Executive Order 14243: Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos

What does Executive Order 14243 do?

The order operates through existing statutory authority, so concrete effects depend on the agency actions and legal limits described below.

Reading the operative provisions of Executive Order 14243

EO 14243 directs agencies to make unclassified records and systems accessible to authorized federal officials conducting work to identify waste, fraud and abuse. It emphasizes interagency data access, but it does not create unrestricted public access or erase privacy protections. Agencies must still follow the Privacy Act, tax-confidentiality rules, health-information statutes, national-security restrictions and other laws governing specific records. The operative instructions appear in the Federal Register text of EO 14243.

Access and disclosure are separate questions. A federal employee may be authorized to use a record for a defined official purpose while remaining barred from redisclosing it or using it for an unrelated purpose. Agencies therefore need role-based access, logging, data minimization and rules for handling sensitive information. The order’s carve-outs and savings language matter because the executive branch cannot use an efficiency directive to override a confidentiality statute or a court order. The practical implementation question is not simply whether a database can be connected, but who can see which fields and under what legal authority.

Data matching can help identify duplicate payments or inconsistent records, but a possible match is not proof of fraud. People can share names, have outdated addresses or appear differently in separate systems. Any adverse action—such as suspending a benefit, demanding repayment or referring a person for investigation—requires the applicable program procedures and an opportunity to correct errors where the law provides one. Measures of success should include verified improper payments prevented, false positives corrected and protections against unauthorized access. This keeps the order’s anti-fraud purpose distinct from the rights that govern individual decisions.