Mary Trump, the estranged niece of Donald Trump, is accusing the president and Elon Musk of turning a secretive federal agency into a tool for authoritarian control, calling the Department of Governmental Efficiency “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”
In a Substack post published Thursday, she alleged that DOGE was created solely “to make sure Elon Musk and Donald Trump have access to our information in a way that makes them both incredibly powerful and beyond the reach of accountability while endangering our personal safety and financial security.”
Why It Matters
Mary Trump has been outspoken against her uncle for years. In 2020, she published Too Much and Never Enough, a tell-all book about Trump and their family. In it, she says the president is “utterly incapable of leading this country and it’s dangerous to allow him to do so.”
What To Know
DOGE, staffed by Musk’s allies, has come under fire following a whistleblower report that revealed employees stole roughly 10 gigabytes of sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
“Sociopaths cannot create; they can only destroy,” Mary Trump wrote on The Good In Us Substack. “Anybody paying attention knows that DOGE…has been a disaster since the day this…agency was created.”
She cited a report shared by NPR in which whistleblower Daniel Berulis disclosed that DOGE agents demanded unrestricted access to NLRB servers. CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the report, noting DOGE operatives “not only accessed data… but also took a substantial amount of sensitive data.”
The NLRB holds records related to union activities, corporate investigations, and confidential labor disputes.
Andrew Bakage, Berulis’ attorney, told NPR that foreign intrusion followed almost immediately. “Within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts…someone or something from Russia tried to log in with the right usernames and right passwords,” Bakage said. “That happened over 20 times.”
Mary Trump also said that after Berulis attempted to raise concerns internally, he received a threat: “someone physically tap[ed] a threatening note to his door” with personal data and drone surveillance images of him walking his dog.
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In her post, the president’s niece also accused DOGE of repurposing databases from agencies including Housing and Urban Development, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS to track immigrants. She claimed DOGE “is now reportedly using HUD data to identify undocumented immigrants and then sharing those data with the Department of Homeland Security.”
Additionally, she wrote that the Social Security Office had enabled the revocation of work permits for over 6,300 undocumented immigrants, while the IRS had agreed to share tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“It’s not only about one subgroup of people. It’s really about all of us,” said Natanya Broer, a senior counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, in a statement to The Washington Post. “Everyone cares about their privacy. Nobody wants their healthcare information or tax information broadcast and used to go after us.”
Mary Trump connected DOGE’s tactics to a broader assault on government accountability and democratic values. “The Trump regime in general and DOGE in particular are antithetical” to the idea of a government that serves the public, she wrote.
Following NPR’s report, Representative Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is calling for an investigation into DOGE’s access to the National Labor Relations Board after revelations that sensitive data was removed from the agency.
So far, neither Trump nor Musk has responded to allegations from NPR or Mary Trump.
What People Are Saying
Daniel Berulis, the whistleblower, in an interview with NPR: “I can’t attest to what their end goal was or what they’re doing with the data.”
Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat, wrote in a letter to the acting Inspector General at the Department of Labor and to the Inspector General at the NLRB: “During its short existence, DOGE has established a track record of extreme negligenceand an alarmingly cavalier attitude with respect to protecting Americans’ sensitive data.
“DOGE has exfiltrated sensitive data to artificial intelligence (AI) companies that have not receivedproper vetting for use by the federal government, flouted federal data access controls, andexposed systems in both the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Energy’snational security research labs to potential foreign attackers.”
What Happens Next
Trump’s DOGE initiative was launched via executive order on his first day back in office and is poised to sunset in July 2026. After Musk’s exit, Cabinet secretaries are expected to continue the department’s work.
