Members of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency gained access over the weekend to a payroll system that processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across dozens of agencies, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The move overruled objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information, including by making it more vulnerable to terrorist cyberattacks, these people said.
By accessing the system, which is housed at the Interior Department, the DOGE workers now have visibility into sensitive employee information, such as Social Security numbers, and the ability to more easily hire and fire workers, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
The DOGE workers had tried for about two weeks to obtain administrative access to the program, known as the Federal Personnel and Payroll System, the two people said. The dispute came to a head on Saturday, as the DOGE workers obtained the access and then placed two of the IT officials who had resisted them on administrative leave and under investigation, the people said.
The move follows other efforts by DOGE to gain entry to federal systems and databases, some of which have encountered resistance in the courts.
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department, Kathryn Martin, said Sunday in a statement, “We are working to execute the President’s directive to cut costs and make the government more efficient for the American people and have taken actions to implement President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
A spokeswoman for the White House did not comment Sunday night in response to an emailed question from the Times.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Musk defended his team’s efforts to gain access to government and personnel information, saying that it was part of a broader effort at “reconciling all of the government databases to eliminate the waste and fraud.”
He added, “These databases don’t talk to each other. And that’s really the source of, that’s the biggest vulnerability for fraud, is the fact that these databases don’t talk to each other. So we need to reconcile the databases. It’s a, frankly, painful homework, but it has to be done, and will greatly improve the efficiency of the government systems.”
The Interior Department is one of a handful of large agencies, including the Pentagon and the Agriculture Department, that house payroll hubs through which flow the salaries of thousands of federal workers at dozens of other agencies. The Interior Department hub processes payrolls for the Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security departments, as well as the Air Force, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, among other federal agencies.
It was not clear Sunday if DOGE has sought or gained access to payroll systems housed at other large agencies that cover some 2 million additional federal workers.
At Interior, the two people said, at least two DOGE employees, Stephanie Holmes and Katrine Trampe, sought and eventually were granted high-level administrative access to the payroll system, allowing them to make changes to employment status, compensation level, health benefits and more — with no additional oversight or approval required.
Late last week, as Ms. Holmes and Ms. Trampe pushed for the access, senior career employees at the Interior Department wrote a memo describing the irregularity of their request and the risks associated with granting it.
“Such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single DoI official presently has access to all HR, payroll and credentialing systems,” said the memo, which was viewed by The New York Times.
Gaining the elevated administrative access to the system would allow the people to view highly sensitive personal information that is subject to controls under the Privacy Act, the violation of which may carry criminal penalties, the memo warned.
It also warned that individuals with the elevated access to the system could become prime targets for cybersecurity attacks by terrorists, nations or other malicious actors. The memo also warned that administrative access to the system “typically requires training and certification.”
“Without formal qualifications, the Department may experience significant failure because of operator error,” the memo warns.
On Friday, the federal employees asked the DOGE workers to give the memo to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for his signature, thus taking on the legal responsibility for those risks, the two people said. Mr. Burgum never signed the memo. Tyler Hassan, a former DOGE employee who was recently named as the Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget, then placed the agency’s chief information officer, and chief information security officer on administrative leave, and placed them under investigation for their “workplace behavior,” the two people said.
On Saturday, Interior Department officials gave Ms. Holmes and Ms. Trampe the access they sought, the two people said.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
