Over 11,000 US government employees given access to classified files

Government officials under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump improperly shared sensitive documents with thousands of federal workers, including potentially classified floor plans of the White House, according to internal records reviewed by The Washington Post, Report informs.

Career employees at the General Services Administration, which provides administrative and technological support for much of the federal bureaucracy and manages the government’s real estate portfolio, were responsible for the oversharing, which spurred a cybersecurity incident report and investigation last week. The records show that the employees inadvertently shared a Google Drive folder containing the sensitive documents with the entire GSA staff, which totals more than 11,200 people, according to the agency’s online directory.

The information shared also included the details of a proposed blast door for the White House visitor center, the records show, as well as bank account information for a vendor who assisted with a Trump administration news conference.

The Google Drive incident is the latest digital security lapse for the Trump administration. Last month, top officials inadvertently included the editor in chief of the Atlantic magazine in an unclassified chat used to discuss highly sensitive military planning, and Trump’s national security adviser and his staff used personal Gmail accounts for government communications, which experts described as insufficiently secure, The Post reported.

But the oversharing, which continued over at least four years, also suggests a pattern of sloppy handling of sensitive information that spans both the Trump and Biden administrations. A special counsel report last year found that Biden carelessly kept classified documents and notebooks at his home.

The file sharing dates at least to early 2021, at the start of the Biden presidency, and continued into the Trump administration — including one share as recently as last week, the records show.

The White House and GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday. Nor did a representative for Biden.