MW Worried about Elon Musk and DOGE getting your Social Security number? Here's how to protect yourself.

By Brett Arends

If the wrong person gained access to personal financial information held by the U.S. Treasury, it would constitute the biggest data breach in history

Labor unions and civil-liberties groups are stepping up their legal campaign to block Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from getting their hands on U.S. citizens' bank-account details, Social Security numbers, Medicare details and other sensitive personal information.

Unions and the Economic Policy Institute filed suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to keep Musk and DOGE out of U.S. Labor Department files, following a suit by the Alliance for Retired Americans and others to keep them out of the personal files held by the U.S. Treasury.

U.S. Department of Justice attorney Bradley Humphreys, representing the Trump administration, insisted that DOGE had not had access to any personal financial details, though he added that direct access had been given to Marko Elez - a former engineer with Musk's SpaceX company now working at the U.S. Treasury as a "special" temporary employee.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has issued a temporary injunction blocking DOGE from any access to sensitive data pending a full hearing on the issue.

Humphreys's claims follow days of confusion and rumor on the subject, following the news that Musk and DOGE were looking at U.S. Treasury data in their campaign against U.S. government spending.

Neither the U.S. Treasury nor Elon Musk had responded to earlier requests for clarification from MarketWatch.

But given the febrile political atmosphere in the country, the chaotic developments in Washington and a systemic breakdown in trust, many will remain concerned about who has access to their data and what they can see.

If the wrong person got access to personal financial information held by the U.S. Treasury, it would constitute the biggest data breach in history. Anyone who had all this could make a fortune selling it to criminals on the dark web. It would only take one person to copy files to a thumb drive or the cloud - identity theft galore.

If you're worried about that data ending up in the wrong hands - from the turmoil in Washington, or anywhere else - there is a surprisingly simple thing you can do to protect yourself: a credit freeze. I wrote about it here not long ago.

As the U.S. government explains, a credit freeze stops banks and credit-card companies from getting access to your credit reports. As most of them won't lend without seeing the reports, it effectively prevents anyone from opening an unauthorized account using your information.

A credit freeze is generally seen as the most effective way of protecting yourself.

It is remarkably easy to do. You just contact the three credit bureaus -Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - and follow the steps on their website. It took me just 10 minutes and a phone call.

In the case of two agencies, TransUnion $(TRU.UK)$ and Equifax $(EFX)$, I was able to do it online via their websites. (In both cases I had to watch out that they didn't sign me up for marketing emails.)

With the third, Experian (EXPGY), doing it over the phone (1-888-397-3742) was actually much quicker than the elaborate steps needed to do it online.

Freezing your credit is not a perfect answer. As the Public Interest Research Group says, someone who has your details can commit all sorts of other identity theft - and in many cases you can do nothing to prevent it, and you will only know about it after the fact. (Check out this recent case, where someone stole another person's identity and lived under it for 30 years.)

But it is the best option available. And in this era of data breaches, governmental turmoil and confusion, it offers some security and peace of mind.

-Brett Arends

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February 06, 2025 14:23 ET (19:23 GMT)

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