From Politico:
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.
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, 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.” …
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. …
Shocking misconduct but not surprising - everyone knew this was happening.
ReplyDeleteShapiro 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.”
House Social Security subcommittee ranking member John B. Larson (D-Connecticut) and Ways and Means Committee ranking member Richard E. Neal (D-Massachusetts) said Tuesday that DOGE “appointees engaged in this scheme — who were never brought before Congress for approval or even publicly identified — must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for these abhorrent violations of the public trust.”
ReplyDeleteBut a Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions, said the department is not currently investigating DOGE.
Privacy experts said the details in the new court filing raise serious concerns about the DOGE members’ compliance with the Privacy Act, which says federal employees can only access data that they need to carry out their jobs.
I’m flabbergasted,” University of Virginia privacy law expert Danielle Citron said. “If that information is shared willingly and knowingly and they are sharing without the reason they collected it, it’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”
Joe Spielberger, the senior policy counsel at a nonpartisan watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, said it was a good sign that the Trump administration would make such a referral. But, he said, the corrections filing “goes way beyond potential Hatch Act violations, to say the least.”
He said the filing raised questions about whether the Social Security Administration misled the court last year about what officials knew at the time.
Tuesday’s court filing also revealed that a DOGE employee agreed to help a “political advocacy group” review voter rolls in search of voter fraud as part of an effort to “overturn election results in certain States.
ReplyDeleteThe Social Security Administration only became aware of the agreement in November, when it was doing a review of internal records unrelated to the case before Hollander.
Hollander initially blocked DOGE team members from accessing Social Security’s records, but the Supreme Court later restored DOGE’s access.
The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Two House Democrats called for a criminal investigation into DOGE’s activities and prosecution of the team members who participated in them.
This current DOJ rarely admits they made a mistake. Secondly, why did the Supreme Court step in and give DOGE access to the files? What was so important that DOGE needed additional time to complete the project?
ReplyDeleteTip of the iceberg. What else have they done with the data?
ReplyDeleteNotice of correction by DOJ…
ReplyDeleteDOGE teams may have sold our Social Security information and sold it to companies that were involved in election interference.
Wow, means your personal information will be bought and sold in the open market. No stopping it.
Delete11:26 - citation of link to section about data being sold?
Deletehttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
Deletegov.uscourts.mdd.577321/
gov.uscourts.mdd.577321.197.0.pdf
I'm so angry about this, but nothing one individual can do. If everyone got together, all we could do is protest. Who are we going to sue? SSA? No, cuz they aren't the ones at fault, people quit over the handling of the information and warned us. Gonna sue DOGE? No, cuz they're barely anything anymore. Gonna sue the US government? We'd be laughed outta court. We just gotta live with our info being out there, who knows where by now.
ReplyDeleteThe Social Security Administration made two Hatch Act violation referrals last month after a Department of Government Efficiency employee signed an agreement to share SSA data with a political advocacy group, according to a new court filing.
ReplyDeleteThat advocacy organization isn’t named in the document, but its “stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”
That is one of the most concerning parts of the court documents, Kathleen Romig, director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Nextgov/FCW.
“Nearly a year after DOGE staff shared sensitive data with a group hoping to overturn election results, SSA acknowledges that they still don’t know what data they shared or whether it is still on an insecure server,” she said.
Democrats on Wednesday also decried the leak and called for DOGE staffers to be held accountable.
ReplyDelete“Remember when the Supreme Court gave DOGE the green light to access your social security data? It was never about curtailing waste, fraud, and abuse,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in a statement on the social platform X.
“The DOJ just admitted DOGE was ‘secretly’ in touch with advocacy groups ‘seeking to overturn election results.’ The idea being: use a trove of personal information to disenfranchise voters and change election results,” he added.
Schumer continued, “DOGE accessing your data was illegal. Using it to overturn election results is illegal. We must hold the DOGE staff involved accountable.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) echoed his concerns.
“A year ago, we stood outside SSA, protesting DOGE’s access for just this reason. The Trump Admin denied it. Once again, the truth comes out: they lied,” Van Hollen posted on X.
“Meanwhile, DOGE’s haphazard firings & disruptions have made life harder for millions of Americans who rely on Social Security.”