Five months ago, the public first learned about Charles Borges, then the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, and the remarkable whistleblower complaint he filed. According to his dramatic accusations, members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operation had uploaded a copy of a highly sensitive database to a vulnerable cloud server, creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
The New York Times reported soon after that the database in question included “individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.”
In theory, Borges, a decorated military veteran, would have been rewarded for coming forward to shine a light on the underlying risks. In practice, he quickly found himself out of work. He told NBC News in September that after reporting his concerns to management, he “suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable.”
It was around this time that he submitted his “involuntary resignation.”
In August, after Borges blew the whistle, the Trump administration said he was wrong. This week, however, the Department of Justice implicitly acknowledged in a court filing that he was right, although it did not refer to the former chief data officer by name.
So where does that leave Borges, five months later? The Washington Post highlighted a quote from his lawyer: ‘Having admitted what Mr. Borges has said all along, the Social Security Administration must take appropriate action to protect Americans’ data, and Mr. Borges must get justice for the violation of his rights,’ Borges’s attorney Debra Katz said in a statement Tuesday. For now, it’s an open question as to what “getting justice” might entail, even as the whistleblower appears to be moving forward on a new career path: In November, Borges announced that he’d run a Democratic state Senate campaign in his home state of Maryland. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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