“We will destroy the old system”: Elon Musk and Doge attack the American taxman with … a hackathon
There are angry hackathons, happy meetings of passionate developers. And then there is the one that THE Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) of Elon Musk Prepare for Washington, in highly sensitive terrain: the IRS headquarters, in other words, the American taxman.
The objective? Create a “mega API” capable of centralizing access to IRS systems, renowned for their opacity and their complexity inherited from decades of patches and mainframes. Officially, it is a question of rationalizing, improving efficiency, even – why not – fighting fraud. Behind the scenes, it's a whole different soap that is played out.
Elon Musk wants to refound the IRS with a central API: experts ring the alarm
At the controllers, two key figures: Sam Corcos, De LA SANCE SANCE Tech, close to SpaceX, and Gavin KLIGER, young prodigy of data passed by Databricks. Both operators of the DOGE cell, they orchestrate this ambitious overhaul, not without breaking porcelain in passing. $ 1.5 billion in modernization projects have already been sanded. The watchword: “Stop the bureaucratic hell of the Legacy code”.
HIC is the method. In a few weeks, dozens of engineers were thanked, including at the highest level of cybersecurity. There Direct filefree declaration platform acclaimed by the public? Buried. And the deadlines? Reduced from several months to a few short weeks. A form of worried emergency, even in the cozy corridors of the treasure.
In this context, the prospect of seeing Palantant – Controversial company co -founded by Peter Thiel – Involved in the project makes teeth cringe. Because this famous API, once in place, could become a sprawling control tower, capable of crossing tax, social and other federal bases. A dream for Big Data followers, a nightmare for defenders of civil liberties-many to have paraded this weekend in the American streets.
What about tax expertise in all of this? To absent subscribers. “They don't even understand the structure of the data from the IRS, they would only need years to go around”deplores an internal engineer. But that does not seem to brake Doge, which advances with the faith of the converts: if it is broken, we rewrite everything. In Java. Quickly.
The project is officially presented as a response to the executive order of Donald Trump to break the information silos. But between budget cuts, the massive eviction of experienced technicians and the likely installation of a single interface potentially giving access to ultra-sensitive tax data, doubt is installed: rationalization or digital control? Without evoking The particularly dark past of one of the protégés of Elon Musk operating at Doge.
One thing is certain: if the IRS becomes a unified dashboard managed on forced march tomorrow, the stake will no longer be only technical. He will be deeply political.
