Trump administration admits DOGE may have misused Americans’ Social Security data

Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may have accessed and shared Social Security numbers in an effort to help an advocacy group “overturn election results in certain States” last year, according to court documents. 

The revelation, which was first reported by Politico, comes as part of a series of corrections to previous testimony by top Social Security Administration officials related to legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. 

Neither the two DOGE members, nor the advocacy group, are named in the court documents.

In March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration (SSA) “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired,” said Elizabeth Shapiro, a Justice Department official, wrote in the court documents. 

“The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,” said Shapiro.

Shapiro wrote that after these communications, one of the DOGE members, as an SSA employee, signed and sent a “Voter Data Agreement” with the advocacy group. 

The DOGE members may have accessed private information that was ruled to be off-limits by a court at the time, and shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers. 

“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement’,” Shapiro wrote.

It’s unclear if the two DOGE members ended up sharing the data, according to Shapiro, but emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.” 

According to Shapiro, the SSA referred the two DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits federal workers from leveraging their official positions for political activities. 

Last year, a federal judge issued an order to block DOGe’s members access to SSA’s systems, which included SSNs, medical records, drivers’ license numbers, tax information, and other types of personal information. Later on, a SSA whistleblower alleged that DOGE uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server.