The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was sold to the American people as a cost-cutting initiative. Instead, it is clearly something far more sinister: a sprawling data-harvesting operation that threatens the constitutional foundations for American democracy.

The end-game is reportedly a "master database" combining information from the Social Security Administration (SSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and health agencies, as well as voting records. As a senior DHS official told the tech news publication, Wired, “[t]hey are trying to amass a huge amount of data. It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending.”

Meanwhile, key offices that had protected against data misuse have been gutted, including DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). While this is horrifying enough, it is, evidently, just the beginning. When combined with data from private brokers that sell information on us and our online habits, the amount of information available for government misuse is staggering.

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When the government can track where you go, whom you associate with, and what you spend your money on, it violates the Fourth Amendment. It also chills First Amendment freedom of expression, undermines your freedom to travel, and destroys what Justice Louis Brandeis famously called “the right to be left alone” — the fundamental privacy right that underlies American liberty.

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The advent of artificial intelligence to analyze reams of data brings further risk that conclusions will be biased, inaccurate, or uninformed by context. We have already seen how the ridiculous attempts to track DOGE’s cost-cutting bore no relationship to budgetary reality. But even when it is effective, AI in the hands of a weaponized government could be dangerous, enabling governments to micro-target highly persuasive messages to sell their preferred policies.

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We can meet this moment by looking to democracies abroad that have found workable solutions. Surprisingly, Estonia, often called the world's most digitally advanced democracy, built its government infrastructure around the principle that citizens control their data in response to its experience with autocracy. Every Estonian has a digital identity that allows them to access government services securely, and can see who accessed their information, when, and why. Government agencies are barred from sharing data without explicit citizen consent or a court order.

Estonia proves that efficient government and strong privacy protections are not mutually exclusive. While imperfect, their system processes everything from voting to tax filing with stringent safeguards and citizen oversight. Most importantly, its data architecture is designed to prevent mass surveillance.

Privacy technologies also offer solutions. For example, computers can be trained to perform calculations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. Another system, called multi-party computation, allows multiple agencies to analyze data while keeping the information secure. Government systems should be built with "privacy by design," embedding basic protections in the technology.

Strong legal frameworks are needed as well. Both data minimization requirements and purpose limitations would ensure that agencies can collect information only when necessary and that the government cannot repurpose data to adversely affect people. Everyone should also have a right to know when their data is being used, and for what purpose, and be empowered to seek redress for privacy violations. While we await an opportunity for reforms at the federal level, state constitutions and laws could be a critical new bulwark against abuses by the federal government.

The American people never voted for a surveillance state. The truth is now unavoidable: data privacy and ownership are fundamental preconditions for a functioning democracy.