Fetterman blasts Musk over DOGE, IRS

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) went after tech billionaire Elon Musk over a report that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been trying to access an IRS system.

“I want to save billions of your money and make our government more efficient. Rummaging through your personal s‑‑‑ is *not* that. A party of chaos loses—always,” Fetterman said Monday in a post on the social platform X.

His post featured a screenshot of a Politico headline from a report on DOGE’s attempts to access the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System (IDRS). A White House official confirmed to Politico the IDRS access effort by DOGE.

DOGE, which Musk leads, has started accounts on X for the IRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) looking for “insights on finding and fixing waste, fraud and abuse” at both agencies. On Monday, Musk reposted messages from both accounts. 

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Monday wrote to acting IRS Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell, requesting information on access to the IDRS by DOGE and stating worries about possible privacy violations.

“No executive order requiring agency heads to provide DOGE personnel access to IRS records or information technology systems supersedes the federal tax code,” the Massachusetts and Oregon Democrats said.

“Software engineers working for Musk seeking to gain access to tax return information have no right to hoover up taxpayer data and send that data back to any other part of the federal government and may be breaking the law if they are doing so,” they added.

The Hill has reached out to the IRS for comment.

“Unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, Sen. Fetterman seems to be supportive of DOGE’s mission but appears to have fallen for distorted media narratives,” Harrison Fields, a White House principal deputy press secretary, said in an email to The Hill.

“The senator would agree that in order to fix a problem, you must have access to identify where it originates. DOGE strives to bring transparency to its work, and the senator is welcome to hear directly from the source, not clickbait online.”

Updated at 11:10 p.m. EDT