Weaponized Government Databases

The Real Point of the Lisa Cook Firing

Stephen Miran is appearing before Congress today so they can vet him for a position on the Federal Reserve Board replacing Lisa Cook. There’s a lot packed into that sentence. Trump’s firing of Cook “for cause” is in court; with delicious irony, a President convicted of felony mortgage fraud accuses Cook of mortgage fraud for allegedly listing two “principle residences” in separate mortgage applications. Miran, in turn, is a character. He has previously been known along with Scott Bessent as the author of the “Mar al Lago Accord,” an economic policy prescription that called for tariffs and a weakened dollar. He also has expressed controversial views about the role of the Fed. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/04/us/trump-news#stephen-miran-federal-reserve-trump

But focusing on Miran and Cook is missing the forest for the trees. Go back to the fact that the “cause” for Cook’s dismissal is said to be mortgage fraud, fraud that was “discovered” and promoted on social media by the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte. Pulte is a hard core Trump loyalist. He was appointed to his position because in 2020 the Supreme Court (Collins v. Yellen) ruled that the President can replace the head of FHFA without cause. So Trump was able to install Pulte, who has weaponized it to accuse Democrats who are viewed as obstacles to Trump’s agenda as of variations of the crimes for which Trump himself has been convicted.

Okay, all very amusing. But consider that FHFA has access to loan documents for about 2/3 of the entire American housing market, tens of millions of households. Consider the way AI could be deployed to search those files for any inconsistencies — and the estimation that more than 11% of all mortgage applications contain errors because the applications are very paper- and detail-specific. In real life are supplemented by communications between borrowers and banks that do not necessarily show up in the documents. In other words, a search of all mortgage documents in FHFA files for any inconsistency would produce an enormous amount of ammunition to bring bogus claims of “crimes” against political enemies.

Then there are social security files, which the Court has ruled DOGE can put into a cloud-based storage file so that they can search for evidence of "waste, fraud, and abuse" across the entire system. Scrape those files for inconsistencies or contradictions with any other federal records and you have a basis for accusing millions of individuals of "crimes" — "no one is above the law," right?

And there are lots of other juicy collections of data held by the federal government. The Privacy Act of 1974 was designed specifically with this concern in mind in the aftermath of Nixon's weaponization of the IRS. Without those protections Trump and presumably future presidents are in a position to go much, much farther than anything Nixon could have dreamed of. Of course that would require enormous computing power. Enter MArk Zuckerburg, whose Manhattan-sized proposed data center was the subject of Trump’s awestruck admiration at a recent cabinet meeting.

This is the truly frightening combination. Mass data analysis, zero protections of informational privacy, weaponization of routine regulatory functions, and a lawless administration bent on finding ways to harm its enemies. The national government is necessarily entwined in a vast range of activities. When every office of that government is converted to a vindictive law enforcement agency with total access to all information contained anywhere in the system — it's not "Fascism," we will need a new word for this specifically 21^st century form of authoritarianism.

We're not there yet, at the moment they are still limiting the use of this apparatus only to target specific political opponents. Whew.

And equally obviously, it is still science fiction to talk about mass scraping of social media to identify people likely to commit “crimes” or or potential "disturbances" so that they can be detained ahead of time. At least, that's still science fiction in the United States — in other places like Argentina under Trump’s good friend Javier Milei it's already here.

But no need to worry, Trump and his people--Pulte, Miller, Noem--would never go there. And if you have never filed any document that contained any inconsistency or incomplete documentation or that contradicts anything in any federal database, then you have nothing to worry about.