The Justice Department told a federal court on Tuesday that Elon Musk’s DOGE team, working inside the Social Security Administration, stored sensitive Social Security data on servers that were never approved by the agency. The filing also said two members of the team secretly communicated with an outside advocacy group tied to efforts to overturn election results in certain states. The DOJ said the issue surfaced while correcting sworn testimony given last year by senior SSA officials during lawsuits over DOGE access to federal data. Those corrections said team members shared information through third-party systems and may have reached private records that a judge had already blocked them from seeing. The court papers said the conduct raised serious questions about how the DOGE project actually operated inside SSA. Justice Department flags election-related contacts by DOGE staff Elizabeth Shapiro, a senior DOJ official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for possible Hatch Act violations. The law bars federal workers from using their jobs for political purposes. Elizabeth wrote that the two employees were in contact with an advocacy group pushing to overturn election results in specific states. The filing said one of the two signed a Voter Data Agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to compare federal records with state voter rolls. Elizabeth said the agreement and the outside communications were not known to SSA leadership at the time earlier court statements were made. She wrote that SSA believed its prior claims about DOGE, focusing on fraud detection and technology upgrades, were accurate when stated. Elizabeth also said there is no evidence that SSA staff outside the involved DOGE members 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 DOJ suggest DOGE staff could have been asked to help the group by accessing SSA data to match against voter lists, but it remains unclear if any data was actually shared. Unapproved servers expose how DOGE handled restricted SSA data Elizabeth also disclosed that Steve Davis, a senior adviser to Musk tied to the DOGE project, was copied on a March 3, 2025, email that included a password-protected file. The file contained private information on about 1,000 people pulled from Social Security systems. Elizabeth said it is unknown whether Steve accessed the file. She also said the current SSA staff cannot open the file to confirm exactly what it contains. SSA continues to say DOGE never had access to official systems of record. Elizabeth wrote that it remains possible that restricted data derived from SSA systems was sent to Steve. That detail was included as part of the DOJ’s corrections to earlier court testimony. The filing also said a DOGE team member briefly received access to private Social Security profiles even after a court order blocked that access. Elizabeth said the access was never used. In a separate case, another DOGE member had access for two months to a call center profile containing private information, and Elizabeth wrote that it is still unknown whether any private data was accessed during that period. According to her, DOGE staff also shared data links using Cloudflare, a third-party service not approved for SSA data storage, meaning it falls outside any security rules. If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .
