The Social Security Administration (SSA) has disputed a whistleblower's allegations that claimed DOGE made an unauthorized, unsecured copy of a critical database - but it's what the denial doesn't say that speaks volumes.
For those who haven't been following the saga of ex-SSA Chief Data Officer and career government IT professional Charles Borges, it's a pretty straightforward one. Borges filed a whistleblower complaint in August, accusing employees of the Trump-decreed, formerly Musk-helmed cost-cutting unit - which is not an official government agency formed by Congressional authority - of making an unauthorized copy of Numident, the SSA database that contains records of every single person who has ever applied for a Social Security Number.
According to Borges, the DOGE copy (a live duplicate of the real Numident database) was created without adherence to SSA security policy and, even more shockingly, it was placed in a cloud environment outside of SSA's management. Borges said that the duplicate was administered by a pair of DOGE employees, not the SSA infrastructure administrators who are supposed to manage the Administration's digital services.
That seems par for the course for DOGE, which has so far shown a willingness to run roughshod over established security protocols with little regard for congressional oversight or protection of critical data.
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