In touting its efforts to claw back government funds, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency appears to have posted the sensitive tax information of two private companies for millions to view.
The DOGE X account posted multiple screenshots of unredacted Housing and Urban Development contracting documents Friday. The contracts were for two companies that service mortgage loans.
“$1.9 billion of HUD money was just recovered after being misplaced during the Biden administration due to a broken process,” the post read, alongside the screenshots. “These funds were earmarked for the administration of financial services, but were no longer needed. @SecretaryTurner and @DOGE worked together to fix the issue and de-obligated the funds which are now available for other use by the Treasury.”
“It is astounding how much taxpayer money can be saved with even a small amount of effort,” Musk said in a post promoting DOGE’s original post, which included the unredacted documents, to his 217.6 million X followers.
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The screenshots of documents attached to the original post, which DOGE published at 3:24 p.m., included sensitive company information such as the names, addresses and signatures of the government contractors as well as their tax ID numbers. The original post was viewed more than 2 million times, according to the metrics listed on X.
By 3:40 p.m., the post was edited to remove the documents — and 22 minutes after that, the post was edited again to reattach cropped and redacted versions of the documents, covering the names and tax ID numbers that were visible in the earlier version.
However, the original versions of the documents, including the now-redacted information, are readily visible in the post’s edit history. HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post came just days after DOGE’s website shared classified information detailing the size and scope of certain intelligence agencies, HuffPost reported.
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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