Social Security watchdog investigating claims that DOGE engineer copied its databases

2. Cybersecurity

The person is alleged to have taken sensitive information from the agency on a thumb drive.

The inspector general's office of the Social Security Administration is investigating allegations of a security breach by a member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency operation spearheaded by Elon Musk. A whistleblower has claimed that a former software engineer from DOGE said he possessed two databases from the SSA, "Numident" and the "Master Death File." The person reportedly asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive "to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company]," an unnamed government contractor where he is currently employed. Those databases include personal information about more than 500 million living and deceased Americans.

The Washington Post reported that the whistleblower complaint was filed with the inspector general in January. "When The Post contacted the agency and the company in January, both said they had not heard of the complaint. Both said they subsequently looked into the allegations and did not find evidence to confirm the claims," the publication said. It is unclear why the complaint is now being investigated and neither party offered comment this week for The Post's article. The SSA watchdog informed both members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office of its investigation.

These allegations follow a different whistleblower complaint filed last August about DOGE access and mishandling of data from the SSA. Charles Borges, former chief data officer at the agency, claimed that a SSA database was stored in an unsecured cloud environment. "This is absolutely the worst-case scenario," Borges told The Post of the latest claims. "There could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now."

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