In March 2025, DOGE employees embedded at the Social Security Administration secretly coordinated with a political advocacy group — believed to be True the Vote, a prominent election denial organization — to cross-reference Americans' Social Security data with state voter rolls. The stated purpose was to find \"evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.\"
\nOn March 24, 2025, a DOGE team member signed a \"Voter Data Agreement\" with the political advocacy group in his capacity as an SSA employee. The agreement was executed without authorization from SSA leadership and was only discovered months later during an unrelated internal review.
\nThe advocacy group had contacted two members of SSA's DOGE team with a request to analyze state voter rolls the group had acquired. The implicit arrangement was to use the federal government's most comprehensive identity database — containing the Social Security number, date of birth, and other identifying information for virtually every American — to validate or challenge voter registration records.
\nBeginning March 7, 2025, DOGE team members were using Cloudflare — a third-party server not approved for storing SSA data — to share data outside SSA's security protocols. This represented a fundamental breach of the security architecture designed to protect Americans' most sensitive personal information.
\nChuck Borges, SSA's former chief data officer, filed a formal whistleblower disclosure in August 2025 alleging far broader data mishandling. According to Borges, DOGE staffers improperly copied the NUMIDENT database — which contains records for more than 300 million Americans, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, places of birth, and parents' names — into a virtual database without following required security protocols.
\nBorges was involuntarily resigned from government in August 2025 and subsequently filed a retaliation complaint. Additional allegations have emerged that at least one former DOGE employee retained \"God-level\" access to SSA systems and stored a database on a personal thumb drive.
\nIn January 2026, the government publicly disclosed that two SSA DOGE employees were referred to the US Office of Special Counsel for potential Hatch Act violations. In March 2026, SSA's inspector general notified congressional leaders that it had opened a formal investigation into the allegations.
\nThe Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity while acting in their official capacity. Coordinating with a political advocacy group to use government databases to challenge election results is a textbook Hatch Act violation. The referral to the Office of Special Counsel indicates the government itself recognizes the seriousness of the conduct.
\nThe Privacy Act prohibits federal agencies from disclosing personal records without the individual's consent. Sharing SSA data with a political advocacy group — or even discussing the possibility of such sharing using government communication channels — violates the Act's core protections.
\nThe most alarming dimension is the potential political weaponization of America's most comprehensive identity database. Cross-referencing Social Security records with voter rolls could be used to challenge the voter registrations of naturalized citizens, elderly voters, or other populations — not because of actual fraud, but because of data-matching false positives that are inherent in comparing databases with different naming conventions and update frequencies.
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