The Authoritarian Playbook: DOGE, Surveillance, and the Collapse of Democracy

Inside Trump and Musk’s plan to centralize power through data

Photograph: James Leynse/Getty Images

It has been a long 86 days— and feels like a decade—since Trump returned to power. In that time, I’ve been documenting, day by day, the systematic capture of American institutions and the collapse of democracy in my Trump Tyranny Tracker. Not just the headlines, but patterns. While most of the media remain trapped in a cycle of chasing the latest headlines—tariffs one day, SignalGate the next—I’ve been focused on the patterns. And what appears to be taking shape is far more dangerous as I see strong indications that Trump may be laying the groundwork for a centralized surveillance state. I can’t say that definitively but we do need to pay close attention.

At the center of it all is unauthorized DOGE—run by Musk and a team of unvetted operatives, some with deeply troubling histories. His operatives have embedded themselves across the federal government, bypassing standard hiring processes, background checks, and oversight. We were gaslit that DOGE was a project to cut waste, root out fraud, and “modernize” government systems but I have always believed that is a cover story.

But cover for what?

Yes, part of DOGE’s mission appears to be dismantling federal agencies—but that’s just the surface. What I believe Musk is doing is using DOGE as cover to build a massive data collection and profiling infrastructure—one that will have chilling consequences for dissent, journalism, and democracy itself.

They had years to plan for this moment, anticipating Trump’s return to power. And from day one, we saw it—the lightning speed with which they moved, as if the blueprint had been ready all along.

And this is not theoretical. It’s already being tested—in plain sight.

Surveillance as Strategy: The Russia Playbook

What Trump and Musk appear to be building looks eerily familiar. In fact, it mirrors something in authoritarian regimes— like Russia and China.

One of Putin’s first moves after taking power was to consolidate the Russian state by installing loyalists in every key position—not just politically, but across the entire informational apparatus. Like the Soviet dictators he emulates—and as a former KGB officer—Putin understands that power isn’t just maintained through brute force, but through data, surveillance, and fear.

Russia has always operated as a surveillance state. From the Soviet era to the present day, its internal security services have been fixated on identifying, isolating, and crushing dissent—both within the government and across society. The only thing that’s changed is the sophistication of the tools. Russia’s government databases were merged under the pretext of national security. State contracts were funneled to loyal oligarchs. Surveillance infrastructure became the regime’s central nervous system.

Journalists, activists, and political opponents were tracked, detained, and silenced. And all of it was perfectly legal—because the system was engineered to make it so.

This looks to be the blueprint Musk and Trump are now following.

Musk’s unvetted operatives—most of them political loyalists with no public service background—have been given access to internal sensitive systems of key U.S. government agencies. These include the Social Security Administration, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, and, most recently and alarmingly, the IRS. Each holds massive amounts of our sensitive personal data— tax records, income histories, medical information, demographic data, and backgrounds.

Individually, these data points reveal a lot. Combined? They offer a total profile—an AI-searchable and cross-referenced system— built to track every American’s financial, personal, and political life.

And this is exactly what happens in Russia.

Testing Grounds: The Federal Workforce

This surveillance apparatus isn’t just being tested on immigrants or international students, it’s being tested on federal workers themselves.

According to The Guardian, employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs were warned that their virtual meetings were being secretly recorded—and advised to be cautious about voicing any disagreement with Trump’s decisions. At the State Department, IT staff reportedly began installing monitoring software on employee devices. In response, some staffers—fearing hidden microphones—resorted to blasting white noise or turning on breakroom sinks to muffle their conversations.

At the EPA, a partner water management organization sent out an internal warning that all calls, calendar entries, and meetings with EPA staff were being monitored by an AI tool—one that had appeared, unannounced, as a notetaker in their virtual calls. While the agency denied it, staff say they were explicitly told that DOGE was scanning communications for any signs of “anti-Musk,” “anti-DOGE,” or “anti-Trump” sentiment.

At USAID, leadership handpicked by Trump’s White House was reportedly caught reading private group chats. Employees said that their acting administrator—the same person who handled the agency’s IT—abruptly appeared in a group chat of over 40 contractors. The breach was so blatant that staff began abandoning official systems altogether. Eventually, USAID’s website was taken offline without explanation.

A new whistleblower disclosure reported by NPR reveals just how far Musk’s reach may already extend. At the National Labor Relations Board, DOGE operatives allegedly accessed highly sensitive data related to union organizing and labor complaints then attempted to cover their tracks—disabling monitoring tools and deleting access logs. Technical staff later flagged what appeared to be data exfiltration and even detected suspicious log-in attempts from a Russian IP address.

The one thing I want to be clear about is this has nothing with modernizing or streamlining operations. It’s about purging dissent, monitoring loyalty, and rooting out ideological noncompliance. And like in Russia and other authoritarian states, it’s all happening under the radar, inside the machinery of bureaucracy.

The Mass Purge: Chaos by Design

I also believe the ongoing mass purges of federal workers serve multiple functions. First, they create chaos inside the agencies, eroding institutional memory and making it easier to rewrite processes without oversight. Second, they eliminate career officials—many of whom might resist or expose what Musk and his operatives are actually doing behind the scenes. And third, they overwhelm the media with scandalous and likely illegal firings, distracting the public while core government services collapse and the surveillance infrastructure is quietly built in the background.

