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social security administration
DOGE Employees May Have Improperly Accessed Social Security Data With Aim to 'Overturn Election Results'
The DOJ filing also appeared to corroborate claims that DOGE employees improperly tried to make "a live copy of the country’s Social Security information" on a third-party cloud platform.
Jan 20, 2026
The US Department of Justice acknowledged last week that two members of the Department of Government Efficiency may have improperly accessed Social Security data at the request of an unidentified organization whose goal is challenging US election results.
In a court filing dated January 16, the DOJ revealed that the unidentified organization last March reached out to two DOGE employees, who were working at the Social Security Administration (SSA), and requested that they "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," the DOJ wrote. "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."
The filing said that SSA has "not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group," but that it had reviewed emails indicating that "DOGE team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls."
The DOJ also revealed that the SSA in December 2025 made referrals of the two DOGE employees to the US Office of Special Counsel for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal government employees from using their positions for political purposes.
Politico, which first reported on the DOJ filing, noted that the disclosure "came as part of a list of 'corrections' to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data," and also included revelations that "DOGE team members shared data on unapproved 'third-party' servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time."
The admission that DOGE employees shared data on a third-party server bolsters an explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August from former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges, who alleged that DOGE officials have been responsible for “serious data security lapses” that “risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”
At the heart of Borges’ complaint was an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”
Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the Borges complaint warned, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. In a worst-case scenario, the complaint said, the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.”
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1 Year Into Trump 2.0, the Social Security Administration Is in Disarray
Democrats in Congress must hold hearings to protect beneficiaries.
Jan 16, 2026
There is no part of the federal government that Americans depend on more than the Social Security Administration. It is the agency that is charged with administering the earned benefits of millions. Unfortunately, after one year into President Donald Trump’s second term, SSA is in disarray. The Washington Post recently took an in-depth look at the SSA and reported among other things that:
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit, and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people, and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September—a six-year high, data shows.
SSA officials are likely to respond to the Washington Post story by pointing out that a recent SSA inspector general argued that SSA has made major improvements. Fox News reported that:
The inspector general’s report concluded that SSA’s telephone performance improved during fiscal year 2025 largely because of operational changes, including the rollout of a new cloud-based telecommunications platform, expanded automation, and staffing realignments. The platform, implemented in August 2024, allowed SSA to increase call capacity, expand self-service options, and monitor performance in real time, according to the report.
There is one catch with the inspector general’s report, and, to paraphrase Joseph Heller, it is one heck of a catch. This summer SSA changed “the type of data it reports publicly, removing information like callback wait times.” SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told members of Congress over the summer that SSA changed the metrics because reporting the wait times might discourage people from calling the agency. Yes, you read that correctly. So, rather than fixing the problem SSA decided to not share the data. This might be a solution to a public relations problem, but it is not going to help beneficiaries in the slightest.
There is no doubt about the fact that 2025 was a tumultuous time for SSA. The year began with Elon Musk, the then head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme; and, in an address to Congress in January President Trump said that there were “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security and that people up to 160 years old were receiving Social Security benefits. None of these accusations, of course, proved to be true. While Trump and Musk’s spurious claims have faded away, the damage they have done to SSA lingers on.
If Republicans on Capitol Hill are not interested in exercising their duty to provide oversight, Democrats must step up to the plate.
The current congressional leadership has shown zero interest in exercising any oversight responsibility on any issue foreign or domestic. Congress’ lack of interest or will to scrutinize the Trump administration led Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner to ask, “Is congressional oversight dead? Where does this end? If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”
While they are not in the majority, Democrats on Capitol Hill are not powerless. They can still hold hearings of their own. These hearings would not be part of the legislative process. They would however give Democrats the platform they need to speak up for the American people. There is good news here for those who care about Social Security. The ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security is Rep. John Larson of Connecticut who has fought for years to protect Social Security. Larson is the perfect person to shine a light on the current state of affairs at SSA.
If Republicans on Capitol Hill are not interested in exercising their duty to provide oversight, Democrats must step up to the plate. Seventy-five million Social Security beneficiaries are counting on them to protect their earned benefits.
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Social Security Administration 'In Turmoil' as New Reporting Details Damage Done by Trump Cuts
In-depth reporting from the Washington Post found the Social Security Administration is dealing with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers."
Dec 30, 2025
An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump's second term.
The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is "in turmoil" one year into Trump's second term, resulting in a customer service system that has "deteriorated."
The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.
This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with "record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers," as the remaining SSA workforce has "struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices."
The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.
However, the Post's sources said these employees "were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions."
One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency "offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim."
Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.
Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.
An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.
Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle "calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail."
Also hampering the SSA's work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.
The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.
"I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, 'You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?'" the employee said. "He was just like, 'No, no, no.'"
Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time."
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