Staffers from billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” had unauthorized access to sensitive information inside the Social Security Administration and may even have used it in coordination with an outside advocacy group, the Trump administration said in court.
The Justice Department said in a Friday “notice of corrections for the record” that the administration had uncovered “communications, use of data, and other actions by the then-SSA DOGE Team that were potentially outside of SSA policy” or in violation of a court order stemming from unions’ efforts to block DOGE from accessing people’s data.
The filing reveals officials falsely stated in the court case that DOGE team members had no access to personal identifying information when they actually did in several specific instances. In one case, DOGE staffers shared with their affiliates in other agencies an email attachment containing approximately a thousand people’s names and addresses.
In another instance, an advocacy group asked two members of the DOGE squad for help analyzing voter rolls the group had acquired with an eye toward overturning election results in certain states. The filing says there’s no evidence the staffers shared data with the group.
“In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group,” the filing says. “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, but SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.”
The apparent breaches of SSA policy occurred last March, mostly before a federal court granted a request from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees to block DOGE access to SSA records. In June, the Supreme Court said DOGE could do what it wanted while the case made its way through the courts.
Musk initially boasted DOGE would find fraud in federal agencies and save the government as much as $2 trillion, but the effort fizzled last year and Musk had a dramatic falling-out with the president in June. Musk’s team at Social Security tried to impose anti-fraud measures, such as requiring more Social Security claimants to travel to field offices instead of filing claims over the phone, but backed off the initiatives in the face of public backlash.
In August, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer submitted a whistleblower complaint to Congress, accusing DOGE staffers of improperly making a live copy of Social Security’s most sensitive database and recklessly storing it 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,” the data officer, Charles Borges, said in his complaint.
In a statement on Tuesday, Debra Katz, an attorney for Borges, said in a statement that “this court filing validates the concerns he raised that the actions of DOGE officials compromised the data of Americans.”
The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.