Two DOGE team members at Social Security Administration contacted outside group seeking to overturn election results

In Mar. 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of the SSA's DOGE team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The group's stated aim was to 'find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,' according to Justice Department official ESElizabeth Shapiro in a Jan. 16, 2026 court filing. One DOGE team member signed a 'Voter Data Agreement' in his capacity as an SSA employee and sent it to the advocacy group on Mar. 24, 2025, just four days after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE's access to SSA systems.

Email communications reviewed by the SSA suggest that DOGE team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to voter rolls, but the SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group. The SSA determined this during an unrelated review in Nov. 2025, after DOGE operations ended. At this time, there's no evidence that SSA employees outside the two DOGE team members were aware of the communications with the advocacy group or the Voter Data Agreement.

The SSA referred both DOGE employees to the Office of Special Counsel in late Dec. 2025 for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty. The Hatch Act broadly prohibits federal workers from using their official positions or government resources for political purposes. Neither the two employees nor the advocacy group are named in court documents, though the sequence of events bears similarity to True the Vote's public appeals to DOGE to investigate voter registration systems nationwide.

The court filing also revealed that DOGE team members were using Cloudflare, an unapproved third-party server, to share SSA data from Mar. 7 through Mar. 17, 2025 (approximately one week before the temporary restraining order was entered). Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols. The SSA didn't know until its recent review that DOGE team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, the SSA hasn't been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.

SDSteve Davis, an EMElon Musk ally who worked with DOGE, was included in a Mar. 2025 email that contained a password-protected file with private information belonging to roughly 1,000 people in Social Security systems. It's unknown at this time whether any private information was accessed. This revelation contradicts earlier SSA statements asserting the agency had 'IT safeguards to ensure no private or commercial servers have been integrated with SSA systems.'

A whistleblower complaint filed by CBCharles Borges, the agency's now-former chief data officer, in Aug. 2025 accused DOGE personnel of uploading a copy of agency data for virtually every American to a vulnerable cloud server. The data included addresses, birth dates, and other sensitive information that could be used to steal identities. Borges accused DOGE personnel of copying a live set of data without any independent security or oversight measures in place. Should hackers gain access, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and potentially require the government to give every American a new Social Security number at great cost.

U.S. District Judge EHEllen Hollander in 🦀Maryland signed a temporary restraining order on Mar. 20, 2025, blocking DOGE from accessing 'sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information' after a government employees union filed a lawsuit in Feb. 2025. Hollander wrote that 'The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.'

Through the U.S. DOGE Service, which Trump repurposed from the government's in-house tech team U.S. Government Service, EMElon Musk intended to find 'waste, fraud, and abuse' in the federal government and specifically targeted the Social Security Administration. Musk had previously labeled the nation's retirement program a 'Ponzi scheme' as he deployed DOGE across the government to cut spending and fire workers. Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued to block DOGE's access to private information, such as tax records, Social Security Numbers, banking information, and other data.