A senior official at the U.S. Social Security Administration today filed a whistleblower complaint over DOGE’s access to agency data.
The official, SSA Chief Data Officer Chuck Borges, is represented by the nonprofit Government Accountability Project. The whistleblower complaint is addressed to members of Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
An SSA spokesperson pushed back against the complaint. “SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the Internet.”
Multiple DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, staffers joined the SSA at the start of the year. In March, a lawsuit led a federal court to block the staffers from accessing certain agency data. The Supreme Court reversed the decision in June.
At the center of today’s whistleblower complaint is an SSA database called NUMIDENT. It contains information from more than 300 million Americans’ Social Security card applications. Those applications include names, dates of birth, addresses and other personal data along with information about family members.
The complaint charges that DOGE staffers have created what is “effectively a live copy” of NUMIDENT in an insecure cloud environment. According to the document, SSA officials have no way of tracking who can access the database....
Russian propaganda is spreading false statements that the account of the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov, was allegedly created with...