Social Security watchdog investigating claims that DOGE engineer copied its databases

Source: Engadget

Investigation overview

The Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA) is investigating allegations that a former software engineer from DOGE possessed two SSA databases—the Numident and the Master Death File—and attempted to transfer them from a thumb drive to his personal computer for “sanitizing” before using them at his current employer, an unnamed government contractor. Those databases contain personal information on more than 500 million living and deceased Americans.

Whistleblower complaint

• The whistleblower filed the complaint with the SSA inspector general in January.
• When The Washington Post contacted the agency and the contractor in January, both said they had not heard of the complaint and later reported that they had looked into the allegations but found no evidence to confirm them.
• The SSA watchdog has now opened an investigation and has informed members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office. Neither the agency nor the contractor offered comment for the recent article.

Previous allegations

A separate whistleblower complaint was filed in August concerning DOGE’s access to and mishandling of SSA data. Charles Borges, former chief data officer at the SSA, claimed that an SSA database was stored in an unsecured cloud environment. Borges told The Washington Post that this represented “the worst‑case scenario,” noting that “there could be one or a million copies of it, and we will never know now.”