Doing The Right Thing

     From the Washington Post:

Charles Borges, then chief data officer for the vast Social Security Administration, was alarmed last when he learned that members of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service had copied a mainframe database containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including names, birthdays, addresses and more.

The discovery prompted Borges to file a whistleblower complaint in August, telling Congress and the Office of Special Counsel that the cloud server where the database was uploaded had little oversight and was vulnerable to attacks by bad actors. 

The result: He said the Trump administration’s reaction to his complaint caused him to feel isolated and subject to a hostile work environment, prompting him to resign and give up a decades-long government career and dream job. … 

Borges is not the only Social Security official to raise concerns about the safety of data under the U.S. DOGE Service, which was launched by billionaire Elon Musk to cut costs across the government. 

Former acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek — who was elevated to that role by the Trump administration after showing loyalty to DOGE — said in an interview that Borges’s worries, as documented in his whistleblower report, are both “appropriate” and “accurate.” Dudek, who said he is on paid administrative leave pending a full separation from Social Security, said the type of cloud server that DOGE used is not sufficiently protected for such personal information and has been a well-known problem for years. 

“That absolutely has been the problem with that environment since I’ve been with the agency, that it is too little secured,” Dudek said. Borges, he continued, is “absolutely right.” …