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TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CONCEDES DOGE TEAM MAY HAVE MISUSED SOCIAL
SECURITY DATA  
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Kyle Cheney
January 20, 2026
Politico
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_ Some DOGE personnel had more access to data than previously
acknowledged, according to a court filing. _

Elon Musk shows off a shirt that says "DOGE" as he walks on the South
Lawn of the white House after stepping off Marine One upon arrival to
the White House in Washington, DC on March 9, 2025., Oliver
Contreras/AFP via Getty Image

 

Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security
Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking
to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed
an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to
match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly
disclosed court papers
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Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA
referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch
Act, which bars government employees from using their official
positions for political purposes.

Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as
part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials
during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social
Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on
unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private
information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.

 

 

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to
undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended
to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and
modernize the agency’s technology.

“SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were
made, and they are largely still accurate,” Shapiro wrote, adding
“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, a longtime DOJ veteran, said it’s not yet clear whether
either of the two DOGE team members — who are not identified in her
filing – actually shared data with the advocacy group, which is also
unidentified. But she said 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.”

The White House and SSA officials did not immediately respond to
requests for comment.

Shapiro also revealed that Steve Davis, a senior adviser to Musk and
DOGE’s team, was copied on a March 3, 2025 email that included a
password-protected file containing private information of about 1,000
people contained in Social Security systems. It’s unclear, she said,
whether Davis ever accessed the file. And Shapiro said current SSA
employees have been unable to access the file to determine precisely
what it contained.

Though SSA stands by its claim that DOGE “never had access to SSA
systems of record,” its possible that some of the restricted data
“derived from” Social Security systems was sent to Davis, she
said.

Davis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Also among the corrections: DOJ revealed that a DOGE team member was
briefly granted access to private Social Security profiles even after
a court prohibited it. Shapiro said the access was never
“utilized.” And in another instance, a DOGE team member had access
for two months to a “call center profile” that contained private
information.

“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was
accessed,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s
DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the
third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”

“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in
this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” Shapiro
indicated. “SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE
Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because
Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine
exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still
exist on the server.”

* Elon Musk
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* DOGE
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* Social Security
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* election tampering
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* voter rolls
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* Social Security data
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