Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.
Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: “We’ve so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base,” Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March.
Corcos has discussed plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, sources say. APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data into the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.
Over the last few weeks, DOGE has requested the names of the IRS’s best engineers from agency staffers. Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.
Corcos and DOGE indicated to IRS employees that they intended to first apply the API to the agency’s mainframes and then move on to every other internal system. Initiating a plan like this would likely touch all data within the IRS, including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, as well as tax return and employment data. Currently, the IRS runs on dozens of disparate systems housed in on-premises data centers and in the cloud that are purposefully compartmentalized. Accessing these systems requires special permissions and workers are typically only granted access on a need-to-know basis.
A “mega API” could potentially allow someone with access to export all IRS data to the systems of their choosing, including private entities. If that person also had access to other interoperable datasets at separate government agencies, they could compare them against IRS data for their own purposes.
“Schematizing this data and understanding it would take years,” an IRS source tells WIRED. “Just even thinking through the data would take a long time, because these people have no experience, not only in government, but in the IRS or with taxes or anything else.” (“There is a lot of stuff that I don’t know that I am learning now,” Corcos tells Ingraham in the Fox interview. “I know a lot about software systems, that’s why I was brought in.”)
These systems have all gone through a tedious approval process to ensure the security of taxpayer data. Whatever may replace them would likely still need to be properly vetted, sources tell WIRED.
“It’s basically an open door controlled by Musk for all American’s most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data,” an IRS worker alleges to WIRED.
The data consolidation effort aligns with President Donald Trump’s executive order from March 20, which directed agencies to eliminate information silos. While the order was purportedly aimed at fighting fraud and waste, it also could threaten privacy by consolidating personal data housed on different systems into a central repository, WIRED previously reported.
The IRS, Palantir, Sam Corcos, and Gavin Kliger did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In February, a memo was drafted to provide Kliger with access to personal taxpayer data at the IRS, The Washington Post reported. Kliger was ultimately provided read-only access to anonymized tax data, similar to what academics use for research. Weeks later, Corcos arrived, demanding detailed taxpayer and vendor information as a means of combating fraud, according to the Post.
“The IRS has some pretty legacy infrastructure. It’s actually very similar to what banks have been using. It’s old mainframes running COBOL and Assembly and the challenge has been, how do we migrate that to a modern system?” Corcos told Ingraham in the same Fox News interview. Corcos said he plans to continue his work at IRS for a total of six months.
DOGE has already slashed and burned modernization projects at other agencies, replacing them with smaller teams and tighter timelines. At the Social Security Administration, DOGE representatives are planning to move all of the agency’s data off of legacy programming languages like COBOL and into something like Java, WIRED reported last week.
Last Friday, DOGE suddenly placed around 50 IRS technologists on administrative leave. On Thursday, even more technologists were cut, including the director of cybersecurity architecture and implementation, deputy chief information security officer, and acting director of security risk management. IRS’s chief technology officer, Kaschit Pandya, is one of the few technology officials left at the agency, sources say.
DOGE originally expected the API project to take a year, multiple IRS sources say, but that timeline has shortened dramatically down to a few weeks. “That is not only not technically possible, that’s also not a reasonable idea, that will cripple the IRS,” an IRS employee source tells WIRED. “It will also potentially endanger filing season next year, because obviously all these other systems they’re pulling people away from are important.”
(Corcos also made it clear to IRS employees that he wanted to kill the agency’s Direct File program, the IRS’s recently released free tax-filing service.)
DOGE’s focus on obtaining and moving sensitive IRS data to a central viewing platform has spooked privacy and civil liberties experts.
“It’s hard to imagine more sensitive data than the financial information the IRS holds,” Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights organization, tells WIRED.
Palantir received the highest FedRAMP approval this past December for its entire product suite, including Palantir Federal Cloud Service (PFCS) which provides a cloud environment for federal agencies to implement the company’s software platforms, like Gotham and Foundry. FedRAMP stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and assesses cloud products for security risks before governmental use.
“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”
