Within weeks of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, members of Elon Musk’s Government Effectiveness team showed up at the Social Security Administration and began demanding access to documents. Those efforts didn’t go down well: Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King resigned after denying DOGE’s request for access to the agency’s sensitive government records.
Months later, Charles Borges, then the SSA’s chief data officer, filed a high-profile whistleblower complaint alleging that members of Operation DOGE uploaded copies of highly sensitive databases to vulnerable cloud servers, creating a “huge vulnerability.”
In fact, the New York Times reported that the database contained “an individual’s full name, address and date of birth, as well as other details that could be used to steal their identity, making it one of the most sensitive repositories of personal information in the United States.”
As the year unfolds, not only is the DOGE team facing new accusations of misusing Social Security data, but the Trump administration revealed in a court filing last week that that may have actually happened. Politico reports:
The Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court documents that two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were in secret contact with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn certain state election results,” and one of the members signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls.
Senior Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro said the SSA filed charges against the two DOGE employees for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
At this point, it’s worth emphasizing that the Trump administration has repeatedly said it doesn’t care at all about the Hatch Act, the federal ethics law designed to limit the political activity of federal workers, and views it as a joke.
In other words, even if DOGE members were found to have violated the Hatch Act in this case, the Trump administration would punish them, which seems highly unlikely. For that matter, even if there was reason to believe that the unnamed officials involved crossed other legal lines, it’s hard to believe that the highly politicized Justice Department would take such accusations seriously. In fact, even prosecutors who revisit the matter may be at risk of being fired, given the extent of corruption among leading judges.
But for those concerned about the integrity of the Social Security system, the allegations are extraordinary regardless of whether these individuals face any liability. Court documents describe incidents in which DOGE members shared Social Security data on unapproved third-party servers and may have also retrieved private information that they should not have accessed under existing court orders.
An Axios report describes the court filing as “a shocking admission by the Trump administration as it fights in court over DOGE’s right to access and use Social Security data to expose fraud and waste.”
White House and SSA officials did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment. Watch this space.
This article updates our previous coverage.
Post-Trump administration. Revealed to court: DOGE members may have misused social security data appeared first on MS NOW.
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