How DOGE improperly accessed and shared Social Safety information : NPR

For a lot of the final yr, staffers who had been initially a part of the Division of Authorities Effectivity effort improperly accessed and shared delicate private information on hundreds of thousands of People. The Trump administration hasn’t been capable of reply how a lot information is in danger, what it was used for or why its unprecedented efforts to consolidate information are wanted.

These questions deepened final week, when the Social Safety Administration stated it found DOGE staff on the company secretly and improperly shared delicate private information final yr, however as soon as once more cannot confirm the extent of the violations. The admission got here in a court docket submitting final Friday, Jan. 16, that made quite a few corrections to testimony given by high company officers final yr in a lawsuit alleging that DOGE was illegally accessing Social Safety information.

Within the submitting, Justice Division attorneys representing the Social Safety Administration wrote that two SSA DOGE staff had been referred to a federal watchdog to find out whether or not they violated a regulation barring authorities staff from utilizing their job for political exercise, generally known as the Hatch Act.

The unnamed staff secretly conferred with a political advocacy group a few request to match Social Safety information with state voter rolls to “discover proof of voter fraud and to overturn election ends in sure States,” the submitting stated. It stays unclear whether or not any information really went to this group.

“Based mostly on its evaluation of information obtained throughout or after October 2025, SSA recognized communications, use of knowledge, and different actions by the then-SSA DOGE Crew that had been doubtlessly outdoors of SSA coverage and/or noncompliant with the District Courtroom’s March 20, 2025, momentary restraining order,” DOJ attorneys wrote.

DOGE workforce members additionally circumvented IT guidelines to improperly share information on outdoors servers, despatched a password-protected file of personal information to DOGE associates outdoors the company and had the power to see information even after a decide briefly halted entry.

In acknowledging the breaches, the Social Safety Administration additionally repeatedly indicated it nonetheless has little information of what information was shared and affords little perception into how these incidents occurred.

Plaintiffs within the lawsuit towards the Social Safety Administration have requested the 2 courts at the moment contemplating the case to include the “brazen misconduct” documented within the corrected testimony.”The unauthorized launch of People’ private information represents a profound violation of public belief,” stated Richard Fiesta, government director of the Alliance for Retired People, which is a plaintiff within the case together with unions. “Retirees, staff, and households rely on the Social Safety Administration to guard their most confidential data. Now we have a proper to know what occurred to our data, who had entry to it, and what it was used for.”

The revelation bolsters the claims of whistleblower Chuck Borges, who alleged that DOGE staffers repeatedly violated inside SSA insurance policies and federal legal guidelines, together with a call to repeat a dataset of greater than 300 million People’ delicate data right into a digital database with out following required safety protocols.

“It is disappointing to be confirmed proper,” Borges, who was the chief information officer for SSA till his resignation in August, advised NPR in response to the fling. (He has additionally filed a separate criticism alleging that he was retaliated towards for elevating considerations and was compelled to resign to uphold his moral and authorized obligations.) “Sure, it is validating, nevertheless it’s additionally disappointing as a result of it places American public information in danger.”

He stated the submitting must be “a wake-up name to Congress” to research what information was accessed and what it was used for. An NPR evaluation of the filings and different statements made by DOGE associates shines much more mild on how Social Safety information was used to advance doubtful claims of fraud which have influenced key Trump administration insurance policies on immigration, advantages and election safety.

This consists of the Division of Justice suing 25 states, primarily run by Democrats, for refusing to show over nonpublic voter rolls that include delicate information, together with Social Safety numbers. These states and voting rights teams argue that the Trump administration demand violates federal privateness legal guidelines and raises questions on what the info shall be used for.

“This submitting reveals that the federal government’s efforts are actually designed not for what they are saying they’re — to implement federal regulation — however to chase down conspiracy theories about election fraud,” stated Brent Ferguson, director of strategic litigation at Marketing campaign Authorized Middle, a nonprofit authorized heart that has intervened in among the DOJ lawsuits towards states to argue that the demand for delicate voter information is just not lawful.

The Social Safety Administration didn’t reply to NPR’s requests for added data.

How DOGE shortly obtained — and misused — delicate information

Within the first month of President Trump’s return to workplace, the Division of Authorities Effectivity effort despatched representatives into federal companies and demanded unprecedented entry to information. On the Social Safety Administration, that included roughly 10 folks tasked with reviewing what the Trump administration stated was huge fraud.

On Feb. 21, a gaggle of plaintiffs filed the lawsuit arguing that DOGE’s efforts to acquire Social Safety information violated the regulation and jeopardized the safekeeping of extremely confidential data the company retains.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk led the casual Division of Authorities Effectivity.

