Journalists' rights to publicize who works for the government is absolutely protected by the first amendment.
Republicans didn't have any problem with that when they used it to blow Valerie Plame's cover in political retaliation. Somehow now that it's Musk's army of channers stealing our data and breaking the government payment systems _some_ people have decided the first amendment is optional I guess.
Tangential, but the Plame thing was very much done by the political establishment types which tends to go beyond parties. For instance the person who outed her (Richard Armitage - Republican/Bush's Deputy Secretary of State) endorsed Clinton and was a never-Trumper. The motivation is that her husband's work (as well as her own) revealed that a lot of the pretext for the Iraq War was built on outright fabrications and lies. They apparently refused to play ball and were going public, so "they" destroyed her.
I think Democrat/Republican loses meaning in these sort of contexts. I've never once voted for a Republican in my life yet I also am extremely supportive of what's happening right now, mostly because of a strong anti-establishment inclining. I find that when powers grow too comfortable, they trend towards corruption and abuse, exactly of the Plame sort as but one tiny morsel of such. A bit of a shake-up now and then keeps everything far healthier for everybody (the country itself most of all), and it's far nicer doing it this way than by watering Jefferson's Tree of Liberty.
I assure you, as DOGE starts to look at the Pentagon, which has failed audits repeatedly, to 0 consequence, expect to hear all sorts of establishment Republican yelping.
Republicans didn't have any problem with that when they used it to blow Valerie Plame's cover in political retaliation. Somehow now that it's Musk's army of channers stealing our data and breaking the government payment systems _some_ people have decided the first amendment is optional I guess.