If you’ve been trying to follow the nitty-gritty details of DOGE’s efforts to seize control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—and why it’s so important—then odds are you’ve already heard of Nathan Tankus. An independent journalist and researcher, his newsletter Notes on the Crises has become essential reading for anyone seeking to untangle the workings of an abstruse but vital piece of financial infrastructure that most of us had never given much thought—or even heard of—before January. (How essential? Tankus is the guy Paul Krugman calls up when he needs an explainer.)

In our latest episode of WatchCats, Tankus walks us through what the Treasury payments system is, why it’s so important—and why he thinks DOGE’s insistence on controlling its levers has set the stage for a constitutional crisis. We also explore how the Musk team’s meddling may imperil the Social Security system millions of older Americans rely on to make ends meet.

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For more than 30 years, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has been advocating for—and litigating to protect—personal privacy against increasing technological encroachment. No surprise, then, that the folks at EPIC were alarmed when it became clear that DOGE staff were seeking access—for unclear purposes—to an array of highly sensitive and normally stringently siloed federal databases. They filed a lawsuit in February challenging that access under the Privacy Act of 1974, and a host of other federal privacy statutes.

This episode, EPIC’s Senior Counsel and Director of Litigation John Davisson joins us to explain their challenge, why they believe DOGE’s efforts run afoul of federal law, and why you ought to care about it.

For most of her career in journalism—first at The Washington Post, now at The New York Times—Emily Badger’s beat had been housing, transportation, and urban policy. But since the start of the second Trump administration, she’s distinguished herself as one of the sharpest observers of the fledgling Department of Government Efficiency.

The piece that first caught our eye—and the central topic of our conversation—was her impressively exhaustive catalog of the personal information contained in databases DOGE has sought access to. This episode, she walks us through what they want to know about you, and why it has privacy advocates worried.

Badger has also done essential reporting on DOGE’s ambitious claims about the money they’re supposedly saving taxpayers—and why those numbers just don’t add up. And most recently, she wrote about why Elon Musk’s latest breathless claims about fraud supposedly newly uncovered by DOGE are misleading.

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