In a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Democracy Forward seeks to compel the SSA to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests linked to a “voter data agreement” revealed in a January court filing.
That filing from the Department of Justice, which is part of a lawsuit by several labor groups over DOGE’s handling and exposure of personally identifiable information, detailed coordination between two members of Elon Musk’s tech collective embedded at SSA and an advocacy group seeking “evidence of voter fraud.”
Lambert here: “ ‘Tech collective” is an interesting formulation.
Democracy Forward, which represents the federal unions at the center of that lawsuit, immediately filed a FOIA seeking a copy of the voter data agreement, plus all emails between the parties. The SSA acknowledged receipt of the request, per the new complaint, but on March 4 informed Democracy Forward that “because of ‘unusual circumstances,’ specifically ‘the need for consultation with another agency,’ SSA needed to extend the time limit to respond to this request.”
Despite subsequent follow-ups, Democracy Forward claims that it still hasn’t received the documents and hasn’t heard from SSA in days.
Democracy Forward also aims to compel the Social Security Administration to respond to FOIA requests tied to other revelations in the January DOJ filing, including two Hatch Act referrals submitted by the SSA to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel regarding employees who had communicated with True the Vote — which is “widely suspected to be” the “election denying” group in question, the press release states.
There are also public records requests that Democracy Forward wants resolved about DOGE’s handling of SSA data on unauthorized Cloudflare servers, a violation of agency security standards.
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