DOGE Employees May Have Improperly Accessed Social Security Data With Aim to ‘Overturn Election Results’
Original article by republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The DOJ filing also appeared to corroborate claims that DOGE employees improperly tried to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information” on a third-party cloud platform.
The US Department of Justice acknowledged last week that two members of the Department of Government Efficiency may have improperly accessed Social Security data at the request of an unidentified organization whose goal is challenging US election results.
In a court filing dated January 16, the DOJ revealed that the unidentified organization last March reached out to two DOGE employees, who were working at the Social Security Administration (SSA), and requested that they “analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired.”
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“The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” the DOJ wrote. “In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group.”
The filing said that SSA has “not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group,” but that it had reviewed emails indicating that “DOGE team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”
The DOJ also revealed that the SSA in December 2025 made referrals of the two DOGE employees to the US Office of Special Counsel for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal government employees from using their positions for political purposes.
Politico, which first reported on the DOJ filing, noted that the disclosure “came as part of a list of ‘corrections’ to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data,” and also included revelations that “DOGE team members shared data on unapproved ‘third-party’ servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.”
The admission that DOGE employees shared data on a third-party server bolsters an explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August from former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges, who alleged that DOGE officials have been responsible for “serious data security lapses” that “risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”
At the heart of Borges’ complaint was an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”
Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the Borges complaint warned, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. In a worst-case scenario, the complaint said, the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.”
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