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New reporting that DOGE abused Americans’ private Social Security data should come as no surprise. We have warned from the beginning that DOGE had no business accessing this data and that no good could come of it. Last June, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court order that barred DOGE from accessing Americans’ Social Security data. This gave DOGE carte blanche to misuse Americans’ personal information that it never should have had in the first place.
Now, the Trump administration is attempting to single-out and scapegoat two DOGE staffers because of the latest breach. No doubt, any DOGE employees who misused Americans’ personal Social Security data (in this case, reportedly by promising to share it with a third-party in order to ‘overturn election results’) should be held accountable for their actions. But this reported malfeasance was enabled by a culture created by the Trump Administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE soon after the president took office — a culture of recklessly interfering in the legitimate functions of the federal government with questionable intent and zero accountability.
ProPublica
DOGE’s supposed mission, as directed by the White House, was to root out alleged ‘fraud’ at the Social Security Administration. It found no significant fraud but hobbled SSA’s ability to serve the 70 million people who rely on Social Security — by slashing the workforce and erecting new hurdles for beneficiaries simply trying to access their earned benefits.
“The reported abuses of Social Security data are part of this relentless attack on the functioning of the Social Security Administration, under the phony cover of hunting for ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ at what was among the most efficient federal agencies,” says NCPSSM president and CEO Max Richtman.
This week’s reports of DOGE malfeasance are not isolated. In August, DOGE team members were found to have uploaded the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans to a ‘vulnerable cloud server’ without any credible explanation.
The disclosure mirrors what Chuck Borges, the former chief data officer at the SSA, said in his whistleblower complaint, warning that the private data of more than 300 million Americans was at risk after DOGE employees uploaded a copy of the Social Security Administration’s database to a cloud environment. – MarketWatch, 1/21/26
“We stand with Congressmen John Larson (D-CT) and Richard Neal (D-MA) in demanding ‘a full criminal investigation into DOGE leaks of private Social Security data to Elon Musk’s associates and immediate congressional action to safeguard Americans’ privacy,'” says Richtman.
Elon Musk recently donated $10M to Kentucky GOP Senate candidate & Trump supporter Nate Morris (AP/Mark Humphrey)
“If people can’t trust Social Security to keep their privacy inviolate, confidence in the entire program may well be shattered,” writes L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik. “Sadly, that would be consistent with conservatives’ long war against this most popular and important government program, but maybe that’s what Trump has wanted all along.”
It is probably not coincidental that the two DOGE staffers reportedly promised to share Social Security data with an unnamed political advocacy group, ostensibly to challenge election results. Their ultimate boss, Donald Trump, is still peddling the lie that he won the 2020 elections; their former boss and ex-leader of DOGE, Elon Musk, just donated a whopping $10 million to the campaign of a Trump-supporting Senate candidate in Kentucky, who was endorsed by the late Charlie Kirk last year. (Musk, the world’s richest man, was the biggest donor in the 2024 election cycle — spending $300 million, mostly on behalf of Trump.)
The Social Security Administration claims to have had no knowledge of the data abuse by DOGE employees. The Department of Justice refuses to investigate DOGE, only the two employees in question. Meanwhile, anyone with a Social Security number has reason to be alarmed that their data has been leveraged by the unholy convergence of DOGE’s phony efficiency campaign and the radical political agenda of Trump and Musk.
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Listen to our podcast interview with former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley on the Trump administration’s devastating actions at the Social Security Administration.