> My impression is that this guy is a typical bureaucrat who has power based on his ability to gatekeep access to information; he’s upset someone went around him.

Gatekeepers exist for a reason. Sometimes the stuff inside the gates is important.

For someone to think that doing an end-run around this guy and creating a new non-authoritative copy of this database is reasonable, you have to think that there's a reasonable end that couldn't be achieved by going through the established channels.

The only thing that I've heard of is using AI to look for "waste, fraud and abuse", and it's very unclear to me how looking at, say, my parents' SSN application for my SSN several decades ago is going to tell you whether that application or any disbursements are fraudulent.