Wired: “…The NFC is an agency nested inside the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) that handles payroll for 650,000 government employees—over a fifth of the federal workforce—across more than 170 agencies, including the SBA, according to a source familiar with it who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press. The information contained in the NFC’s systems includes the Social Security numbers, banking information, addresses, and dates of birth for federal employees, including members of the FBI and DOJ. “We can and have managed the complexities of law enforcement pay for decades,” says the source. (The USDA referred a request for comment from WIRED to the SBA. The SBA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) According to the source familiar with the NFC, requests for access, especially for sensitive systems, normally go through a vetting process. The request is evaluated and, if granted, only permits the lowest level of access required. “We were being told,” they believed, “to give them unlimited access.” According to emails viewed by WIRED, an IT manager at the NFC requested that Coristine and Park be granted “admin authority” to the mainframe and access to two other applications: Insight, which includes detailed employment records, and the Reporting Center, which includes payroll data. The requests for Insight and the Reporting Center were for “read only” access, meaning that Coristine and Park could see data in the system but not change it. Within roughly three hours of Kucharski’s email, the DOGE operatives had mainframe access, giving them—according to the source—the power to see sensitive information like an employee’s “salary, banking, address, deductions, debt and other vital employment information” at the NFC. In an email timestamped 4:15 pm, less than an hour after this access was granted, Coristine wrote to Hernandez and the SBA’s deputy chief human capital officer, with another request: “Could you please send me the NFC CIO’s phone number?” All of this was quite unusual by normal government standards, though not those prevailing at the time: As Coristine and Park were gaining access to the NFC mainframe, another DOGE operative, Marko Elez, had gained read-write access to the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. The speed at which DOGE operatives were able to access these datasets, says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, was highly concerning, because it indicates they likely did not go through the regular screening and security clearance processes required of government employees who handle sensitive information.

“As far as we know, these people don’t have real security background checks,” he says. Experts WIRED previously spoke to doubted that Coristine could have obtained a clearance.