This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.

Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.

But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.

It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.

In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.

And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.

This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.

The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.

ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.

Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.

About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.

The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”

While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.

“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.

He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.

A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.

Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.

In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.

At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”

With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.

Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.

“The Taliban Gets DOGED”

At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”

Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.

Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”

“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”

“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.

He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”

In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.

While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.

Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.

Timeline of Events

• Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
• Mar. 31 3:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
• Mar. 31 7:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
• Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. EST to 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
• Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
• Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
• May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.

USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.

He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.

As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.

Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.

After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.

Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)

The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.

“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”

It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.

When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”

Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.

Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.

But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.

Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.

While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.

In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.

When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.

Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.

When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.

Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.

It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.

But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.

When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.

Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.

The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.

Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.

Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.

During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.

Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.

Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.

Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.

Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”

At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”

George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”

Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.

In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?

“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.

ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.

Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.

Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.

The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after President Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.

In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.

“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”

In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.

Danny Werfel, IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, said the privacy laws allowing federal investigators to obtain taxpayer data have never “been read to open the door to the sharing of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of tax records for a broad-based enforcement initiative.”

A spokesperson for the White House said the planned use of IRS data was legal and a means of fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of “illegal criminal aliens.”

Taxpayer data is among the most confidential in the federal government and is protected by strict privacy laws, which have historically limited its transfer to law enforcement and other government agencies. Unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer return information is a felony that can carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

The system that the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the blueprint said it could result in immigration agents raiding wrong or outdated addresses.

“If this program is implemented in its current form, it’s extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted,” said an IRS engineer who examined the blueprints and who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The dispute that ended in De Mello’s ouster was the culmination of months of pressure on the IRS to turn over massive amounts of data in ways that would redefine the relationship between the agency and law enforcement and reduce taxpayers’ privacy, records and interviews show.

In one meeting in late March between senior IRS and DHS officials, a top ICE official made a suggestion: Why doesn’t Homeland Security simply provide the name and state of its targets and have the IRS return the addresses of everyone who matches that criteria?

The IRS lawyers were stunned. They feared they could face criminal liability if they handed over the addresses of individuals who were not under a criminal investigation. The conversation and news of deeper collaboration with ICE so disturbed career staff that it led to a series of departures in late March and early April across the IRS’ legal, IT and privacy offices.

They were “pushing the boundaries of the law,” one official said. “Everyone at IRS felt the same way.”

The Blueprint

The technical blueprint obtained by ProPublica shows that engineers at the agency are preparing to give DHS what it wants: a system that enables massive automated data sharing. The goal is to launch the new system before the end of July, two people familiar with the matter said.

The DHS effort to obtain IRS data comes as top immigration enforcement leaders face escalating White House pressure to deport some 3,000 people per day, according to reports.

One federal agent tasked with assisting ICE on deportations said recent operations have been hamstrung by outdated addresses. Better information could dramatically speed up arrests. “Some of the leads that they were giving us were old,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “They’re like from two administrations ago.”

In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block the plan, arguing that the memorandum of understanding between DHS and the IRS is illegal. But a judge in early May ruled against them, saying the broader agreement complied with Section 6103, the existing law regulating IRS data sharing. That opened the door for engineers to begin building the system.

The judge did not address the technical blueprint, which didn’t exist at the time of the ruling. But the case is pending, which means the new system could still come under legal review.

Until now, little was known about the push and pull between the two agencies or the exact technical mechanics behind the arrangement.

The plan has been shrouded in secrecy even within the IRS, with details of its development withheld from regular communications. Several IRS engineers and lawyers have avoided working on the project out of concerns about personal legal risk.

Asked about the new system, a spokesperson for IRS parent agency the Treasury Department said the memorandum of understanding, often called an MOU, “has been litigated and determined to be a lawful application of Section 6103, which provides for information sharing by the IRS in precise circumstances associated with law enforcement requests.”

At a time when Trump is making threats to deport not only undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens, the scope of information-sharing with the IRS could continue to grow, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and sources familiar with the matter: DHS has been looking for ways to expand the agreement that could allow Homeland Security officials to seek IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes.

Last month, an ICE attorney proposed updating the MOU to authorize new data requests on people “associated with criminal activities which may include United States citizens or lawful permanent residents,” according to a document seen by ProPublica. The status of this proposal is unclear. De Mello, at the time, rejected it and called for senior Treasury Department leadership to personally sign off on such a significant change.

The White House described DHS’ work with the IRS as a good-faith effort to identify and deport those who are living in the country illegally.

“ProPublica continues to degrade their already terrible reputation by suggesting we should turn a blind eye to criminal illegal aliens present in the United States for the sake of trying to collect tax payments from them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement after receiving questions about the blueprint from ProPublica.

She pointed to the April MOU as giving the government the authority to create the new system and added, “This isn’t a surveillance system. … It’s part of President Trump’s promise to carry out the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens — the promise that the American people elected him on and he is committed to fulfilling.”

In a separate statement, a senior DHS official also cited the court’s approval of the MOU, saying that it “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”

How the System Works

The new system would represent a sea change, allowing law enforcement to request enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated, computerized process.

The system, according to the blueprint and interviews with IRS engineers, would work like this:

First, DHS would send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people it’s targeting. The request would include the date of a final removal order, a relevant criminal statute ICE is using to investigate the individual, and the tax period for which information is sought. If DHS fails to include any of this information, the system would reject the request.

The system then attempts to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary method by which the IRS identifies an individual in its databases.

If the system makes a match, it accesses the individual’s associated tax file and pulls the address listed during the most recent tax period. Then the system would produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS’ targets’ last known addresses. The spreadsheet would include a record of names rejected for lack of required information and names for which it could not make a match.

