DOGE employees may have misused social security data, Trump adminration tells court | World News

FILE – Elon Musk attends a memorial for conservative activ Charlie Kirk, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2025, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

Two employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have misused and shared social security data of Americans to unauthorised parties, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a court filing. According to the DOJ filing on Friday, two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Adminration may have violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

What DOJ said

Elizabeth Shapiro, a top DOJ official, told a federal judge in Maryland that two DOGE employees were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states.”

Politico, which first reported the development, said that one of the employees signed an agreement with the group allowing the use of Social Security data to match state voter rolls.

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernise the agency’s technology.

“SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate,” Shapiro wrote, adding, “At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement.’”Story continues below this ad

Shapiro said it’s not yet clear whether either of the two DOGE team members — who are not identified in her filing – actually shared data with the advocacy group, which is also unidentified. But she said emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to ass the advocacy group accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The SSA only became aware of the agreement in November, when it was doing a review of internal records.

Whblower warned about data leak risk

According to a CNN report, Charles Borges, who had served as Social Security’s chief data officer between late January and late August, warned in a whleblower complaint that DOGE employees put the records of more than 300 million Americans at risk creating a copy of the data in a vulnerable cloud computing server.

What happened to DOGE

The DOGE, which was headed Elon Musk, was one of the most high-profile and controversial undertakings of the second Trump adminration.Story continues below this ad

Musk claimed DOGE could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, roughly one-third of all government spending, reducing wasteful spending. But Musk stepped down from DOGE ahead of schedule in May 2025, and in November, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor confirmed that the agency was no longer a centralised entity.