എലോൺ മസ്ക് എന്റെ പ്രവാചകൻ: വാഷിംഗ്ടണിലെ ഫെഡറൽ സംവിധാനങ്ങളെ അട്ടിമറിക്കുന്ന മസ്കിന്റെ ഡോജ് (DOGE) ടീം

In the early hours of Saturday 22 February 2025 the following email landed in the inboxes of the entire US federal workforce:

From: HR hr@opm.gov

Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2025

Subject: What did you do last week?

Importance: High

Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.

Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.

When she noticed the email that Saturday night, Kathleen Walters already had far too much going on in her life. Number one was figuring out if the lump in her breast that her doctor had just detected was a tumour. Half of her known blood relatives had died of cancer, and she was now 52: the lump needed understanding.

Her work life was harder to dramatise with a list. For a start, the specifics of her job at any given moment, as she would have been the first to point out, couldn’t legally be described to others. She was the chief privacy officer at the Internal Revenue Service. She ran a staff of 650 people tasked with preventing any of the 100,000 IRS employees from losing or leaking or even so much as peeking at, unless they had the authority to peek, any of the 266m tax returns they were just then processing from the previous year. “One hundred thousand people is a big-sized town,” said Kathleen. “In any big-sized town, you have some crazy people. I could easily see someone writing, ‘This weekend I audited Beyoncé.’”

Whoever had sent this email asking her to list five things she’d done at work was now demanding that all these people inside the IRS share information that, in many cases, should never be shared. She thought it was nuts.

She responded quickly, and vaguely, with five things she had done the previous week, all the while feeling sure no one would ever read what she wrote. Her phone was already exploding with questions from her subordinates – a few of whom were saying that their replies were bouncing back with a “mailbox is full” notice. Now she had to sit and think about how to minimise the damage that might be caused by 100,000 IRS employees thinking that they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t supply some detailed answer about what they’d done during their work week. A meaningful percentage risked being tossed in jail if they described what they did in an email. It was a crime for an IRS employee even to acknowledge that some specific person had or had not filed a tax return. “People don’t understand what the IRS does,” said Kathleen.

The email came as a surprise, but then the IRS was suddenly full of surprises. Nine days earlier, on 13 February, a Thursday, the first Doge person turned up in the lobby, unannounced, and security called Traci DiMartini, who ran the IRS’s human capital department. There’s a kid down here who said he needs to get into the building, he said. The kid’s name was Gavin Kliger.

Traci called her counterpart at the Treasury department, as the IRS sits inside Treasury, and Treasury always cleared any new political appointees; Treasury had no record of anyone named Gavin Kliger. Traci then called Tim Curry at the Office of Personnel Management – but he had no idea what was going on. Finally, she called security and asked them to escort the young man to her office.

Gavin Kliger came with a chip on his shoulder, it seemed to Traci. He offered not even the faintest smile or the most glancing eye contact. Dressed in black from hoodie to sneaker, he was brusque to the point of rudeness. He looked, and was, just a few years out of college. Eyes on the floor, he explained to Traci that he’d come to sort out the problems inside the IRS and to root out the fraud. “That’s a big job!” she said.

Anyone who worked at the IRS knew that it had its problems; fraud wasn’t likely one of them. Its technology infrastructure was a case study in government dysfunction, but its ethical infrastructure was sound. Like all federal employees, its staff wasn’t allowed to accept more than a free cup of coffee from anyone who might want something from their agency.

Gavin Kliger, in contrast, struck Traci as problematic. He’d somehow laid his hands on badges granting him access to some crazy number of government buildings. His backpack was stuffed with government-issue phones and at least four laptops – and he was now insisting that Traci supply him with an IRS phone and laptop. He also demanded his own IRS email address, access to computer systems with all the taxpayer information, and a meeting with the acting IRS commissioner, Doug O’Donnell. As Gavin sat there, Traci called Treasury again. That guy you said didn’t exist is now here sitting in my office. What do y’all want me to do with him?

