DOJ: DOGE Workers May Have Misused Social Security Data

Federal officials say a tiny team inside the controversial Elon Musk-linked Department of Government Efficiency may have stepped over the line with Social Security data, NBC News reports. In a new court filing, the Justice Department told a federal judge in Maryland it was alerted that two members of the Social Security Administration's DOGE team were contacted in March by an unnamed political advocacy group looking for help combing through state voter rolls. The group's stated goal, DOJ said, was to hunt for voter fraud and try to undo election results in certain states. One DOGE staffer allegedly signed a "Voter Data Agreement" with the group on March 24—four days after the judge had issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE's access to Social Security records.

The agreement allegedly involved matching SSA data to voter rolls, but the DOJ says it's not clear whether any SSA personal data actually reached the outside group. It also says there's no evidence other SSA employees were aware of the contacts or the agreement, which never went through normal data-sharing approvals. SSA officials only discovered the episode during an unrelated review in November, the month DOGE shut down. The Trump administration later made two Hatch Act referrals to the Office of Special Counsel in December; Politico, which was first to report the story, says those referrals were for the two DOGE employees involved in the SSA allegations.

The filing also confirms separate security lapses. DOJ said SSA recently learned that from March 7 to March 17, DOGE team members used links to share SSA data via Cloudflare, a third-party service not authorized to store Social Security information and outside the agency's security rules. Because the data passed through an external server, SSA says it cannot yet determine what information was uploaded or whether it remains there. The disclosures come after a whistleblower alleged in August that DOGE had placed millions of records in a cloud setup that evaded oversight, and months after the Supreme Court reversed the lower-court order that had briefly blocked DOGE's access to sensitive SSA files. The DOJ filing also reveals a senior adviser to Musk and DOGE's team was copied on an email including private information from SSA systems, but it's not clear if he accessed it or what exactly it contained.