The White House is trying to get its hands on sensitive unemployment insurance data held within the Labor Department — raising concerns the Trump administration could weaponize it for deportations or political uses.

The data, collected by states and provided to the agency’s inspector general’s office, likely includes workers’ addresses, Social Security numbers and other identifying information, according to unemployment experts. The office began collecting the information from states during the pandemic in order to fight fraudulent benefit claims.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order last week that requires the inspector general’s office to grant the labor secretary and her designees “unfettered access to all unemployment data and related payment records” held by the office. Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was confirmed by the Senate earlier this month.

“The concern is they could use it for whatever they want to,” said Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert at The Century Foundation, a think tank. “The immediate worry is they will use it for immigration enforcement.”

He added that the datasets would include “really accurate information about where people live and what kind of work they did” — the sort of data that the inspector general’s office may have already refused to hand over to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Even if it’s used solely in an effort to prevent fraud, experts worry the data could be used to deny social safety benefits for fraudsters and innocent people alike, or get leaked due to unsecure handling.

“Are they going to follow due process?” Stettner wondered of the administration.

The Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump has said is run by the billionaire Elon Musk, has been seeking delicate data from several agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration, as it fires federal workers and hypes dubious claims of rampant fraud. Those efforts have prompted lawsuits from groups that warn the data is highly personal and could be mishandled or exploited for political or policy goals.

A White House spokesperson told HuffPost the administration wanted the unemployment information to fight fraud but declined to comment when asked specifically if the data could be shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“DOGE is looking for waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars across all agencies, including the Department of Labor,” deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in an email.

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Unemployment insurance programs are generally run by state workforce agencies and funded through employer taxes. When unemployment skyrocketed as COVID-19 spread, the Labor Department’s inspector general’s office sought data from the states in order to identify shaky claims, like those filed in a dead person’s name or in multiple jurisdictions.

Federal grants offered to help states administer their unemployment programs were contingent on providing the data to the inspector general, an independent watchdog office within the Labor Department. At the time, Congress was pumping billions of federal dollars into the safety net through COVID-19 relief packages.

Larry D. Turner, the former inspector general at the Labor Department, told HuffPost the data was necessary to fight bogus claims but warned it was “sensitive” and could be misused. Trump fired Turner in his first week in office in a purge of 17 inspectors general across the federal government.

“We agreed we would not share it with anybody because of the possibility it could get into the wrong hands and be compromised,” Turner explained.

Trump campaigned on a promise to crack down on undocumented immigrants and has pressed his administration to use whatever tools they can to identify people who aren’t in the country legally.

Sharing information across government agencies could be a key strategy in that effort. The Washington Post recently reported that the Internal Revenue Service was nearing a deal to share the addresses of potential undocumented immigrants with ICE for cross-referencing.

Trump’s executive order related to unemployment, billed as an effort to “eliminate information silos,” goes beyond requiring the inspector general to fork over data. It also says the federal government should have “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.”

In an unemployment context, that appears to be a reference to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, or NASWA, an organization representing labor agencies in all 50 states. The association maintains a data hub into which states submit claims for cross-matching and analysis in order to detect fraud. Claims can then be flagged before they’re paid out.

A spokesperson for NASWA did not respond to an email or voicemail seeking comment on the White House’s executive order.

Michelle Evermore, an unemployment insurance expert who previously worked at the Labor Department, called the White House’s pursuit of such information “incredibly distressing.”

“This is the federal government trying to control state-level data,” said Evermore, a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Evermore said there are “legitimate reasons” a federal agency might want state claims data — to combat fraud or, say, to create a centralized, national platform for claimants to file for benefits. But she warned that the data shouldn’t be accessible to “any DOGE guy with a dongle.”

“If you have the state data, you have a tremendous amount of information on individuals,” she said.