The Treasury guy went away, then came back and said that Gavin Kliger had been hired three weeks earlier by the Office of Personnel Management and was attached to Doge – whatever that meant.

In her nine years running human capital departments at various federal agencies, Traci had never seen a new political appointee just turn up in the lobby and demand access to the computer systems. “None of this is normal,” she said, “but we’re still trying to be nice.” She explained to Gavin the IRS rules: before anyone was allowed to work inside the building, he needed to pass a tax audit.

I don’t need to do that, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

No, I don’t, he said.

Yes, you do, she replied.

They went back and forth like that a bit until finally Gavin relented. Traci then explained that after he passed the audit, he’d need to be given the mandatory presentations about ethics and taxpayer information. Gavin thought that the IRS should just let him in. “He wanted access to our systems immediately,” said Traci.

Traci’s next call, at 6.30pm that Thursday evening, was to Kathleen, to arrange for her to brief Gavin on data privacy laws and to warn her that the experience might not be entirely pleasant. If I had a kid who behaved the way he does, I’d slap the shit out of him, Traci said – but then Traci was from Philadelphia. Traci was always telling Kathleen that she should try a bit less hard to see the best in others.

By then word of Doge’s arrival at the IRS had spread, and Kathleen had read about them. Anyone who Googled Gavin’s name found a bit more than usually popped up about any given young Doge person. He’d grown up in southern California, where he was into Asian martial arts and the high-school marching band, then had gone on to the University of California at Berkeley. Graduating in 2020 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he’d taken a job as a programmer at Databricks. He’d also been active on X, where he’d retweeted with apparent approval posts from the white nationalists Steve Laws and Nick Fuentes. “One of Musk’s few Doge lieutenants who has embraced the spotlight,” Forbes wrote of him. Most of the other Muskrats scrubbed the internet of their presence. Gavin had written Substack pieces defending two Trump nominees, Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth. He’d deleted his X posts, but the Forbes writer John Hyatt had found a research tool, Web.archive, to revive and analyse them. “What emerges is a portrait of an internet edgelord and Musk and Trump superfan who has disdain for government spending, illegal immigrants, and who enjoys the odd racist and ableist joke,” he wrote.

By the time Traci called her, Kathleen was gone for the weekend and 50 miles away from the IRS building: she needed to find someone else to do Gavin’s briefing. Kathleen was white; the two women immediately below her were Black. “They’d both already read about him and were both already uncomfortable,” said Kathleen. Phyllis Grimes, her deputy, agreed to fall on the hand grenade.

Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”

It fell to Kathleen to draft the five-page agreement required by law for Gavin Kliger to be let inside the IRS building on Monday morning, 17 February. The memo that she wrote over the weekend, and that he signed, gave him access to some of the systems but, explicitly, none that contained taxpayer information.

Traci set him up in a conference room with an assistant at the beginning of the week. “People started getting these calls,” said Kathleen. “It was like getting the call from the principal’s office. ‘Gavin wants to see you.’ ”

Doge had its own private structure in addition to its official one. Officially, President Trump created Doge with an executive order on his first day in office. The president doesn’t have the authority to create or to fund an executive agency, however. Congress does. The Trump administration dodged that problem by taking an office inside the White House created during the second Obama term, the US Digital Service, kicking out the people inside and renaming it the Department of Government Efficiency. The US Digital Service had been given the power to hire talent from the tech sector without going through the usual slow federal hiring process. This now ensured that Doge could hire whomever it wanted without any questions being asked, and make it sound official. In effect, all that Doge had done was create a corpse for itself to occupy.

The zombie killed off the spirit of the original life form. Real Doge had nothing to do with Official Doge or the former US Digital Service or any other government body. Real Doge was more like Elon Musk’s pop-up restaurant. “None of us ever signed a piece of paper saying that we were in Doge,” said one Doge insider. The people who joined either worked for one of Musk’s companies, or knew someone who did, or knew someone who knew someone who did. To be truly a member of Doge was to be included in the group Signal chat and granted access to the sleeping quarters on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration (GSA).

