DOJ court filing revealed DOGE shared Social Security data of 300 million Americans via an unapproved server

On January 16, 2026, the Justice Department filed a court document in the ongoing litigation over Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to Social Security Administration data, correcting earlier agency testimony and disclosing for the first time that DOGE team members at SSA had copied and shared a database containing the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, citizenship status, and parents' names of more than 300 million Americans through Cloudflare, a third-party server not approved to store SSA records and outside the agency's security protocols. SSA said it still could not determine what data was shared or whether it remains on the server, and that it only learned of the Cloudflare use during an internal records review; the filing states the data-sharing took place shortly before a March 2025 court order restricting DOGE's access to SSA systems. SSA's former chief data officer, Charles Borges, had warned of this exact vulnerability in an earlier whistleblower complaint; the agency denied the claim at the time, and Borges was forced to resign shortly afterward.

The same filing disclosed that in March 2025, an unnamed political advocacy group contacted two DOGE team members at SSA requesting help analyzing state voter rolls the group had acquired, stating its goal was to "find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." One of the employees signed a "voter data agreement" with the group. SSA said it has not seen evidence that SSA data were actually shared with the group, but the agency referred both employees to the Office of Special Counsel in December 2025 over the contact, citing potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their official positions for partisan political activity.

Updates

2026-01-20 — House Democrats called for a criminal investigation and prosecution [1]

Rep. John Larson, ranking member of the House Social Security Subcommittee, and Rep. Richard Neal, ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a joint statement after the filing was reported that "the 'DOGE' appointees engaged in this scheme — who were never brought before Congress for approval or even publicly identified — must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for these abhorrent violations of the public trust."

2026-01-27 — Senate Finance Committee leaders demanded a briefing from SSA [4]

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a bipartisan letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano requesting a prompt briefing on the scope of DOGE's data-sharing and written answers, by February 10, on what SSA has done to enforce its data-protection policies and determine what data was shared outside the agency.

2026-07-24 — Wyden and Whitehouse said SSA's responses were unresponsive or disproved [5]

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the Finance Committee's ranking Democrats, sent SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano a follow-up letter stating that the agency's responses to their prior oversight requests "have either been unresponsive or later disproved by SSA's own admissions," and renewed their demand for details on DOGE's data access. The letter also cited a separate, then-unconfirmed whistleblower allegation that a DOGE employee had copied sensitive SSA data to a personal thumb drive for a private employer, and noted that at least two dozen former DOGE staffers remained embedded in the administration in national-security or data-security roles.