New White House Plan to Track Spending Raises Cyber Risks www.databreachtoday.com/new-white…

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to build new technology systems capable of tracking and justifying every single procurement across the U.S. government, the world’s largest buyer of goods. If it’s built, such a system could expose vast troves of sensitive data to hacking and foreign manipulation.

Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing agencies to work with his Department of Government Efficiency to create such a system, mandating that it also include a justification for each payment. The system should have a mechanism for the agency head “to pause and rapidly review any payment.”

When agencies are forced to abruptly innovate without time to develop robust security architectures and conduct rigorous testing, they create an open invitation for attackers, former federal officials and public-sector cybersecurity experts told Information Security Media Group. That exact risk was what led to the creation of the U.S. Digital Service under the Obama administration - before it was rebranded last month as DOGE, largely driven by Trump and his mercurial multi-billionaire adviser, Elon Musk (see: Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Email Sparks ‘Security Nightmare’).

“The rush to build complex systems on the fly is a sure-fire recipe for disaster,” said Terry Dunlap, senior vice president at NetRise and a former global network vulnerability analyst at the National Security Agency. “Expect insecure code, unchecked vulnerabilities and supply chain pitfalls that could easily let malicious actors slip in undetected.”

Centralizing vast amounts of financial data would also create a high-value target - “a proverbial bullseye on the back of a government agency,” Dunlap said. Hackers, nation states or even rogue insiders could exploit such a repository to wreak havoc on economic stability, compromise sensitive intelligence or even disrupt national infrastructure, he warned.

“In short, it’s a cybersecurity dumpster fire waiting to happen,” he said.