Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that America’s continental shelf couldn’t get any bigger. It is, after all, mostly rock, the submerged landmass linking shore and abyss. But in late 2023, after a long and expensive mapping project, the State Department announced that the continental shelf had grown by 1 million square kilometers—more than two Californias.

The United States had ample motive to decide that the continental shelf extends farther than it had previously realized. A larger shelf means legal access to more of the ocean floor’s riches: animals, hydrocarbons, and, perhaps most important, minerals to power electric-vehicle batteries. America has no immediate plans to excavate its new seabed, which includes chunks of the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and Atlantic, as well as several small pockets of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. But, according to the State Department, the combined area could be worth trillions of dollars.

The announcement shows just how shrewdly the U.S. has gamed the international system. Since 1982, a United Nations agreement called the Law of the Sea has served as the cornerstone of the global maritime order. In its expansion project, the U.S. abided by the treaty’s rules dictating how nations can extend their shelves—but, notably, it never ratified the agreement, which means that unlike the 169 nations that did, it doesn’t have to pay royalties on the resources it extracts. Apparently America can have its cake and eat it, too: a brand-new shelf, acquired in seemingly good order, that it can mine for free. This gold rush in the making can be seen as the culmination of a long national bet that even though America helped create the global maritime order, it’s better off not joining.

America’s undersea enlargement would not have been possible without Larry Mayer. An oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire, Mayer began the U.S. government’s largest-ever offshore-mapping effort in 2003. Over the next 20 years, he led a team of scientists that dragged sensors across America’s neighboring oceans, scanning more than 1 million square miles of seabed. “When you do that at nine miles an hour, it takes time,” Mayer told me. The project logged more than three years afloat, “a lot of it in the Arctic, which takes even more time because we’ve got to break ice.”

[From the January/February 2020 issue: History’s largest mining operation is about to begin]

Forty voyages and more than $100 million later, Mayer returned with four terabytes of data, which State Department officials plugged into formulas laid out by the treaty. “Not all countries have the ability to hire Larry Mayer and the scientific wherewithal to go out for 20 years and spend tens of millions” to grow their shelf, says James Kraska, a law professor at the U.S. Naval War College who also teaches a course at Harvard Law School on international maritime code. “Ghana hasn’t done this.”

America first claimed jurisdiction over its continental shelf in 1945, a few weeks after Japan’s surrender in World War II. For several years, the U.S. government had been concerned about Japanese ships catching salmon off Alaska, as well as other nations drilling for oil off American shores. With the war over, President Harry Truman proclaimed that an underwater area of some 750,000 square miles—about 4.5 Californias—now belonged to America.

No internationally agreed-upon definition of continental shelves existed until 1958, when 86 countries gathered at the first UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The group decided, somewhat unhelpfully, that a shelf could extend as far and as deep as a nation could drill. By the following decade, technology had advanced so quickly that a country could claim virtually an entire ocean. Sure enough, one member of Congress from Florida proposed that the U.S. occupy what amounted to two-thirds of the North Atlantic.

President Lyndon B. Johnson warned against such expansionism. In a 1966 speech, he denounced the “new form of colonial competition” that threatened to emerge among maritime nations. “We must ensure that the deep seas and the ocean bottoms are, and remain, the legacy of all human beings,” he said. The following year, Arvid Pardo, an ambassador from Malta, called on the UN to deem the ocean floor “the common heritage of mankind.” In 1970, the U.S. voted alongside 107 other nations to do precisely that.

The UN reconvened in 1973 to legislate a shared vision of the seas. Over the next nine years, more than 150 nations and as many as 5,000 people gathered for off-and-on negotiating sessions in New York City and Geneva. They discussed a wide range of topics—freedom of navigation, fishing, scientific research, pollution, the seabed—and ultimately produced the Law of the Sea.

The U.S. had helped pave the way. Three years before the convention, the Nixon administration had presented a draft treaty that proposed a forerunner to the International Seabed Authority: an agency established by the Law of the Sea that would collect royalties from underwater resources and distribute them to the developing world. But the nation’s posture changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. American delegates began showing up to negotiating sessions wearing ties that bore the image of Adam Smith, the father of free markets. It was an early sign of the administration’s reluctance to regulate the maritime economy.

In 1982, the U.S. voted against adopting the Law of the Sea—one of only four countries to do so—and said it would refuse to ratify the finalized treaty. Reagan’s reason: the regulations on mining, which he thought would hamper America’s ability to exploit undersea mineral resources. He seemed particularly worried about the royalty scheme that would govern the international seafloor, a vast virgin deep that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any one state and makes up about half of the world’s ocean floor.

That June, Reagan reportedly told his National Security Council, “We’re policed and patrolled on land and there is so much regulation that I kind of thought that when you go out on the high seas you can do what you want.” The president was concerned about “free oceans closing where we were getting along fine before,” minutes from the meeting show. He dispatched onetime Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to persuade other nations to reject the treaty, but the mission failed.

