On 13 February 2025, a young man named Gavin Kliger appeared in the IRS lobby, unannounced, with a backpack stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops, plus badges granting access to an unspecified number of government buildings. Security called Traci DiMartini, head of the IRS's human capital department. Neither Treasury nor the Office of Personnel Management had any record of him. He was, it turned out, a Doge operative — hired three weeks earlier by OPM, attached to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, and sent to "sort out the problems" and "root out the fraud" inside the IRS. The collision was immediate and structural. Kliger demanded an IRS phone, laptop, email address, access to computer systems containing taxpayer information, and a meeting with acting commissioner Doug O'Donnell. DiMartini — nine years running human capital at federal agencies — had never seen a political appointee simply show up and demand systems access. She insisted on the legally required tax audit and mandatory ethics and privacy briefings. Kliger resisted at every step, treating the process as bureaucratic obstruction rather than the legal architecture it is. The privacy stakes are not abstract. Kathleen Walters, IRS chief privacy officer, oversaw 650 people whose job was to prevent any of the IRS's 100,000 employees from leaking, losing, or even glimpsing taxpayer data they weren't authorized to see. It is a federal crime for an IRS employee to acknowledge whether a specific person has filed a return. Walters drafted a five-page agreement giving Kliger access to some systems but explicitly none containing taxpayer information. Kliger signed it. Nine days after Kliger's arrival, the entire federal workforce received a Saturday-night email from an unidentified sender at OPM demanding employees list five things they'd accomplished the previous week. For IRS employees, the request was not merely insulting — it was potentially illegal. A meaningful percentage of the 100,000-person workforce risked criminal liability if they described their work in sufficient detail in an unsecured email. Some employees' replies bounced back with a "mailbox is full" notice, suggesting no one was reading them. The exercise appeared designed to create a compliance test, not to gather useful information. Kliger's background, unearthed by Forbes reporter John Hyatt via Web.archive after Kliger deleted his social media, included retweets of white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes, Substack posts defending Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and what Hyatt described as "a portrait of an internet edgelord." When Walters's deputy Phyllis Grimes — a Black woman — extended her hand to shake his before a mandatory privacy briefing, Kliger stared at it and declined, though he had shaken the hands of white men who offered them. He played on his phone throughout the briefing. The legal structure of Doge itself is precarious. Trump created it by executive order on his first day in office, but a president cannot create or fund an executive agency — that power belongs to Congress. The administration worked around this constraint by housing Doge inside an existing White House office, a legal fig leaf whose durability remains untested. What is being tested, in real time, is whether the statutory protections governing the most sensitive financial data in the country — 266 million tax returns — can withstand an operation that treats compliance as an obstacle and legal process as friction to be optimized away. The pattern is clear: arrive unannounced, demand access, treat legal requirements as negotiable, install people with no relevant experience in positions touching the most sensitive systems in government. The IRS's ethical infrastructure, as multiple career officials attest, was sound before Doge arrived. What it was not designed to withstand was a principal who treats the rules themselves as the problem.