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That they had motive to be involved: In accordance with the court docket filings made final week, on March 3 a DOGE workforce member despatched an “encrypted and password-protected file” with the names and addresses of roughly 1,000 folks to the Division of Homeland Safety, copying DOGE adviser Steve Davis and a DOGE Division of Labor worker. “Regardless of ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Info Workplace, SSA has been unable to entry the file to find out precisely what it contained,” the DOJ submitting admits.

From March 7 to 17, the brand new submitting acknowledged that SSA DOGE staff had been utilizing hyperlinks to share information by means of an unapproved third-party server. The company additionally stated it was unable to find out what information was shared or if it nonetheless exists, whereas additionally standing by earlier testimony that IT safeguards and safety protocols guarantee no outdoors servers are built-in with SSA methods and that entry to information is managed and tracked. None of that improper exercise was publicly identified on the time. However on March 20, a federal decide discovered there was sufficient different proof out there to briefly block DOGE’s work, calling the just about unfettered entry to information “tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”

Borges’ whistleblower disclosure alleged that the next day, DOGE officers presumably circumvented the momentary restraining order by directing profession workers to revive entry for 2 DOGE staffers and provides them much more privileges than earlier than. These privileges had been apparently reduce off by the tip of March 24. Final week’s court docket submitting appeared to not less than partially corroborate that declare by providing a “clarification” that one DOGE staffer was looking the company’s grasp database of all Social Safety numbers the morning of March 24, the identical day officers advised the court docket all entry had been terminated.

On the similar time, different federal courts additionally moved to revoke improper DOGE information entry on the Treasury Division, Workplace of Personnel Administration and Division of Training. A few of the similar DOGE staff on the Social Safety Administration had been additionally given extra entry to methods at different federal companies.

Actual information, doubtful fraud claims

One motive DOGE and the Trump administration sought sweeping entry to the federal government’s information shops was to seek out alleged voter fraud, mirrored in a collection of strikes made in March 2025.

Aram Moghaddassi, a DOGE engineer on the time, was granted entry to a Division of Homeland Safety information system generally known as SAVE that’s used to test foreign-born people’ citizenship and immigration standing whereas he was working concurrently at DHS and SSA.

“This entry is completely essential to get detailed immigration standing for non-citizen SSNs to detect fraud and improper funds,” Moghaddassi wrote to SSA officers on March 15, 2025.

Later that week, Moghaddassi wrote to the deputy chief of workers for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis from a DHS electronic mail account asking for assist with the state’s voting information, in response to public information obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight.

“We’re engaged on SAVE entry for Florida regulation enforcement now,” he wrote. “On our finish, Florida voter registration and voting information could be useful instantly to test for voter fraud.”

Moghaddassi didn’t reply to requests for remark from NPR.

Across the similar time, in response to the brand new disclosure from the Social Safety Administration, two unnamed DOGE Social Safety staff had been approached by an unnamed political advocacy group earlier within the month with a request to research state voter rolls with a purpose to “discover proof of voter fraud and to overturn election ends in sure States.”

One of many DOGE staffers signed a “Voter Knowledge Settlement” and despatched it to the advocacy group on March 24, allegedly with out the information of or approval of anybody else on the Social Safety Administration. The submitting stated the company has not but seen proof that information was shared.

Investor Antonio Gracias at a marketing campaign occasion in Wisconsin final yr. As a part of the DOGE effort, Gracias labored on the Social Safety Administration and used among the company’s information to make spurious claims about voter rolls.

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The following day, March 25, Trump introduced an government order directing the Division of Homeland Safety and DOGE to “evaluation every State’s publicly out there voter registration listing” and directed the Social Safety Administration to take “all acceptable motion” to make SSA databases with related data accessible to election officers verifying voter registrations.

Within the following days, Antonio Gracias, a non-public fairness investor and ally of DOGE chief Elon Musk who was working with DOGE within the Social Safety Administration, would push spurious claims about noncitizen voting and the SSA enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE program, a course of that streamlines the Social Safety card course of for sure classes of immigrants.

Courtroom filings on the time indicated Gracias’ work was purported to concentrate on demise information and decreasing improper funds. The momentary restraining order was additionally nonetheless in impact, elevating questions on the time about how he acquired that information.

Gracias was copied on Moghaddassi’s request for entry to SAVE information, and at a March 30 rally in Wisconsin with Musk, claimed {that a} pattern evaluation of Social Safety information with voter rolls discovered noncitizens who had been registered and solid a poll.

Gracias didn’t reply to interview requests from NPR through his firm.

In a collection of media appearances within the following weeks, Gracias gave shifting numbers of alleged noncitizens found by DOGE, from “properly over a thousand” who voted in a single state to “hundreds” in a handful of states. However finally, he advised reporters on the finish of April that DOGE had referred simply 57 circumstances for prosecution, and that they “could or could not have voted.”

