A whistleblower report submitted to Congress and the Office of Special Counsel claims that DOGE employees uploaded a very sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) database to a vulnerable cloud server while auditing the agency, one that contains Social Security numbers for 300 million Americans as well as associated identity information.
The whistleblower report was filed by Chuck Borges, chief data officer at the SSA. The complaint does not assert that the DOGE database copy was exposed to the open internet or to any known threats, but that it was kept outside of the agency’s usual oversight and tracking mechanisms and thus may have violated federal statutes for the handling of sensitive personal data.
The whistleblower report asserts that in June of this year, the DOGE team requested transfer of the entire set of US social security data to a virtual private cloud environment for testing. This Numerical Identification System (NUMIDENT) dataset includes all Social Security numbers issued as well as associated names, dates of birth, addresses, citizenship status, and family member names along with other points of information.
The complaint notes that such a request is “odd but not unheard of,” with the SSA strongly discouraging the movement of NUMIDENT to test environments but not outright forbidding it. The request was assessed as “high risk” due to “...
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