Official Doge employed maybe 10 guys in their 40s and 50s who wore suits and could sort of pass as ordinary political appointees, but none had access to the sixth floor at GSA. “The older guys in the suits were not there to take risks or blow things up,” said one Doge insider. It was hard to say what any of the older Doge suits did except to make way for the young guys when they showed up with explosives.

Most of Doge’s inner circle just wanted to exist in the presence of Elon Musk. “It was, Elon is my prophet, and I worship the ground he walks on,” said one of the older Doge insiders.

As a Doge member, you could get away with saying – or having said – almost anything. What you couldn’t say is that the government actually sort of worked. Or, if it didn’t work, why it didn’t work. This new game rewarded not understanding but speed. The plan was the same plan Musk had executed two years earlier at Twitter: Make sweeping statements about the incompetence and dishonesty of the people working inside the place before you know much about them. Once you’ve terrified the employees, fire them in huge numbers. If it turns out you screwed up and fired the wrong people, hire some of them back.

The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to execute Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or rich families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough of them for there to be a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that added to the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t simply stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed from Elon Musk their status and sense of superiority. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.

Even among the young men sleeping inside the GSA, Gavin was regarded as a force. “Wherever he went, entropy went through the roof,” said one. Just weeks into their new jobs as destroyers of government institutions, the Muskrats had given Gavin Kliger a nickname: the Chaos Agent.

Another surprising email landed in Kathleen’s inbox on 28 February. It was Friday night. “I don’t know why everything always happened on a Friday night,” she said. She’d taken her daughter for pizza and wasn’t meant to be checking her phone when she spotted the emails. The first one that she read had been sent at 6.34pm by a colleague in the IRS legal department. “Melanie requested a data pull,” it read. “It feels not quite kosher.”

Exactly 64 minutes earlier, at 5.30pm, Doug O’Donnell, the acting IRS commissioner, had left his post. O’Donnell’s successor was to be Melanie Krause, until then chief operating officer, who had been installed as acting IRS commissioner by Treasury secretary Scott Bessent. Like Kathleen, Melanie was a career civil servant, though 13 years younger. Kathleen had considered her a friend. “She was really smart, and I thought she meant well,” said Kathleen. “She wasn’t a mean person.” They were both working moms, and Melanie liked to share, and share in, the details of the difficulties. Now she’d apparently told the IRS research department to share taxpayer data. With whom, and for what purpose, became clear in the second email, which came from the IRS director of data management:

Kathleen,

DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] has requested if we could find addresses for 700,000 names of likely undocumented immigrants.

1. Do we have legal authority to use the tax return filing data for this purpose?

2. If the answer to Question 1 is yes, then my second question is related to a file we receive from the Social Security Administration (SSA) that contains Date of Birth (DOB), Date of Death (DOD), Gender, Citizenship, and Name Control Information for all issued Social Security Numbers (SSN). Would our MOU allow us to use this perhaps in conjunction to tax return data for this purpose?

While it is likely that use of SSA data is also needed. The technical feasibility of being able to produce reliable outcome is unknown but likely very low.

Thanks

Kathleen read the first numbered paragraph and stopped reading. The request was plainly illegal. The IRS couldn’t just hand over great gobs of taxpayer information to the Department of Homeland Security or any other agency without a change in federal privacy law. Changing the law was not trivial. She knew that because she’d just done it – to allow the IRS to share taxpayer data with state child support enforcement agencies. The states wanted to know if former spouses who were failing to pay child support in fact did not have the income to do so – and the IRS alone could answer the question. What Kathleen had asked for in that case could not have been less controversial. Basically no one in American politics was willing to come out against child support enforcement, and the change to the federal law had passed Congress in December 2024 with almost no dissent. Yet it had taken 18 months to get it done, with endless meetings on Capitol Hill and the close involvement of the IRS commissioner and the secretary of health and human services. “Doge couldn’t imagine 18 months,” she said. “Doge didn’t have 18 months. Their whole thing was, If you can’t do it legally, we’ll find some way to do it illegally.”

