Two of Elon Musk’s staffers on the Social Security Administration’s so-called Government Effectiveness team were secretly in contact with a right-wing advocacy group trying to “overturn the election results,” according to the Justice Department.
A court filing in a long-running lawsuit against DOGE over Social Security shows that at least one DOGE staffer signed an agreement with the activist group that could involve providing Americans’ Social Security information so that the data can be matched to state voter registrations.
The employee signed a “voter data agreement” and delivered it to an unnamed organization in March 2025. “The advocacy group’s stated goal is to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states,” the Justice Department said.
Two staffers were referred to the Justice Department for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which broadly prohibits political activity by federal workers.
It’s unclear whether DOGE staff (two people were not identified in court documents) actually shared the data with the activist group, but the emails “suggest that DOGE team members may have been asked to assist the advocacy group with access.” [Social Security] The data matched the electoral roll,” the Ministry of Justice said.
Elon Musk-backed DOGE’s efforts to root out “fraud” within Social Security may also be investigating voter data in partnership with an activist group seeking to overturn election results (AFP via Getty Images)
The previously unreported disclosure comes on the heels of a months-long case alleging that the Donald Trump administration and DOGE illegally obtained sensitive information to support politically motivated fraud claims, including the president’s false claims that millions of dead people were receiving benefits as a result of Musk’s hacking of federal spending and the workforce.
Although the activist group is not named in the document, the sequence of events is similar to True the Vote’s public call for DOGE to investigate the nationwide voter registration system.
“We have received word that the message is being passed on,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote last year of the effort.
independent True the Vote has been asked to comment.
Tuesday’s filing also comes six months after the Supreme Court allowed DOGE access to Social Security data, pending a decision by a federal appeals court.
The latest filings also show DOGE shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers, potentially accessing sensitive information, activities that have been blocked by courts.
According to the Justice Department, members of the DOGE team used links to share data through the third-party server Cloudfare.
Cloudflare has not yet received approval from the agency, which still “cannot determine exactly what data [was] Sharing to Cloudflare or whether the data still exists on the server,” Shapiro said.
According to the Justice Department, some restricted data “originating from” Social Security’s system was shared with senior advisers on Musk’s team, although the agency maintained that DOGE “never accessed” Social Security’s “system of records.”
The Justice Department said Steve Davis, a Musk ally who had worked with DOGE, was included in a March 2025 email containing a password-protected file containing private information belonging to about 1,000 people in the Social Security system.
“It is unclear whether any [private information] were visited,” said Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro.
Musk has previously called the U.S. retirement plan a “Ponzi scheme” as he deploys DOGE across the government to cut spending and lay off workers (AFP via Getty Images)
Through the U.S. DOGE service, which Trump repurposed from the in-government technology group U.S. Government Services, Musk intends to uncover “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government and specifically target the nation’s largest retirement plans.
He called it a “Ponzi scheme.”
Two unions and an advocacy group sued to prevent DOGE from accessing private information such as tax records, Social Security numbers, banking information and other data, while an agency whistleblower claimed that DOGE could put the personal information of millions of Americans at risk of being compromised or hacked.
A disclosure filed last year with the government’s top ethics office said the DOGE team had uploaded copies of agency data on nearly every American to vulnerable cloud servers.
The data includes addresses, dates of birth and other sensitive information that can be used to steal identities.
A whistleblower disclosure by the agency’s now former chief data officer, Charles Borges, accuses DOGE personnel of copying a set of real-time data without any independent security or oversight.
His statement underscores previous warnings and lawsuits from regulators seeking to prevent a group of young engineers founded by Musk from wreaking havoc on federal agencies.