Just 16 years earlier, the U.S. under Johnson had set out to prevent nations from making unilateral claims to the high seas. Then America made its own. Months after the Law of the Sea was finalized, Reagan said the U.S. would abide by its rules on “traditional uses of the oceans,” such as navigation, but not by the “unnecessary political and economic restraints” that the treaty imposed on mining. Instead, Reagan claimed jurisdiction over all the natural and mineral resources within 200 nautical miles of the nation’s shores (230 regular miles), an allowance that the Law of the Sea granted only signatories. That is, he cited “international law” for permission, even though he had refused to ratify that law. Reagan showed that the U.S. could take what it wanted from the treaty without submitting to the UN. Judging by the newly extended shelf, it still can.

The State Department’s Extended Continental Shelf Project works out of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Boulder, Colorado, some 800 miles from the nearest ocean. Its office is down the hall from the Space Weather Prediction Center. When I visited last year, maps of the Arctic adorned the walls, and a whiteboard showed an elementary red drawing of the U.S. and Canada protruding into the Atlantic. Inside sat Brian Van Pay, the director of the project, and Kevin Baumert, its lawyer.

Van Pay and Baumert are picky about words. When I asked whether America had just gotten bigger, Van Pay replied: “It depends on how you define it. If you’re talking about sovereignty”—he emphasized the last syllable—then no. “But if you’re talking about sovereign rights”—maybe. “But it’s not territory.”

[From the April 1969 issue: The deep-sea bed]

According to the Law of the Sea, a continental shelf stretches 200 nautical miles from a nation’s shores. Any country can mine this area without worrying about royalties. But the treaty lays out two formulas for tacking on “extended” shelf; calculating this is what kept Van Pay and Baumert busy. If you mine there, you need to pay royalties to the International Seabed Authority—unless you’re America and haven’t ratified the treaty.

The first formula requires finding the “foot of the continental slope,” where the seabed starts to flatten out. For the next 60 nautical miles beyond that point, you’ve got continental shelf. The second formula involves the sediment on the ocean floor. (This goes by the technical name “ooze.” It’s plankton skeletons, mainly.) Shelves extend as long as the sediment covering them is thick enough that oil and gas could plausibly be stashed underneath. A team of scientists, led by the geologist Debbie Hutchinson, scanned the ocean floor with seismic sensors to find this boundary. Two regulatory limits circumscribed Van Pay and Baumert’s calculations: No shelf can spread more than 350 nautical miles from shore, or more than 100 nautical miles beyond 2,500 meters of depth. The formulas yielded 1,279 coordinate points delineating the new shelf.

The rules are objective, but the results depend on other nations’ recognition. Parts of America’s new shelf overlap with those of the Bahamas, Canada, and Japan, prompting ongoing negotiations. And in March, Russia’s foreign ministry said that it wouldn’t recognize America’s shelf, because the U.S. hadn’t sent its data to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the agency created by the Law of the Sea to review such submissions.

Russia’s claim relates to a broader concern that the U.S. has essentially ignored unfriendly provisions in the treaty—such as oversight requirements—while exploiting advantageous ones, such as formulas for shelf expansion. Van Pay and Baumert disagree with that characterization. Baumert told me that America’s expansion is not unprecedented; more than three dozen countries have extended their shelves without ratifying the Law of the Sea. (Only four of those still haven’t ratified, though: Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and the United States.)

Furthermore, Van Pay and Baumert told me that they hadn’t sent in their new coordinate points because the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf had never considered submissions from a nation that wasn’t a party to the Law of the Sea. I asked the commission, If America submitted its shelf boundaries, would you review them? “This question has never been raised,” Aldino Campos, the chair of the commission, told me. He said it wouldn’t discuss whether to consider such a submission unless it actually receives one. But ultimately the commission only makes recommendations; actually asserting the new limits of a continental shelf falls to the United States.

Even though America hasn’t ratified the treaty, Kraska, the law professor, told me it has an obligation to comply with it. He argued that it has taken on the force of “customary international law”—that is, a set of norms and practices that are so widely followed that they become binding to all nations, whether or not they’re signatories. All told, he said, the U.S. has made a “credible, good-faith effort” to extend its continental shelf in accordance with the Law of the Sea.

Most mainstream U.S. government officials want America to ratify the treaty. Five presidents and at least five secretaries of state have urged Congress to join, arguing that it would help bolster the international rule of law. Becoming a party to the Law of the Sea would also allow the U.S. to further legitimize its expanded shelf.

Ever since Reagan, though, Republican lawmakers have staved off ratification, which requires two-thirds of the Senate. Along with conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, they worry that the royalty schemes would impose an undue financial burden and that joining the treaty could result in a “dangerous loss of American sovereignty.”

Their calculus may soon change. As early as this year, the International Seabed Authority could finalize regulations that would open up mining on the international seafloor. Because America hasn’t ratified the Law of the Sea, it won’t have the right to participate. (Some conservatives argue, however, that the U.S. can simply do as it pleases on the international seafloor.) Pressure is mounting on lawmakers: In March, more than 300 former political and military leaders called on the Senate to ratify, reflecting concerns that America might not be able to keep up with China if it relies solely on its own shelf.

America may not mine its new seabed for decades anyhow. The role of the State Department, Van Pay and Baumert insist, is to set the fence posts, not referee what happens within them. In the meantime, America’s shelf could keep growing. “We always want to leave open that possibility,” Van Pay told me. More data could be collected, he said. “There are more invisible lines to draw.”