Trump administration admits DOGE may have misused Americans’ Social Security data

Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may have accessed and shared Social Security numbers in an effort to help an advocacy group “overturn election results in certain states” last year. according to court documents.

The revelation, which first reported by Politicocomes as part of a series of corrections to earlier testimony by top Social Security Administration officials related to legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data.

Neither the two DOGE members nor the defense team are named in court documents.

In March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration (SSA) “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had obtained,” Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro wrote in court documents.

“The defense team’s stated goal was to find evidence of voter fraud and overturn election results in certain states,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro wrote that following these communications, one of the DOGE members, as an SSA employee, signed and sent a “Voter Data Agreement” with the advocacy group.

DOGE members may have had access to personal information deemed off-limits by a court at the time, and shared data with unapproved “third-party” servers.

“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees other than the DOGE Team members involved were aware of the communications with the defense team. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement,'” Shapiro wrote.

It’s unclear whether the two DOGE members ended up sharing the data, according to Shapiro, but the emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could be asked to assist the defense team by accessing SSA data to match voter rolls.”

According to Shapiro, the SSA referred the two DOGE employees for possible violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from using their official positions for political activities.

Last year, a federal judge issued an order blocking DOGE members’ access to SSA systems, which included SSNs, medical records, driver’s license numbers, tax information and other types of personal information. An SSA whistleblower later alleged that DOGE uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to a vulnerable cloud server.