A staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) recently gained high-level access to the National Payment Service. This provides DOGE with the ability to view sensitive information and even cancel payments or deny loans.
The National Payment Service, housed at the Farm Service Agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), supports food producers through loans and emergency relief. It manages billions of dollars in payments.
“Everything” is in the National Payment Service, says Scott Marlow, a former senior official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The farmer’s entire financial life and the life of their kids and their family, every time they’ve missed a payment, every time they’ve had a hard time, every time they’ve gotten in financial trouble…it’s there.”
NPR recently viewed internal logs from Jordan Wick, a DOGE-linked former software engineer, revealing that Wick can access personal information from farmers through the National Payment Service. The level of permissions allows DOGE to see and modify data entries as well as cancel loans.
The opening up of records is highly unusual for the USDA, according to Marlow. “I cannot understate the emphasis and the seriousness with which USDA had historically taken the handling of private information.”
A USDA employee, who asked to remain anonymous, says that the data is extremely valuable, explaining that it offers insight into productivity, markets, and commodity pricing. This jeopardizes farmers’ privacy as well as competition, the source says, adding, “You can hedge a lot of bets and make a lot of money if you know what’s happening with agriculture.”
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Photo courtesy of Drew Dempsey, Unsplash
