At least 10 people associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now working at the Social Security Administration…. [The operatives] are, according to internal documents, Akash Bobba, Scott Coulter, Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, Antonio Gracias, Gautier Cole Killian, Jon Koval, Nikhil Rajpal, Payton Rehling, and Ethan Shaotran. This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.
According to the SSA court filing and accompanying sworn statements, seven of them have read-only access to several datasets including the Master Beneficiary Record, which contains detailed information about individuals and their benefits. Those same DOGE representatives also have read-only access to Numident, a database containing information about everyone who’s ever applied for a Social Security number, as well as data referred to as “Treasury Payment Files Showing SSA Payments from SSOARS.” (The Social Security Online Accounting and Reporting System is a set of systems containing “information on the SSA’s financial position and operations,” according to the SSA.)
In the SSA filing, lawyers for the agency claim that the DOGE operatives have “no access to SSA production automation, code, or configuration files.” A previous sworn statement from Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff, claims that its CIO, Michael Russo, was DOGE-aligned and demanded that Bobba be given access to “everything, including source code.”
Individuals having access to the records of multiple agencies is highly unusual and problematic, experts say. “Federal law places strict controls on personal data held by agencies, including limits on cross-agency transfers and rigorous training requirements for personnel who have a legitimate need for access,” says John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Ignoring those safeguards and haphazardly putting systems at multiple agencies under the thumb of a single engineer obliterates those protections. They’re hotwiring the federal government with a total disregard for privacy and data security.”
Lambert: Worth reading in full for the role of finance weasels like Michael Russo and Antonio Gracias.
Individuals having access to the records of multiple agencies is highly unusual and problematic, experts say. “Federal law places strict controls on personal data held by agencies, including limits on cross-agency transfers and rigorous training requirements for personnel who have a legitimate need for access,” says John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Ignoring those safeguards and haphazardly putting systems at multiple agencies under the thumb of a single engineer obliterates those protections. They’re hotwiring the federal government with a total disregard for privacy and data security.”
Bobba, a former Palantir intern and recent UC Berkeley graduate, was first appointed to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) before moving to the General Services Administration (GSA). … Bobba was eventually granted access to sensitive SSA systems after [Michael] Russo and Musk lieutenant Steve Davis directly pressured top SSA administrators.
Farritor, a 23-year-old former Thiel Fellow and Space X intern who helped to recruit other young engineers to join DOGE on a Discord group for SpaceX interns, has also appeared internally at the GSA, the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education.
Rajpal, a former Twitter and Tesla employee, now at the SSA, has also appeared at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, OPM, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
WIRED previously reported that Elez, a 25-year-old engineer also on the SSA list, at one point had read and write access within the federal payment system at the Treasury Department. He was also deployed at Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to The New York Times.
Shaotran, another young DOGE employee, is a 22-year-old Harvard student and a runner-up at an xAI hackathon. (xAI is Musk’s artificial intelligence company.) He has been deployed at GSA and the Department of Education and was recently onboarded at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to internal documentation.
Killian is a 24-year-old former computer science student who matriculated at McGill University and has been part of DOGE’s work at the Environmental Protection Agency and GSA, as well as the SSA.
In a Tuesday meeting, United States DOGE Service administrator Amy Gleason told staff that Musk-affiliated engineers and some legacy USDS workers would be headed to SSA to improve “identity proofing,” say sources who were in the meeting.
“It’s a valid fear that personally identifiable information will be exfiltrated or source code messed with without necessary controls and rigor,” John McGing, a former SSA employee who worked at the agency for almost four decades, tells WIRED.
Add new comment