A former employee with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency allegedly claimed he tapped into two sensitive Social Security Administration databases and intended to share the information with his private employer, according to an anonymous whistleblower complaint.
The complaint — filed with Social Security’s internal watchdog and first reported by The Washington Post — alleges that the U.S. DOGE Service staffer accessed two protected databases containing personal information, including Social Security numbers, for more than 500 million living and dead Americans.
The employee allegedly told the whistleblower who filed the complaint that he intended to move the data from a thumb drive to his personal computer “so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data” before taking it to his private employer.
After leaving the agency, he allegedly told colleagues he retained “God-level” security access to the Social Security’s systems and told another coworker at the agency that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were considered illegal, according to the whistleblower.
It is unclear when the alleged breach took place, or if any such breach was successful.
In a letter to members of congressional oversight committees obtained by The Independent, Social Security’s Office of Inspector General alerted lawmakers on March 6 to what it described as an “anonymous complaint on matters relating to the potential misuse of SSA data by a former DOGE employee, among other allegations.”
The office is “conducting an investigative review of these anonymous allegations,” the letter states.
“These allegations describe one of the largest known data breaches in American history, perpetrated by Trump appointees for the explicit purpose of weaponizing Americans’ sensitive personal data for political gain,” Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement to The Independent.
“There must be a full public accounting of this breach at Social Security, including justice for anyone who committed or enabled criminal theft of Americans’ data,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Government Accountability Office also confirmed that the office is reviewing DOGE’s access to Social Security data, per the request of the House Ways and Means Committee’s top Democratic Rep. Richard Neal.
The office declined to comment on the scope of that review as the investigation remains ongoing. Any subsequent report will be public.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is demanding a broader investigation into “DOGE-related data leaks” at the agency following the complaint, which he said demonstrates the Trump administration’s “callous disregard for the safety and security of Americans’ most sensitive information.”
“Not only has an ex-DOGE bro been accused of running around with the social security information of every American on a flash drive, he also may have the ability to edit and manipulate data at the Social Security Administration at will,” Garcia said in a statement shared with The Independent. “This is dangerous and outrageous, and Oversight Committee Democrats will fight for transparency and accountability.”
Garcia has also requested a staff level briefing from the Social Security Administration no later than March 23 “related to DOGE’s access to Americans’ data, SSA’s efforts to understand and make public the extent of this access, and any potential misuse, manipulation, or inappropriate sharing of that data,” according to his letter to the agency.
Former DOGE employees who are believed to have knowledge of any alleged possession of that data also have been asked to sit for interviews with the Oversight Committee Democrats “to clarify the facts surrounding DOGE use of Americans’ sensitive data,” according to Garcia.
A spokesperson for Social Security said “the allegations by a singular anonymous source have been strongly refuted by all named parties — SSA, the former employee, and the company.”
The agency “is focused on continuing our digital-first transformation to deliver better, faster service for every American,” according to the spokesperson, which called The Washington Post “a dying outlet desperate for clicks and eager to publish fake news to scare seniors.”
The whistleblower complaint follows several alleged breaches in the wake of the formerly Elon Musk-led DOGE project inside Social Security, which the billionaire right-wing activist once labeled a “Ponzi scheme.”
The U.S. DOGE Service — which President Donald Trump repurposed from the government’s in-house tech team U.S. Government Service — is now baked into federal agencies with a task to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Musk’s team reportedly exposed Social Security data belonging to more than 300 million Americans when his DOGE team uploaded a copy of agency data to a vulnerable cloud server, according to a separate whistleblower report filed last summer.
That whistleblower disclosure from Charles Borges, the agency’s now-former chief data officer, accused DOGE personnel of copying a live set of data without any independent security or oversight measures in place.
And in January, the Department of Justice confirmed that two DOGE staffers at Social Security were secretly in touch with a right-wing advocacy group that was seeking to “overturn election results.”
A court filing in one of several lawsuits against DOGE’s efforts inside the federal government revealed that at least one DOGE staffer signed an agreement with the activist group that may have involved providing Americans’ Social Security information in an effort to match that data to state voter registrations.
That employee signed a “voter data agreement” and delivered it to the unnamed group in March 2025. “The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” according to the Justice Department.
It’s unclear whether the DOGE staffers — neither of whom are identified in court filings — actually shared data with the activist group, but emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing [Social Security] data to match to the voter rolls,” according to the Justice Department.
A wider intrusion into Americans’ data as alleged in the latest whistleblower report would mark an unprecedented breach of sensitive data.
“This massive, illegal and horrific breach of Americans’ most sensitive data has confirmed the very fears we’ve been warning about for over a year — that the Trump administration allowing DOGE to infiltrate our government without oversight created fertile ground for abuse, and in this case of an exceptionally egregious kind,” according to Lisa Gilbert, president of advocacy group Public Citizen, which has sued to block DOGE’s access to federal agencies.
“Federal and state officials must ensure the misuse of this data ends immediately and that all private copies of Social Security data are destroyed,” she said. “Prosecutors should open a criminal investigation immediately and, if the evidence supports it, prosecute this case aggressively.”
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