Trump's Trials - DOGE has special access to sensitive financial data on millions of farmers

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

DOGE recently got high-level access to a database that controls billions of dollars in government payments to farmers and ranchers across the U.S.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detro and this is Trump's Terms from NPR. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode we bring you one of NPR's latest stories about the 47th president and how he is trying to remake the federal government. Today's story starts right after this. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE,

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This is Eric Glass. On This American Life, sometimes we just show up somewhere, turn on our tape recorders, and see what happens. If you can't get seven cars in 12 days, you gotta look yourself in the mirror and say, holy, what are you kidding me? This car dealership trying to sell its monthly quota of cars and it is not going well. I just don't want one balloon to a car. Balloon the whole freaking place so it looks like

a circus. Real life stories every week. Billionaire CEO Elon Musk isn't hanging out in Washington as much anymore due in part to major policy disagreements and online feuds with President Trump as well as ongoing challenges managing his companies. But one of his major pet projects, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, lives on. At the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one DOGE staffer can now review and cancel tens of billions of dollars in government loans and payments to American farmers and ranchers. This is a group that makes up a big chunk of Trump's

political base. NPR's Jenna McLaugh up a big chunk of Trump's political base. NPR's Jenna McLaughlin has that exclusive reporting and joins us now. Hey Jenna. Hey Scott. So Doge has not been in the headlines quite as much since Musk left the government. Catch us up on the status of this special government team. Yeah, it's been a little bit of a busy news cycle, but even without Musk in DC, Doge has continued to find ways to burrow their way into these

federal agencies. NPR put together a team to cover the federal restructuring and what DOJ has been up to. Back in February, we've been busy keeping track of everything that they've got going on. I've had a particular focus on DOJ's access to sensitive data. And that's how I started looking at the Department of Agriculture. Okay. So what did you hear about what is happening at the Department of Agriculture?

Yeah. So I got to look at internal access logs that show that Jordan Wick, a former software engineer who used to work at Waymo, who's been publicly linked to Doge, got high level access to this government system, the one that controls tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and loans for millions of American farmers and ranchers. It lives inside part of the USDA called the Farm Service Agency. Think of it kind of like the agency's bank. Loans are a big part of what they do, but they also distribute subsidies for things like disaster relief. Think major storms or the COVID-19 pandemic. Okay, so he's in that system.

What exactly can he and Doge do with that access? A lot. First of all, he can see all that sensitive personal information. I mean, think about the kind of things that you have to send to the bank to apply for a loan. I'm pretty sure they know me better than my family after buying a house. It's also possible that there could

be demographic information, like race in parts of that database. Advocates are worried that that data could be abused. But it's even more than that. Like what? Well, with this kind of access, Wick can write onto the system. And what that means is that he can change entries, cancel loans or payments. And that's in line with a memo I saw that went out to USDA staffers announcing that Doge would be reviewing a big chunk of farm loans going forward. No other individual at the agency has this access.

That's part of why the source who provided this information and some of the others I spoke to asked to be anonymous. They were worried about retaliation. When Doge has gotten similar levels of access to databases at the social security administration and the treasury department, it's been challenged in the courts.

We did eventually hear back from a USDA spokesperson after publication. They confirmed that the USDA efficiency team, including WIC, are full-time USDA employees and that they're working to fulfill President Trump's executive order to hunt for fraud and what they described as national security concerns, though they didn't really explain what that meant. Okay, so here's an important question. Did you find any farmers who have had their loans canceled or changed because of this access?

Not yet, and it turns out that might be a really hard question to answer. I spoke to Scott Marlowe. He ran FSA programs under President Biden. He said some payments are seasonal. Farmers might not know right away if payments disappear, for example. He says he's telling farmers and ranchers he works with to keep a close eye on their loan terms, print out their files, make a list and check it twice. Scott will also point out that my source says it would be hard for senior officials to monitor what Doge is up to inside the system because there aren't really safeguards or alerts for unusual activity when you have that level of access. Marlo tells me he would be concerned about anyone having that much access to USDA systems without oversight. Take a listen.

That ability to change without fingerprints is extremely troublesome in any, I don't care who it is, in any system. So that's the reaction on the expert level, the Washington level. What about farmers and ranchers who might be more directly affected by this? Yeah, it's hard to be a farmer right now in general. They're distracted by tariffs, cuts to government programs, not to mention increasingly common natural disasters. I mean, just look at this awful flooding we're seeing in Texas and New Mexico.

But specifically related to this, I spoke to Zach Duchenal. He's the former head of the Farm Service Agency under President Biden, but he's also a rancher from South Dakota. His family has had a ranch on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation for decades. He says farmers and ranchers are facing the fear of uncertainty. Having inexperienced people come in and hold up or threaten farmers' loans, he's worried that that will only make that uncertainty worse. That is NPR's Jen McLaughlin. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks as always to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detro. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR. This summer on Planet Money Summer School, we're learning about political economy. We're getting into the nitty gritty of what government does with things like trade, taxes,

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