The Department of Justice said in federal court Tuesday that Elon Musk’s DOGE team, which operates within the Social Security Administration, stored sensitive Social Security data on servers not approved by the Social Security Administration.
The filing also says two members of the team were in secret contact with outside advocacy groups involved in efforts to overturn election results in certain states.
The Justice Department said the issue surfaced last year when SSA executives were amending sworn testimony in a lawsuit over DOGE’s access to federal data.
Those corrections noted that team members may have shared information through third-party systems and accessed personal records that judges had already blocked from viewing.
According to court documents, this action raised serious questions about how the DOGE project was actually being operated within SSA.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a senior Justice Department official, said the SSA had referred to both. doge Warning employees of potential violations of the Hatch Act. The law prohibits federal employees from using their jobs for political purposes. Elizabeth wrote that two employees have been in contact with advocacy groups seeking to overturn election results in certain states.
One of the two signed a voter data agreement that could have included using Social Security data to compare federal records with state voter rolls, the filing said.
Elizabeth said the agreement and external communications were not known to SSA leadership at the time the previous court statement was made. She wrote that SSA believes previous claims about DOGE, which focused on fraud detection and technology upgrades, were accurate at the time they were stated.
Elizabeth also said there is no evidence that SSA staff other than the DOGE members involved knew about the advocacy group or the voter-related agreement. She added that the two employees and the advocacy group were not named in the filing.
Emails reviewed by the Justice Department suggest that DOGE employees may have been asked to assist the group by accessing SSA data and matching it to voter lists, but it remains unclear whether the data was actually shared.
Unauthorized server exposes how DOGE handled restricted SSA data
Elizabeth also revealed that a March 3, 2025 email from Steve Davis, Musk’s senior adviser on the DOGE project, was copied and included a password-protected file.
The file contained personal information on approximately 1,000 people pulled from the Social Security system.
Elizabeth said it was unclear whether Steve had access to the files. He also said that current SSA staff are unable to open the files and see their exact contents.
SSA continues to claim that DOGE did not have access to official records systems. Elizabeth wrote that there is still a possibility that limited data obtained from the SSA system was sent to Steve. This detail was included as part of the Justice Department’s corrections to earlier court testimony.
of filing It also said members of the DOGE team temporarily received access to private Social Security profiles even after access was blocked by court order. Elizabeth said this access was never used.
In another case, another DOGE member had access to a call center profile containing personal information for two months, but it is still unclear whether any personal data was accessed during that period, Elizabeth wrote.
She said DOGE staff also shared data links using Cloudflare, a third-party service that is not approved for SSA data storage, meaning it is outside the scope of security rules.
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