When Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency started ransacking the federal government’s data in early 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice insisted that DOGE goons never improperly accessed and shared private information at the Social Security Administration. That was an obvious lie, of course, but we now have a court filing that attempts to correct the record almost a year later. Unfortunately, the filing leaves us with more questions than answers, especially about a political group that was trying to get information from at least one DOGE member.
The filing, which was first spotted by Politico, includes “corrections” and “clarifications” to the court. The first clarification involves a temporary restraining order from March 20, 2025, and a declaration filed by the Department of Justice a few days later. The declaration insisted that they had “revoked all SSA DOGE Team members’ access to SSA systems containing personally identifiable information” and systems. The new filing states that DOJ believed that statement to be true at the time, but now says one unidentified DOGE member was running searches of personally identifiable information (PII) on March 24, 2025.
The next correction in the filing involves a prvious declaration that “The DOGE Defendants have never had access to SSA systems of record.” But that wasn’t true either. An unnamed DOGE team member sent an email to someone at the Department of Labor and another unnamed person at the Department of Homeland Security that included a file with Social Security data. The file is password protected and DOJ claims they can’t access it to see what’s inside. But it states they believe the file contains personal information “derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.”
Still another correction in the filing lays out instances when a DOGE member got access to call center information well after the court order forbidding that kind of access. And then there’s the correction that points out DOGE members were sharing data with Cloudflare in a way that’s not approved.
Another correction details how DOGE member after DOGE member was rummaging through private data on Social Security employees. From the filing:
- Three DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing SSA employee records for agency personnel for workforce initiatives.
- Two DOGE Team members were granted access to a system containing personnel access information to ensure terminated employees were unable to badge into the building or to access IT systems with their PIVs.
- Six DOGE Team members were granted access to shared workspace that would have allowed DOGE Team members to share data to which the employees had separately been granted access for fraud or analytics reviews.
- Two DOGE Team members had access to a data visualization tool that could connect to other data sources, which could provide access to PII.
- Two DOGE Team members had access to additional EDW schemas beyond those reported as of March 12, 2025.
None of that sounds good. But the most shocking revelation from the new court filing involves a shadowy group that apparently was trying to get access to Social Security data:
However, SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired. The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States. In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.
It’s unclear which group may be involved. Making matters even worse, it sounds like the existence of this agreement was only accidentally discovered while looking at a completely different case.
At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the “Voter Data Agreement.” This agreement was not reviewed or approved through the agency’s data exchange procedures. SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.
The two DOGE members involved have been referred to a special counsel over violations of the Hatch Act, but it’s not clear whether anyone will ever pay the price for DOGE’s gross mishandling of private information. Elon Musk certainly hasn’t. He’s still the wealthiest person in the world and getting richer by the day. He had a spectacular blow-out with Trump but they’re palling around again, no doubt plotting how to fuck over more Americans.
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