Adam Schiff Says Your IRS Data May Have Been Breached — And Not By A Hacker, But Donald Trump: 'Consider This Your Warning'

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is urging Americans to treat their tax records as already compromised, blaming what he calls an "unprecedented" data grab engineered by President Donald Trump.

What Happened: "Consider this your warning. Your personal data may have been breached. And the culprit wasn't a hacker. It was Donald J. Trump," Schiff said in an X post which featured a 5-minute-long video address.

"The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to get access to millions and millions of records of Americans from the IRS," he said, calling taxpayer information "among the most secure records in the federal government."

He added that unauthorized disclosure is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Schiff warned that the planned software system would allow DHS to "gain access to millions of records at a time, never having to justify it," thereby bypassing the longstanding rule that agencies must tie each request to a specific investigation.

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Using the data to hunt undocumented immigrants would "renege" on assurances that filing taxes is safe, he said: "We're supposed to be encouraging people … to pay their taxes, and now we're going to use their good-faith payment to go after them."

Aggregating so much information, Schiff added, heightens the chance of "one spectacular hack," citing past breaches.

Why It Matters: His warning follows a ProPublica investigation showing IRS engineers are building software to let ICE pull taxpayer addresses on demand, a system career officials said pushed the boundaries of the law. The report suggests that the tool would bypass legal review and feed ICE real-time data to meet a White House goal of 3,000 deportations a day.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and eight other members of Congress called the emerging IRS "mega-database" a "surveillance nightmare" that violates tax-privacy laws last month. Former IRS lawyers echoed that view, warning the plan erodes decades-old confidentiality protections.

Photo Courtesy: Lev Radin on Shutterstock.com

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