DOGE might have misused Social Security data, Trump administration admits

Date:
Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:05:00 +0000

Description:
Employees might have shared SSNs to help an advocacy group try to overturn election results in certain States.

FULL STORY

The US Department of Justice has confirmed in a court filing that members of Elon Musks "DOGE" were secretly in contact with an advocacy group seeking to overturn election results in certain states - and one such member went as far as to sign an agreement which may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls.

The DOGE employees in question have been referred for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their
positions for political purposes.

It is said the political advocacy group, which is not named in the court documents, approached the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration (SSA), and requested to analyze state voter rolls with a goal to finding evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States, a Justice Department official confirmed.

Unapproved third party servers

The data accessed by DOGE staff might have been private information, which
was ruled to be off-limits by a court, and was potentially shared through unapproved third party servers - Cloudflare.

"SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate," the Justice Department official 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."

It was also revealed a senior adviser to Musk and the DOGE team, Steve Davis, was "copied on a March 3, 2025 email that included a password-protected file containing private information of about 1,000 people contained in Social Security systems," Politico reports.

It is as yet unknown whether the private information was accessed, or whether this was utilized by the department.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/doge-might-have-misused-social-security -data-trump-administration-admits

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