Breakingviews: Washington texting snafu sends alert to boardrooms

There’s a strong signal for boardrooms coming from the loud noise in Washington: brace for crisis. Senior Trump administration officials inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat, in the latest example of sloppiness with sensitive material. Companies entrust the government with loads of confidential information, too, and the risks of exposure are rising quickly.

The U.S. capital is renowned for leaks to advance political agendas, but recent events suggest greater vulnerability to hacking and accidental slips. The Atlantic exposed on Monday that even top-secret information isn’t safe. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others used the commercial messaging service Signal, instead of ultra-secure government technology, to discuss plans to strike Houthi sites in Yemen and looped in Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor.

Such behavior is explicitly forbidden under the law, and it represents a serious national security breach. It isn’t the first red flag either. A grand jury indicted President Donald Trump last year for mishandling classified documents, federal charges that were abandoned after he won the election in November. A judge also recently blocked billionaire Elon Musk from accessing Social Security information in his government efficiency role on grounds that he has no basis to root around on a fraud “fishing expedition.”

Similar tussles have arisen at the Internal Revenue Service and elsewhere in the Treasury Department over Musk seeing extremely sensitive payment systems, which, if cracked, could impede government spending. Purposeful or accidental stoppages of such disbursements could easily rattle investors.

Companies share their secrets with U.S. officials, too. Patent applications, pharmaceutical trials, insurance claims, contractual obligations, financial details and more are included in a range of electronic documentation provided to authorities. Significant budget and staffing cuts across federal agencies make such information even more vulnerable, beyond the carelessness.

Spies seeking corporate intel may have an easier time infiltrating systems at, say, the Food and Drug Administration or Securities and Exchange Commission. The office responsible for modernizing government technology and procurement, known as the 18F program, has already been eliminated.

Such fissures are not theoretical. In 2016, hackers breached the SEC’s EDGAR system used to compile material company information and were only detected following patterns of suspicious trading ahead of public announcements. Bureaucratic secrecy can be frustrating, but safeguarding important information is essential to keep markets and social services running smoothly. After this military mishap, however, corporate America should be escalating its preparedness for a disclosure disaster to DEFCON 3.