The Trump administration just admitted in court that Elon Musk’s DOGE staffers had unauthorized access to sensitive Social Security data—and may have even coordinated with an outside advocacy group trying to overturn election results.
HuffPost reports that in a Friday “notice of corrections for the record,” the Justice Department revealed that officials had previously lied to the court, claiming DOGE team members had no access to personal identifying information. They did. In several specific instances.
THE DETAILS: In one case, DOGE staffers shared an email attachment containing approximately a thousand people’s names and addresses with their affiliates at other agencies. But it gets worse.
An advocacy group approached two DOGE members for help analyzing voter rolls the group had acquired “with an eye toward overturning election results in certain states.” One of those DOGE staffers actually signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with the advocacy group—in his official capacity as an SSA employee.
The filing states: “Email communications reviewed by SSA suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.” The administration claims they haven’t found evidence data was actually shared, but the fact that this coordination happened at all is extraordinary.
OF COURSE: This isn’t the first warning about DOGE’s recklessness with Americans’ most sensitive information. Back in August, the Social Security Administration’s own chief data officer, Charles Borges, filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress accusing DOGE staffers of making a live copy of Social Security’s most sensitive database and storing it recklessly on a cloud server.
“Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost,” Borges warned.
His attorney, Debra Katz, said Tuesday that “this court filing validates the concerns he raised that the actions of DOGE officials compromised the data of Americans.”
ZOOM OUT: Remember when Musk boasted DOGE would root out fraud and save the government $2 trillion? The whole operation fizzled last year, culminating in a dramatic falling-out between Musk and Trump in June.
But the damage was already done. These breaches mostly occurred in March—before a federal court even granted a union’s request to block DOGE access to SSA records. By June, the Supreme Court said DOGE could do what it wanted while litigation continued.
WHY IT MATTERS: The Social Security Administration holds the most sensitive personal data the government collects on nearly every American. DOGE staffers—many of them young tech workers with minimal government experience—were given access to this information and apparently used it in ways that violated agency policy and potentially a court order. One of them signed an agreement with an outside group trying to challenge election results.
The administration’s own court filing now confirms what whistleblowers and critics warned about from the start: this was never about efficiency. It was about access—and it was handled with stunning carelessness.