This, Kathleen realised, is how they could grab taxpayer data illegally. By doing it on a Friday night. Using a woman, Melanie Krause, about to take over as acting commissioner, after a 10-minute meeting between her and Scott Bessent. Without informing the executive charged with protecting the information. “She went around me because she knew what my answer is,” said Kathleen.

The violation ran deeper than the law. The specific dataset sought by DHS was in a silo reserved for the tax returns filed by people without social security numbers. The IRS had created the so-called Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (Itin) back in 1996 as a mechanism for undocumented workers and other non-citizens who lacked social security numbers to file a return and pay taxes.

The programme had been a huge success. The IRS had collected hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes through it. Undocumented workers had been able to demonstrate their commitment to the country, and ease their path to citizenship, by paying more than their fair share. (They were still excluded from most federal benefits.) Now DHS wanted their private data, and it wasn’t hard for Kathleen or anyone else at the IRS to see why. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) had gone hunting undocumented workers but lacked reliable home addresses for many of them. The tax returns told you where roughly 7 million of them might be found.

The second Trump administration had a gift for creating such moments. It was as if all at once all these characters in a grand masked ball were forced to remove their disguises and reveal their identities. In the Great Unmasking, the nation’s leading law firms, led by Paul, Weiss, would cave to what amounted to Trump’s blackmail demands to avoid being shut out of federal business. The nation’s research universities, led by Columbia, would change their internal policies and even pay fines to avoid losing federal dollars.

The revealing moments in the civil service were lonelier. They occurred inside people’s hearts and minds, and seldom leaked to the press. After his arrival at the IRS, one of Gavin Kliger’s first acts had been to demand that the agency fire its 6,700 probationary workers, who had yet to be granted civil service protection. By law they could be fired only for poor performance. Gavin had asked Traci DiMartini, in her capacity as head of human resources, to agree to put her name on an email to the mostly young employees telling them that they had failed at their jobs. The Doge people played this trick often. They’d use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen.

Melanie Krause’s predecessor, Doug O’Donnell, had been pushed out by Doge after he, too, refused to send the dishonest email to the IRS’s 6,700 probationary workers. When a Doge guy at Treasury called with the order, O’Donnell, who had worked for the agency for 38 years, said he wanted to sleep on it – then had trouble sleeping. “He was struggling with this notion of sending the termination emails with this false justification for the termination,” said a person in whom O’Donnell confided. The next day, he refused to send the email, and the Doge guy said something like, “Well, let me be the first to congratulate you on your retirement.” Melanie had been installed precisely because she was proving to Doge that she was more pliable.

Standing outside the pizza place with her daughter in late February, Kathleen called Melanie. Ever since Melanie had arrived, in the fall of 2021, she had sought Kathleen’s advice. There had been stretches when they met daily. Kathleen just sort of assumed that, faced with a difficult choice, Melanie would do what Kathleen herself would do. “I don’t really get outraged,” said Kathleen. “But I think people need to be confronted when they have done something inappropriate.”

Melanie, what are you doing? she asked. We already have legal opinions about this, and it is obviously against the law.

I didn’t tell them to do it, said Melanie. I told them to think about how to do it – if it was legal.

But she hadn’t asked anyone to find out if it was legal to send Ice the home addresses of 700,000 undocumented workers – culled, somehow, from the 7 million who had paid taxes. She’d told them to send the data over, on a Friday night. In such a way that Kathleen might never have heard about it – or heard too late.

It’s not going to be any more legal on Saturday, said Kathleen.

Let’s meet on Monday to clear things up, said Melanie.

