The Trump administration has finally admitted in a federal court filing that employees within Elon Musk’s supposed cost-cutting operation, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), accessed and improperly shared sensitive social security data belonging to Americans, as per The Guardian. The Department of Justice submitted the filing, revealing that a Doge team member signed a secret data-sharing agreement with an unidentified political advocacy group.
The stated goal of Doge was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in specific states before it vanished into thin air, not even one year since its inception. Even worse, the Social Security Administration (SSA) didn’t know this agreement existed until they found it during an unrelated review. The agency is now referring two potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity, to the Office of Special Counsel for investigation.
Doge members apparently shared data with each other using Cloudflare, which is an unauthorized third-party server. The SSA is now scrambling because they can’t figure out exactly what information was transmitted or if it’s still sitting out there on that server.
The filing lays out some major security failures that should concern anyone who values their privacy
Officials do believe that in one instance, a Doge staffer sent an encrypted, password-protected file to Steve Davis, a senior adviser to the operation, that contained the names and addresses of about 1,000 people derived from social security systems. Unfortunately, officials haven’t been able to access the file to confirm its contents, which is a terrible look for data security and transparency.
The filing stated that the SSA identified “communications, use of data, and other actions by the then-SSA DOGE Team that were potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant with the District Court’s March 20, 2025, temporary restraining order.”
This admission is a complete 180 for social security officials. This past August, after former chief data officer Charles Borges warned Congress that Doge was storing Americans’ data in an unsafe environment, an SSA spokesperson, Nick Perrine, insisted the agency was “not aware of any compromise to this environment.” The new filing proves that brave whistleblower was absolutely right all along.
Doge was already in hot water after unions and an advocacy group filed a lawsuit trying to stop the operation from accessing sensitive data. A federal judge had placed a temporary restraining order on the operation, noting that Doge “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.”
Even after the court order, one Doge team member conducted searches of personally identifiable information on the morning of March 24, 2025, with the final search happening around 9:30 AM before full access was finally terminated by noon that day.
It’s important to remember that Doge was launched by Elon Musk at the start of the Trump administration with huge promises to find massive social security fraud. Despite all the controversy and these data compromises, the filings show the operation ultimately failed to identify any widespread waste, fraud, or abuse within the retirement and disability programs the agency administers.
Published: Jan 22, 2026 01:00 pm