A whistleblower complaint has triggered a federal investigation into claims that a former member of a government cost-cutting team said he had access to sensitive Social Security data and planned to use it after moving to a private sector job.
The internal watchdog of the Social Security Administration is examining the allegations, which involve a former software engineer linked to the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE.
According to sources cited by The Washington Post, the agency’s inspector general has informed members of Congress about the complaint and shared it with the Government Accountability Office, which is conducting a separate audit into DOGE’s access to government data.
DOGE was launched by Tesla CEO Elon Musk after US President Donald Trump asked him to lead an initiative aimed at cutting costs and identifying waste across federal agencies.
The complaint states that the former engineer worked at the Social Security Administration last year before joining a government contractor in October. According to the disclosure, he allegedly told several colleagues that he possessed two highly restricted databases containing records of hundreds of millions of Americans. One of the databases was reportedly stored on a thumb drive.
The databases mentioned in the complaint are called “Numident” and the “Master Death File”. Together they contain records relating to more than 500 million living and deceased Americans, including Social Security numbers, dates and places of birth, citizenship details, race and ethnicity, and the names of parents.
According to the disclosure, the engineer told the whistleblower he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]”. The complaint says he planned to remove personal identifiers before uploading the information to the company’s systems.
The complaint also claims that the engineer told another colleague he expected to receive a presidential pardon if the actions were found to be illegal. That colleague reportedly refused to help upload the data because of legal concerns.
The whistleblower filed the complaint with the inspector general’s office on January 9 and later updated it on January 26. The complaint does not state that the engineer successfully transferred or uploaded the data.
The Washington Post reviewed the complaint and spoke with the whistleblower, who filed the report anonymously because of fears of retaliation. The newspaper did not name the former DOGE employee or the company involved because the allegations have not been independently confirmed.
When contacted earlier this year, both the Social Security Administration and the company said they had not previously heard about the complaint. After reviewing the matter, both said they did not find evidence supporting the claims. The company said it conducted a “thorough” two-day internal investigation and concluded the accusations were unsubstantiated.
A lawyer representing the former DOGE member told The Washington Post that his client denied all alleged wrongdoing.
An official familiar with the engineer’s departure from the agency said he returned his government laptop and lost his data access privileges when he left the Social Security Administration.
Former SSA data officer Charles Borges raised concerns, saying, “This is absolutely the worst-case scenario. There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”