They didn’t meet. Instead, on Monday – 3 March – Kathleen and several other top IRS leaders were called into a meeting with Gavin Kliger.

I’ve figured out something important about the IRS, Gavin said. He paused for effect.

Oh no, thought Kathleen.

Every agency has a superpower, said Gavin. The IRS’s superpower is data.

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen.

“No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”.

Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access.

The following Monday, she received a cryptic text from a senior IRS official. I’m going to call your cell, but don’t answer, it read. Her phone rang and she dutifully stared at it. Then came the second text: Gavin is asking where your office is and is now trying to find you to fire you because he says you’re the blocker.

The Blocker! It was one of Elon’s favourite terms. The blocker was the person who didn’t understand progress. The person without vision. The person who could not see beyond the way things were to the way they ought to be. The person who didn’t want to live on Mars or possibly even care if anyone ever got there. The inferior person. Traci had been a blocker. Find the blockers between us and what we want, Elon told his young followers. Find the blockers and eliminate them. Maybe more than anything else, Doge wanted the data. Kathleen was the person blocking them from getting it.

She wasn’t sure what she’d done to anger Gavin. It could have been limiting his access to the procurement contracts. It could also have been pushing back on his request to grant Palantir, Doge’s favourite federal contractor, the right to work with taxpayer data. What Gavin’s issue likely was not was her resistance to handing over to the Department of Homeland Security the addresses of taxpayers who lacked social security numbers. Gavin had never brought that up; this particular attempt to break the law wasn’t his idea. It was coming from somewhere else. As she thought she had stopped it, she ceased to worry about it.

And so, roughly two weeks later, on Thursday, 27 March, she was caught completely off guard by an email chain that popped up on her screen. At the bottom was its origin: a note from Melanie, forwarding some document from the IRS legal department, along with what sounded like an innocuous request. “Kathleen, could you help facilitate I won’t be able to join today?” it read, without explaining what she was meant to facilitate or why Melanie wouldn’t be able to join. Scrolling through, Kathleen couldn’t find the document but did see lots of bewildered replies from others who had been included – What is this about? Happy to help but can you tell us what this is? She called the two young lawyers in the IRS legal office who had authored the document referred to in the chain that had somehow gone missing. They explained that the thing Melanie wanted Kathleen to facilitate was a memorandum of understanding for the IRS to share taxpayer data with DHS. Kathleen was knocked sideways. “I thought that it had been stopped,” she said. “I thought Melanie had been caught with her pants down.” The young lawyers now told her that not only had it not been stopped: they’d been working on it since the end of February. “They told me that they were sorry but Melanie had told them to do it and not to tell me or their boss,” said Kathleen.

The situation was obviously bizarre. Kathleen had never heard of an IRS director asking young IRS lawyers to work on something on the side without telling their boss. And if Melanie didn’t want Kathleen to know that she was handing IRS data to DHS, why had she suddenly included her in the conversation? “I think she got scared and dumped it on me to sign off on,” said Kathleen. Melanie was doing to Kathleen what Gavin Kliger had done to Traci DiMartini. She was presenting her with her own unmasking moment and forcing her to make a choice.

Instead of signing off, Kathleen arranged a Zoom call that day, with the people at the Department of Homeland Security who were requesting the data. The “ICE Innovation Lab”, they called themselves. She’d never heard of it. When she Googled it, nothing came up.

A few others joined the call – lawyers from DHS and a privacy lawyer at the IRS named Julie Schwartz. On the call, Kathleen explained that there were some very narrow circumstances that would allow the IRS to lend a hand. If, for example, an undocumented worker had murdered someone and the police had issued a warrant for his arrest. The Ice Innovators explained that they were looking for more than wanted criminals. “Just how many people do you want information on?” asked Kathleen. The Ice Innovators went back and forth between themselves before agreeing that the number was 7 million. They wanted the current addresses of 7 million undocumented workers who had paid their taxes. The most law-abiding, it turned out, might be the easiest to catch.

