US officials admit DOGE may have misused Social Security data

Two members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been referred by the Social Security Administration (SSA) for potential violations of the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a US law that prohibits federal workers from leveraging their official positions for political activities. According to court documents written by Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro, the referral follows allegations that the DOGE members may have accessed and shared Social Security numbers last year to help an advocacy group. The news outlet Politico first reported the revelation, which occurred while the DOGE members were working at the SSA. Neither the two DOGE members nor the political advocacy group are named in the court documents.

The court documents suggest that the DOGE members may have accessed private information that was ruled off-limits by a court and shared that data on unapproved third-party servers. This development follows a separate allegation from an SSA whistleblower, who reported that DOGE uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server. These actions have led to allegations that the DOGE team misused Americans’ Social Security data during their time working at the agency.

The political advocacy group first contacted the two members of the DOGE team in March 2025. According to Shapiro, the group reached out with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. Following these communications, one of the DOGE members, acting as an SSA employee, signed and sent a “Voter Data Agreement” with the advocacy group. Shapiro, a Justice Department official, noted that “The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” She clarified that there is currently no evidence that other SSA employees outside of the involved DOGE team members knew about the communications or the “Voter Data Agreement.”

Why it matters

The revelations force corrections to previous testimony regarding the legal battles over DOGE’s access to sensitive government data, highlighting ongoing friction between the agency and its oversight.