Trump admin admits DOGE employees had access to off-limits Social Security data

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees working at the Social Security Administration (SSA) broke protocol, had more access to Americans’ sensitive data than previously disclosed, and were in contact with a political advocacy group hunting for election fraud, the Trump administration said in a recent court filing.

Justice Department officials told a federal court in Maryland that SSA had not fully complied with the court’s prior order, and had made statements to the court that it later revealed were not entirely true. The admission came in a document that was previously reported politicoTo correct the record in cases filed by unions representing government employees.

In a recent review, the SSA learned that two members of the DOGE team working at the agency were contacted by a political advocacy group in March 2025, “with a request to analyze state voter lists acquired by the advocacy group.” The filing said the group’s “stated purpose was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn the election results in certain states.” One of those DOGE members signed a “voter data agreement” with the group, which was not reviewed through the appropriate process for SSA data exchanges. The agency first learned that the settlement existed in November during a review, which was separate from the lawsuit at issue. In late December the SSA made two referrals under the Hatch Act – the law that prohibits government employees from engaging in political activities in their professional capacity. SSA and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The SSA, in its recent audit, also found that some of the earlier statements made in court by its then Chief Information Officer were not entirely true. The filing said the agency believed its statements were true at the time, and they are still largely accurate in many respects, although new information shows some inconsistencies. For example, the government stands by its earlier statement that the US Digital Service acquired by DOGE “never had access to SSA systems of record.” But, it was later revealed that a member of the SSA DOGE team had sent an encrypted, password-protected file to a then-senior advisor to DOGE, which the SSA believes contained the personal information of approximately 1,000 people. According to the filing, it remains “unclear” whether the password was ever given to the DOGE advisor.

DOGE employees were also briefly granted access to systems containing Americans’ personal information after the court issued a temporary restraining order, but the government says employees with that access never actually saw the personal information. It also clarified that a DOGE employee had discovered personal information on SSA systems in the morning, a day before the agency filed a declaration in court stating that DOGE employees’ access to such systems had been revoked.

DOGE employees in the SSA also shared data through a third-party server, Cloudflare, which is not approved to share data that way, the filing said. SSA still doesn’t know “what data was actually shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exists on the servers.”