Tax and privacy experts say they worry about how such a powerful yet crude platform could make dangerous mistakes. Because the search starts with a name instead of a taxpayer identification number, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name as or a similar address to that of one of ICE’s targets. The proposed system assumes the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. In effect, the IRS has no way to independently check the bases of these requests, experts told ProPublica.

In addition, the blueprint does not limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS can request it. The system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on taxpayers, said technical experts and IRS engineers who reviewed the documents. By shifting a single parameter, the program could return more information than just a target’s address, said an engineer familiar with the plan, including employer and familial relationships.

Engineers based at IRS offices in Lanham, Maryland, and Dallas are developing the blueprint.

“Gone Back on Its Word”

For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay taxes — regardless of immigration status — with an implicit promise that their information would be protected. Now that same data may be used to locate and deport noncitizens.

“For years, the IRS has told immigrants that it only cares that they pay their taxes,” said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is seeking to block the data-sharing agreement in federal court. “By agreeing to share taxpayer data with ICE on a mass basis, the IRS has gone back on its word.”

The push to share IRS data with DHS emerged while Elon Musk’s DOGE reshaped the engineering staff of the IRS. Sam Corcos, a Silicon Valley startup founder with no government experience, pushed out more than 50 IRS engineers and restructured the agency’s engineering priorities while he was the senior DOGE official at the agency. He later became chief information officer at Treasury. He has also led a separate IRS effort to create a master database using products from Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, enabling the government to link and search large swaths of data.

Corcos didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House said DOGE is not part of the DHS-IRS pact.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, told ProPublica the system being built was ripe for abuse. It “would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions,” he said.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the department’s internal watchdog, is already probing efforts by Trump and DOGE to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, ProPublica reported in April.

The Trump administration continues to add government agencies to its deportation drive.

DOGE and DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database, NPR reported last month. The database links information from the Social Security Administration and the DHS, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing state and local election officials to verify U.S. citizenship.

And in May, a senior Treasury Department official directed 250 IRS criminal investigative agents to help deportation operations, a significant shift for two agencies that historically have had separate missions.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show.

The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.

The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.

The review appears to be in its early stages — one document describes staffers as “beginning preplanning” — but the email directs the IRS to turn over specific documents by Thursday, April 24. It’s not clear if that happened.

The inspector general is seeking, for instance, “All requests for taxpayer or other protected information from the President or Executive Office of the President, OMB, or DOGE. Include any information on how the requestor plans to use the information requested, the IRS’s response to the request, and the legal basis for the IRS’s response,” the email says.

The inquiry also asks for information about requests for access to IRS systems from any agency in the executive branch, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and DOGE.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration office, known as TIGTA, is led by acting Inspector General Heather M. Hill. When Trump fired 17 inspectors general across a range of federal agencies in January, those working for the Treasury Department were not among the ones axed.

The White House, DOGE, OMB and Musk did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

A TIGTA spokesperson, Becky D’Ambrosio, said the agency “does not disclose specific details of ongoing work or timelines.” She said the office has received multiple requests from Congress. “When possible, we are incorporating these requests into our ongoing work providing independent oversight of IRS activities.”

The April 15 request follows concerns expressed by some within the IRS that DOGE employees under Musk’s direction have improperly accessed taxpayer information or shared it with other government agencies, said multiple people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Earlier this month, a group of Democratic senators urged the Treasury inspector general to investigate whether the Trump administration was “violating strict taxpayer privacy laws” by giving DOGE personnel wide access inside the agency.

“Taxpayer data held by the IRS is, by design, subject to some of the strongest privacy protections under federal law, the violation of which can trigger civil and criminal sanctions,” the lawmakers wrote in their request.

In March, three senators said they were troubled by reports the IRS had entered into a sharing agreement to help the Department of Homeland Security “locate suspected undocumented immigrants.” Trump has promised deportations on a massive scale.

A spokesperson for Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the signees of both requests, declined to comment. DHS referred a request for comment from ProPublica to the Treasury Department, which did not respond.

The inspector general examination comes amid major upheaval at the Treasury Department and the IRS, as the administration moves to fire thousands of agency workers and DOGE digs deeper into IRS databases. Melanie Krause resigned as the acting commissioner of the IRS after the agency reached an agreement to share taxpayer data with the DHS.

A former senior official at TIGTA told ProPublica the review could lead to a criminal investigation if reviewers find evidence of lawbreaking. The same official said it’s possible those leading the review could face political repercussions, as have scores of prosecutors, FBI agents, law firms and others who have questioned Trump’s actions.

Emails from the inspector general to IRS employees earlier this month asked them to provide copies of any written agreements to share taxpayer data with entities including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, DOGE, the Office of Personnel Management or other agencies.

It also seeks a full list of non-IRS employees who are part of DOGE or its affiliates. This year, ProPublica has been profiling the figures working for DOGE.

Danielle Citron, a leading privacy legal scholar at the University of Virginia, said the email suggests that the inspector general may be probing for violations of the Privacy Act, which requires agencies to safeguard citizens’ information and only share it across the government in specific cases. The kind of blanket data-sharing agreement the Trump administration is seeking with the IRS, she said, is “exactly what the Privacy Act is designed to avoid.”

CNN and Wired have reported that DOGE is attempting to build a master database that combines information from the IRS, DHS, Social Security Administration and other agencies. The database would be used for immigration enforcement, the outlets reported.

This is not the first time Trump administration decisions at the IRS have prompted an inspector general inquiry.

As ProPublica reported, a senior IRS lawyer warned the agency’s leaders in late February that its plan to terminate nearly 7,000 probationary employees based on poor performance was untrue and a “fraud.” The IRS proceeded with the firings, which have since been challenged in federal court.

After the firings, the IRS inspector general began scrutinizing the mass terminations, said a person familiar with the effort who wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters. The status of the probe is not known.