“Data matching” may seem abstract, but its consequences can be life-changing: visa revocation, deportation, sudden cessation of Social Security payments, all without warning or opportunity to present argument or evidence to a human fact-finder.

One of the hallmarks of the new U.S. Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is large-scale algorithmic analysis and comparison of existing databases of personally-identified information. In many cases, algorithms, AI, and data matching are being substituted for human judgement as the basis for decisions about individuals. Similar projects are being carried out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

These activities appear likely to violate the Privacy Act (including its rarely-enforced criminal provisions) and/or the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act.

DOGE’s programmers are working to aggregate and correlate databases that have been compiled by different agencies or commercial third parties such as social media platforms, identified in different ways, and ingested in different formats.

Data matching  is central to the methods of DOGE and the Trump 2.0 Administration. One of  President Trump’s Executive Orders to heads of all Federal agencies directs that:

Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure Federal officials designated by the President… have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems… This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.

How is this working out, and what does this say about ID-linked records?

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