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

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

The revelation, first reported by Politico, comes as part of a series of corrections to previous testimony by top Social Security Administration officials regarding legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data.

Neither the DOGE members nor the advocacy group were named in court documents.

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

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

After these communications, a DOGE member, acting as an SSA employee, signed and forwarded a “voter data agreement” with the advocacy group, Shapiro wrote.

DOGE members may have accessed private information that the court ruled was off-limits at the time, and shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers.

“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of participating members of the DOGE team were aware of communications with the advocacy group. They were not 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 staff members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match the voter rolls.”

According to Shapiro, the Social Security Administration referred two DOGE employees for possible violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from taking advantage of their official positions for political activities.

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