Within weeks of Donald Trump’s second inaugural, members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team showed up at the Social Security Administration and started demanding access to files. The efforts were not well received: Michelle King, in her capacity as the acting Social Security commissioner, resigned after refusing a DOGE request to access the agency’s sensitive government records.
Months later, Charles Borges, who served at the time as the SSA chief data officer, filed a remarkable whistleblower complaint that alleged members of the DOGE operation had uploaded a copy of a highly sensitive database to a vulnerable cloud server, creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
In fact, The New York Times reported 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.”
As this year gets underway, not only is the DOGE team facing new accusations about the misuse of Social Security data, but the Trump administration revealed in a court filing last week that this might actually have happened. Politico reported:
Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to ‘overturn election results in certain states,’ and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
At this point, it’s worth emphasizing that the Trump White House has repeatedly indicated that it simply doesn’t care about the Hatch Act, a federal ethics law intended to limit the political activities of federal workers, and has treated it like the punchline to a joke.
Put another way, even if DOGE members are found to have violated the Hatch Act in this case, it would be up to the Trump administration to punish them, and that seems extraordinarily unlikely. For that matter, even if there were reason to believe the unnamed officials in question crossed other legal lines, it’s hard to believe that the hyperpoliticized Justice Department would take such allegations seriously. Indeed, prosecutors who even took a second look at the matter might risk getting fired, given the degree to which Main Justice has been corrupted.
But for those concerned with the integrity of the Social Security system, the allegations are extraordinary, whether or not these individuals face any accountability. The court filing describes incidents in which members of DOGE shared Social Security data on unapproved third-party servers and might also have retrieved private information they weren’t supposed to be able to access under an existing court order. An Axios report characterized the court filing as “a stunning admission from the Trump administration, after it battled in court over DOGE’s rights to access and use Social Security data as part of its effort to uncover fraud and waste.” The White House and SSA officials did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment. Watch this space. 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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