DOGE may have misused Social Security data, Trump administration says
The Justice Department has alerted a federal judge in Maryland that members of the Department of Government Efficiency working with the Social Security Administration may have misused data obtained from that agency.
In a court filing filed Friday, Justice Department officials said SSA officials told them that a recent review found that in March, after a Maryland judge’s temporary restraining order went into effect blocking DOGE’s access to the SSA, an anonymous political advocacy group contacted two members of the agency’s DOGE team “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired.”
The advocacy group’s stated goal, the Justice Department wrote, “was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states.”
Politico first reported on the Justice Department court filing.
The Justice Department said one of the two DOGE team members signed a “voter data agreement” with the advocacy group. This person sent a signed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, four days after the temporary restraining order was issued.
“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. They were also not aware of the ‘voter data agreement’. This agreement was not reviewed or approved under the agency’s data exchange procedures,” the filing states.
The Justice Department said it was unclear whether any personal information was provided to the political group.
SSA officials told the Justice Department that they first became aware of the situation during an independent review in November, the month DOGE ceased operations, and the Trump administration made two Hatch Act referrals to the Office of Special Counsel in late December.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander of Maryland signed a temporary restraining order in March blocking DOGE from accessing “sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information.” The order came after a government employee union filed a lawsuit in February seeking to block billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE from Social Security, arguing it violated privacy laws.
“The DOGE team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition in SSA, looking for a fraud outbreak, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote.
“He initiated a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” while potentially endangering the private information of millions of people, she added.
In June, the Supreme Court overturned the ban order and allowed DOGE members to access Social Security data. The DOGE team argued last year that it needed access to Social Security Administration records “to modernize technology” and “to maximize efficiency and productivity.”
A whistleblower report filed in August accused DOGE staff of mismanaging Social Security data by placing millions of people’s data “in a cloud environment that circumvents oversight.”
In Friday’s filing, the Justice Department acknowledged that some data had not been processed properly.
“The SSA has learned that beginning March 7, 2025 and continuing through March 17 (approximately one week before [temporary restraining order] was seized), members of SSA’s DOGE team were using links to share data via the third-party server “Cloudflare”. Cloudflare is not approved for SSA data storage and, when used in this manner, is outside of SSA security protocols,” the filing states.
“SSA was unaware, until its recent review, that DOGE team members were using Cloudflare during this time. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA was unable to determine exactly what data was being shared with Cloudflare or whether the data still exists on the server,” the Justice Department added.