After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing, she said. I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.

“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”

That weekend, Kathleen sent Melanie a note saying she’d be resigning. “I didn’t need to tell her why,” said Kathleen. “She knew why.” She’d be leaving just weeks before her 20th anniversary with the agency. If she’d waited until mid-May, she would have been able to retire and receive benefits for the rest of her life. But she didn’t want to retire. Federal law made it hard for a retired civil servant to return, and if the day ever came when the IRS was rebuilt, she wanted to be able to return. She’d just learned that the lump in her breast was benign.

Days later, Melanie beat Kathleen to it and resigned. Kathleen never figured out how much her note to Melanie – and with it the increased likelihood that the attempted data heist would wind up in the press – led Melanie to quit. On her way out the door, Melanie asked the IRS’s head of communications to plant a story in the Washington Post that she was leaving as a matter of principle. The story cast Melanie as a martyr who had quit rather than divulge IRS data to DHS, when Kathleen knew that she had been caught red-handed trying to do precisely that. “I completely misjudged her character,” said Kathleen.

The Ice agents came for the “illegals” long after the property managers had gone home. The only evidence left behind were grainy videos on security cameras and accounts of terrified residents. “They’re coming in the nights, unannounced,” said Antonio Marquez, who ran a company that owned and managed apartment buildings scattered across the south and south-western United States occupied mostly by lower-middle-income Latinos. “We don’t know how they are targeting the units. It’s wreaking complete havoc.”

Antonio’s apartment complex outside Austin houses a thousand people, mostly young families, at least half of whom are undocumented. It had been visited in the spring late at night by teams of Ice agents. They came in unmarked cars, reported the tenants who remained after the raid. They had no warrants and read no rights. They knew, or thought they knew, exactly which doors to jimmy and which locks to pick and which people to take. The next morning a bunch of tenants were simply gone. All that remained was a pile of discarded possessions.

After the first Austin raid, Antonio had erected a tall metal fence around the property. Occasionally, the Ice agents had taken fully documented tenants – including an older woman who always paid on time, and who returned from Ice custody in an ankle bracelet. The great mystery to Antonio was how Ice knew where people lived. “These are fully targeted,” he said. “They already had these people in mind. They have their addresses. And we don’t know how they’re getting them.”

He was too busy doing his job to notice when, on 11 February 2026, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had shared with the Department of Homeland Security the tax data of 47,000 undocumented workers. On the heels of the Post’s scoop, a federal judge hearing a case on the subject summoned the IRS lawyers who had previously sworn that the agency had rebuffed the DHS demands. Under questioning, the lawyers confessed that the agency had lied to the court and that it had in fact shared the data. “The IRS violated the [Internal Revenue Code] approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to Ice,” the judge wrote in her opinion.

On a hot, sunny afternoon in early March in north-east Austin, it is a lot quieter than it was a year ago, back when Kathleen Walters was still a blocker. Two small children play in a pool, and a worn middle-aged man squats warily in a corner, smoking a cigarette. The wall of the office where the remaining residents come for their mail is decorated with posters advertising the services that Antonio’s company offers. One is more official-looking than the others. Free File del IRS, it reads across the top – and just below, in finer print, it explains how easy and painless it is for a non-citizen to file their taxes.

This is an edited extract from Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis, published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Both Gavin Kliger and Melanie Krause declined to be interviewed for the book. Gavin Kliger declined an invitation to comment for this extract. Melanie Krause says that as a non-partisan public servant, “I did my job with integrity, honesty, and transparency”. She denies instructing anyone to send taxpayer information to the DHS or telling lawyers to work on a data-sharing agreement with the agency. She says that refusing to put her name on an email was not the reason for terminating IRS head of human resources Tracy DiMartini. She adds: “I never agreed or wanted to divulge IRS data to DHS. I resigned for personal reasons after I learned that the Department of Treasury had signed such an agreement.”