Marc Wheat: Don’t Fall For Left’s Selective Outrage About Government Data Collection

The left has panicked lately that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained access to federal databases. However, they have been perfectly content to let career bureaucrats collect such information from the American people. There was no massive outcry, for example, when Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), a law that requires owners of almost all corporations registered in the states to report personal information to the federal bureaucracy to be collected in a massive database.

Such databases have already proven to invite hacking and abuse from actors far more sinister than DOGE. Last year, Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached the Department of the Treasury’s computer security guardrails. In 2016, hackers broke into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system (EDGAR), which processes over 1.7 million electronic filings annually, and “traded on at least nonpublic 157 earnings releases,” enriching themselves by over $4 million. In 2018, a hacker breached 60 million records of US Postal Service user account details; and in 2015, hackers stole the personal information of 21.5 million current and former federal government employees from Office of Personnel Management files in 2015. Even the brave men and women who have risked their lives for our nation have not been protected from such intrusions. The healthcare information of 4.6 million active duty servicemembers, veterans and their family members was compromised in a 2011 Tricare breach. That such federal databases are so insecure did not stop the SEC from getting in on the action creating the similarly vulnerable Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) to unconstitutionally compile the personal information of Americans who invest in the stock market.

The Constitution only confers limited, specifically enumerated powers on the federal government. The remaining powers are given to the states. One of the federal government’s enumerated powers is to regulate commerce among the states. The original meaning of the clause is clear: commerce meant trade and among the states meant—well—among the states. A broader reading would, if followed consistently, turn much of the rest of the Constitution, including the 10th Amendment, on its head. Similarly, the original meaning of the necessary and proper clause conveys to Congress only the power to carry out the powers already granted to it.