The Trump administration has acknowledged for the first time in a court filing that members of the U.S. DOGE Service accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data without the awareness of agency officials.
The disclosures amount to a notable reversal by Social Security officials, who had previously claimed there was no evidence that DOGE had potentially compromised personal data. In August, after former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges told Congress and others that DOGE was storing Americans’ data in an unsafe environment, the agency told The Washington Post it was “not aware of any compromise to this environment” and remains “dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data.”
[A] Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions, said the department is not currently investigating DOGE.
Lambert here: Shocked, shocked.
“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.”
The filing also shares new details about how DOGE members shared data with each other without the agency’s awareness.
In early March, a DOGE staffer at SSA had sent an email to others at DOGE with an encrypted and password-protected file with what appears to be personal information for about 1,000 people, the court filing said. However, the SSA’s chief information office has not been able to access the file to figure out what it contained.
The agency also acknowledged for the first time that DOGE members were using links to share data through a third-party server called Cloudflare, which is not approved for sharing Social Security data. SSA said it was unaware of the sharing until recently and doesn’t know what was shared.
“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,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.
“Having admitted what Mr. Borges has said all along, the Social Security Administration must take appropriate action to protect Americans’ data, and Mr. Borges must get justice for the violation of his rights,” Borges’s attorney Debra Katz said in a statement Tuesday.
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