Trump admin admits DOGE employees had access to off-limits Social Security data

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers working at the Social Security Administration (SSA) broke protocols, had more access to sensitive data on Americans than previously disclosed, and were in touch with a political advocacy group hunting for election fraud, the Trump administration admitted in a recent court filing.

Justice Department officials told a federal court in Maryland that the SSA had not fully complied with the court’s prior order, and had made statements to the court that it later found out were not entirely true. The admission came in a document, reported earlier by Politico, correcting the record in a case filed by unions representing government workers.

In a recent review, the SSA found out that two members of the DOGE team working at the agency had been contacted in March 2025 by a political advocacy group “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired.” The group’s “stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,” the filing says. One of those DOGE members signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with the group that was not reviewed through the appropriate process for SSA data exchanges. The agency first learned the agreement existed in November, during a review that was separate from the lawsuit at issue. The SSA made two referrals under the Hatch Act — the law that prohibits government employees from engaging in political activities in their professional capacity – in late December. The SSA and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The SSA also found out in its recent audit that some earlier statements made to the court by its then-chief information officer were not entirely true. The filing says that the agency believed its statements to be true at the time, and that they’re still largely accurate in several cases, though new information shows some inconsistencies. For example, the government maintains its earlier statement that the US Digital Service, taken over by DOGE, “never had access to SSA systems of record.” But, it was later found out that a member of the SSA DOGE team sent an encrypted, password-protected file that the SSA believes contained personal information on about 1,000 people to a then-senior advisor to DOGE. It remains “unclear” if the DOGE advisor was ever given the password, according to the filing.

DOGE staffers were also briefly granted access to systems with Americans’ personal information after the court issued a temporary restraining order, but the government says the staffers never actually viewed personal information with that access. It also clarified that a DOGE staffer had run searches for personal information on SSA systems the morning before the agency filed a declaration to the court, saying that DOGE staffers’ access to such systems had been revoked.

DOGE staffers at the SSA also shared data through the third-party server Cloudflare, which has not been approved for sharing data in that way, the filing says. The SSA still doesn’t know “exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.”