DOGE plans ‘hackathon’ at IRS this week

The goal is to create over 30 days a single “mega API” — a bridge that enables software systems to talk to each another — for accessing IRS data, Wired reports. 

The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage some parts of the 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, says Wired.

Two top DOGE staffers at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, Wired says. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with links to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management. Corcos also is a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Wired says.

Corcos has talked about plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, Wired says. 

APIs — application programming interfaces — enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data to the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with knowledge of the plan tells Wired, meaning anybody with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place.

A plan like this likely would touch all IRS data, including taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, as well as tax return and employment data, says Wired. The IRS now runs on dozens of disparate systems housed in on-premises data centers and in the cloud that are purposely compartmentalized. Accessing these systems requires special permissions, and workers typically only are granted access on a need-to-know basis.

A “mega API” potentially could allow somebody with access to export all IRS data to systems of their choice, including private entities, says Wired.

“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.”