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Welcome to this week’s edition of Receipts. I’ve spent recent months talking to civil servants (current and former) about the ways in which the Trump administration has been abusing government data. Most of my reporting has covered the ways in which they’ve “disappeared” federal statistics. Today, though, I’m writing on a very different kind of data abuse: the chilling ways the administration has been compiling new information about the public, and weaponizing existing administrative records (on health, taxes, etc.) for political purposes.
Are there examples of abuses of government records I’ve missed? Please drop me a line in the comments, or share a confidential tip. In the meantime I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Bulwark+. The support of our members helps us report on under-the-radar threats to your freedoms like this one.
–Catherine
Trump’s Chilling Weaponization of Confidential Government Records
Remind me—who else in history made lists of Jewish intellectuals and people with disabilities?
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THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has been compiling lists. There are lists of immigrants, lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of dissidents—and lately, even lists of Jews.
All ostensibly in the name of public safety.
Over the past year, I’ve been tracking the Trump administration’s use and abuse of federal data. For the most part, this has involved deletions of records that the regime finds inconvenient, or other forms of censorship. For example, the administration has stopped publishing certain statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation. It has also deleted photos of nonwhite people serving in the military. When Trump found the official jobs reports insufficiently flattering, he fired the head of the statistical agency that produces those figures, after having already slashed the agency’s staffing by 20 percent.
But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.
For example, the Trump administration recently sued the University of Pennsylvania to force it to hand over a list of Jewish faculty, staff, and students. The government is demanding the school release these records without first obtaining consent from Jewish community members themselves; authorities say they need the university to produce this Jewish registry to help the government “combat antisemitism” on college campuses.¹
The University of Pennsylvania has refused to cooperate, to its credit. But not every school has done the same. Last year, Barnard College complied with a similar demand. Barnard faculty and staff were shocked to receive unsolicited text messages asking them to fill out a questionnaire bearing the logo of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), confirming whether they were indeed Jewish.
This should go without saying, but these days it apparently needs to be said: There’s good historical reason to worry that an authoritarian government leader collecting a registry of Jews, under the pretext of protecting Jews, while that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers, may not end up so well for Jews.
“Against a backdrop of rising antisemitism, white supremacy, and other forms of hate, the danger that lists of Jews or other groups could fall into the wrong hands looms especially large,” reads a filing this week from five groups affiliated with UPenn.
What might these groups mean by “the wrong hands”?
Well, even if you give the EEOC the benefit of the doubt and assume that it intends to use this information in a purely benevolent way, someone else in government might try to access Jewish data registry for more nefarious purposes. Such as, say, whoever over at the Department of Homeland Security has been using openly white-nationalist slogans and