DOGE employees may have misused social security data, Trump administration tells court

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 by 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.’”

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 assist the advocacy group by 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.

Whistblower 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 whistleblower complaint that DOGE employees put the records of more than 300 million Americans at risk by creating a copy of the data in a vulnerable cloud computing server.

What happened to DOGE

The DOGE, which was headed by Elon Musk, was one of the most high-profile and controversial undertakings of the second Trump administration.

Musk claimed DOGE could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, roughly one-third of all government spending, by 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.