Voting consultants say the kind of information cross-checking Gracias and the unnamed political advocacy group search to do is error-prone and legally questionable.

Gracias advised a podcast that his workforce was taking a look at public voter registration lists, however these usually don’t embody full or partial Social Safety numbers, making information matching a lot much less exact.

“DOGE has repeatedly made huge information errors,” David Bier, the director of immigration research on the libertarian Cato Institute, advised NPR final yr. “I’ve some doubts that they’ve found something greater than possibly just a few poor authorities information high quality monitoring or they do not perceive the info they’re taking a look at.”

Formal ties with activists targeted on voter fraud allegations

The Trump administration declined to determine the political advocacy group that two DOGE staffers communicated with in a approach that doubtlessly violated the Hatch Act. However the request aligns with the targets of a number of outstanding election denial teams which have referred to as for the Trump administration to make use of its information to power states to take away ineligible voters from their rolls.

In early March, one such group, True the Vote, made public “An Attraction to DOGE: Audit the Voter Rolls” in a publication and on social media posts on X that tagged Musk and DOGE’s account.

“Now we have already aggregated and normalized state voter roll information, cross-referenced towards a number of sources, and made our code out there on GitHub for transparency,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote. “By combining DOGE’s entry to federal databases with our assembled voter roll data, we will effectively determine discrepancies and work towards a cleaner, extra dependable election system.”

The publication and posts on X observe, “We have acquired phrase that this message is being carried ahead. Godspeed.”

True the Vote filed quite a few lawsuits in swing states gained by former President Joe Biden in 2020 making unsupported claims of election fraud and performed a job in supplying information for the 2000 Mules documentary that was later pulled from the market and resulted in an apology from its creator, Dinesh D’Souza, for falsely accusing a Georgia man of voter fraud.

Engelbrecht and True the Vote didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark from NPR.

Federal officers have additionally held conferences with activists who had been concerned in serving to Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election outcomes. In June, a DHS official gave a web-based briefing to activist Cleta Mitchell’s group, Election Integrity Community, about modifications the Trump administration was making to the SAVE information system to determine noncitizens on state voter rolls — earlier than particulars had been shared publicly.

Different figures who had been concerned in makes an attempt to overturn the 2020 election outcomes now serve within the administration. They embody Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey, whose flawed analysis into the 2020 election was cited by Trump throughout his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021. She is now serving because the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity on the Division of Homeland Safety. Former Georgia Republican Occasion official Marci McCarthy, who pushed debunked claims in regards to the state’s voting machines, is the director of public affairs for CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company.

For his half, the president continues to repeat the false declare that the 2020 election was rigged — as lately as Wednesday throughout his speech on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos — and stated “folks will quickly be prosecuted for what they did.”

DOGE’s information has pushed key Trump insurance policies

The unprecedented push to consolidate information entry by DOGE, the Trump administration’s use of that information to justify coverage modifications, and what judges have stated to be violations of privateness legal guidelines, extends past voting and Social Safety.

Within the yr since Trump returned to workplace, DOGE has funneled disparate information from federal companies in service of the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement crackdown.

The administration’s efforts embody taking steps to share delicate Medicaid and IRS information with the Division of Homeland Safety (although a federal court docket has blocked most IRS information sharing for now), in addition to overhauling the SAVE information system right into a centralized nationwide citizenship instrument that hyperlinks to Social Safety Administration information and is at the moment being expanded to incorporate driver’s license data. Borges, the SSA whistleblower, stated after the Supreme Courtroom lifted the ban on DOGE entry on the Social Safety Administration on June 6, DOGE staff transferred a stay copy of the nation’s Social Safety database right into a cloud server with out unbiased safety controls, and Moghaddassi licensed its operation.

Borges resigned on Aug. 29. Quickly after, Moghaddassi was publicly introduced because the company’s co-chief data officer. As lately as Jan. 18, he was listed because the SSA’s consultant to the Chief Info Officers Council, however his title has since been faraway from that web site.

By mid-August, SAVE was up to date to permit officers to test whether or not persons are residents or listed as deceased in federal information utilizing title, date of beginning and simply the final 4 digits of a Social Safety quantity. DHS has inspired states to make use of SAVE to determine noncitizens on their voter rolls. NPR has reported cases of U.S. residents being erroneously flagged by the instrument since its rollout.

As for Borges, he hopes the American folks will get full solutions about what occurred with their Social Safety information. He advised NPR that the info the company maintains “is a really, very full document of everyone’s private data” that may embody clues to assist identification thieves and unhealthy actors. “And in order that, if it had been to get out, it might be a catastrophic threat to the American public.” 

He added, “The cavalier approach wherein they’re treating this information is truthfully fairly appalling to me.”