But there’s more. These purges send a chilling message to the rest of the federal workforce: fall in line or you’re next. They’re not just dismantling agencies—they’re replacing public service with loyalty tests. The result is a hollowed-out government filled with fear, silence, and political operatives. And that’s exactly the point. When institutions are weak and morale is broken, authoritarian power consolidates faster.

Building the Backbone: The Palantir Partnership

Musk’s next move makes these comparisons impossible to ignore. Recent reports revealed that DOGE had begun working with Palantir—a surveillance and data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel, a close Trump ally—to develop a “mega API” for the IRS. According to WIRED and internal sources, the goal is to build a centralized platform capable of querying every taxpayer’s record in real-time.

Palantir’s Foundry software would serve as the “read center” for the IRS, with full integration across departments. That means DOGE and its operatives could search, cross-reference, and potentially manipulate data from multiple federal systems—effectively granting them authoritarian-level visibility into the lives of millions of Americans.

A few weeks ago, WIRED reported that Musk was organizing a so-called “hackathon” in D.C., bringing together Musk operatives, Palantir engineers, and senior IRS personnel. Notably, several top IRS officials had already resigned or been pushed out after refusing to comply with DOGE’s unprecedented and most likely illegal demands for access to taxpayer data.

And again, I want to emphasize that once IRS data is merged with Social Security, immigration records, OPM files, and other federal datasets, the result is a total surveillance profile—financial, demographic, political, and personal.

Targeting International Students and Immigrants: Testing the System

Also, last week, USCIS announced it would begin screening immigrants’ social media accounts for antisemitism, which would be used as grounds to deny visas and green cards. DHS issued a statement declaring: “There is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers... You are not welcome here.”

This isn’t solely about protecting Jewish Americans or Jewish students— who face real threats. Rather, it appears to be an effort to weaponize the issue as a political shield for an anti-immigrant, anti-dissent agenda. Jewish advocacy groups like Bend the Arc quickly condemned the policy, calling it what it is: a smokescreen for cruelty and repression, not a good-faith attempt to combat antisemitism.

And this isn’t theoretical. Immigrants are already being disappeared, social media scanned, and green card holders detained. DHS has reportedly requested IRS data on over 7 million immigrants, and ICE is preparing to act on that data.

Meanwhile, thousands of newly uncovered documents show that the founders of Clearview AI—now a key surveillance partner of ICE and the FBI—explicitly designed their facial recognition system to target immigrants and the political left. As Mother Jones reported, Clearview’s vast database, scraped from social media, is being used by federal agencies with little oversight to match faces, scan political beliefs, and monitor dissent.

And according to 404 Media, ICE’s contractors are also using tools like ShadowDragon to pull data from hundreds of platforms—including Bluesky, Meta, and even OnlyFans—to map individuals’ movements, networks, and online activity in real-time.

This is a live test of the surveillance state to work out the kinks— and the most vulnerable are the first targets.

The Dangers of Surveillance Aren’t Just Theory—They’re History

From Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia, authoritarian regimes have long relied on mass data collection and target lists to control, persecute, and eliminate dissent.

In Europe, the memory of what happens when governments gain too much access to personal data runs deep. Under Nazi rule, census records and bureaucratic files weren’t just administrative tools—they were weapons. Jews, Roma, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and political dissidents were identified, catalogued, and hunted down. Those datasets formed the blueprint for persecution, deportation, and genocide.

The Soviets, too, weaponized information—whether through KGB surveillance files, informant networks, or state-controlled records that tracked citizens' movements, beliefs, and associations. And in post-Soviet Russia, Putin has revived that same model and the state continues to be governed by databases and watchlists where dissent is brutally punished.

That history is precisely why the European Union created some of the world’s strongest data protections. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) wasn’t just designed to hold tech companies accountable. It was built as a post-Holocaust, post-KGB safeguard—to ensure no government could ever again compile mass databases to target people based on who they are or what they believe.

What Comes Next

What I fear most is what happens after the “bugs” are worked out, after lawsuits are shrugged off and court rulings ignored, and after the infrastructure is normalized. Because once this machine is built, it won’t just monitor outsiders. It will turn inward—on journalists, critics, protesters, political opponents, and anyone who challenges the regime.

And here’s the most chilling part: they won’t need new laws. They already have the data.

This isn’t about “efficiency.” It’s about domination, building the digital backbone of a modern authoritarian regime—one that fuses Musk’s techno-utopianism with Trump’s vengeful, paranoid politics.

The Privacy Act of 1974, passed after Watergate to prevent presidential abuse of IRS data, is being ignored. DOGE operatives are being embedded inside agencies and reclassified as official employees to skirt legal protections. Federal judges have ruled this violates privacy law, but Trump’s regime doesn’t care. The construction continues.

So I’ll end by repeating this— I do not believe DOGE was ever created to cut waste or modernize government agencies. I believe it was designed to prepare for something far more dangerous. The personal data they’re collecting isn’t about “efficiency”—it’s about targeting. What they are building are detailed, AI-enhanced dossiers on every one of us. And once complete, those profiles can be weaponized at a time of their choosing.

We must push back and demand answers from our congressional and state leaders—loudly, publicly, and relentlessly—before the surveillance state is fully operational.