American Oversight Seeks Information About DOGE Loyalty Surveillance and Newly Revealed Record-Keeping Failures

In response to yet another reported instance of Trump administration and DOGE officials evading federal record-preservation requirements and weaponizing the government against perceived political enemies, American Oversight has submitted requests for information about DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence to monitor communications, as well as the agency’s use of Google Docs.

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that sources had told the news outlet that members of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had used AI to surveil the communications of employees at the Environment Protection Agency, looking for language perceived to be disloyal to Trump or Musk. The report also notes that DOGE members are working simultaneously out of Google Docs, rather than creating and circulating drafts one at a time — thus allowing them to potentially avoid preserving certain communications or government documents as required by law.

On Wednesday, American Oversight filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the EPA, the U.S. DOGE Service, and General Services Administration, seeking communications regarding the use of artificial intelligence and large language models at the agencies. From DOGE, we also requested guidance about the use of such programs, as well as records related to DOGE’s use of Google Docs, including document titles, version histories, and sharing permissions for files in government-issued or personal Google accounts used for government business. 

The Reuters report also noted that DOGE team members had been using the Signal app to communicate, an allegation that is also central to American Oversight’s ongoing FOIA lawsuit against DOGE. 

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted American Oversight’s request that the court order DOGE to preserve all records that may be responsible to the organization’s requests. The court also rejected DOGE’s arguments that its belated steps to preserve certain records — including a newly created retention policy that stopped short of requiring employees to disable auto-delete features — fulfilled the agency’s legal obligations under federal records laws. 

DOGE was also required to file a status report confirming that the records at issue had been preserved. But — as American Oversight outlined in its response to that filing — DOGE attorneys instead provided a vague and evasive statement, saying that they had made “all reasonable efforts” to save the records, and would “continue to do so.”

This comes after American Oversight last week filed its opposition to the Trump administration’s status report in the organization’s separate lawsuit against top officials for using the Signal app — with messages set to autodelete — to discuss sensitive national security deliberations. In its opposition, American Oversight argues that the administration’s declarations are “grossly inadequate” in addressing the unlawful destruction of federal records — destruction that is especially concerning in light of recent reports that senior officials had set up at least 20 additional Signal group chats for high-level issues.

Rather than addressing these serious security failures and systemic violations of federal records laws, the White House has been focused on rooting out instances of perceived disloyalty and abusing its power to weaponize the government against certain groups, including immigrants. On Tuesday, it was reported that top officials at the Internal Revenue Service had resigned following a new deal between Treasury officials and the Department of Homeland Security to share the tax records of undocumented immigrants in service of the administration’s mass-deportation goals.

To learn more about the decision to bypass IRS leaders so DHS officials could access the private data, American Oversight submitted requests to the IRS, the Treasury, and DHS for communications and dissent memoranda about the decision to share data between IRS and ICE.