Federal officials say a small team inside the Elon Musk-linked Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may have crossed legal lines with Social Security data, NBC News reports.
According to a new court filing, the Justice Department told a federal judge in Maryland that two Social Security Administration (SSA) employees on the DOGE team were contacted in March by an unnamed political advocacy group seeking help to analyze state voter rolls. The group’s stated goal, DOJ said, was to investigate alleged voter fraud and attempt to challenge election results in certain states.
One DOGE employee allegedly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with the group on March 24—four days after the judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from accessing Social Security records. The agreement reportedly involved matching SSA data to voter rolls, though DOJ says it is unclear whether any personal Social Security data was actually shared. There is also no evidence that other SSA employees knew about the contacts or the agreement, which bypassed standard data-sharing approvals.
SSA officials only discovered the incident during an unrelated review in November, the same month DOGE was shut down. The Trump administration later referred the two DOGE employees to the Office of Special Counsel in December under the Hatch Act, Politico reports.
The filing also outlines separate security concerns. DOJ said SSA recently learned that between March 7 and March 17, DOGE team members used links to share SSA data via Cloudflare, a third-party service not authorized to store Social Security information and outside the agency’s security rules. Because the data passed through an external server, SSA cannot yet determine what information was uploaded or whether it remains stored there.
These revelations follow a whistleblower allegation in August that DOGE had placed millions of records in a cloud setup designed to evade oversight, and come months after the Supreme Court overturned a lower-court order that briefly blocked DOGE’s access to sensitive SSA files. DOJ’s filing also notes that a senior adviser to Elon Musk and DOGE was copied on an email containing private SSA information, though it is unclear whether he accessed it or what the email contained.
