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Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team working inside the Social Security Administration secretly communicated with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department disclosed in newly revealed court filings.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a senior Justice Department official, said the SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from using their official positions for partisan political activity.
Shapiro’s disclosure, dated Friday and not previously reported, appeared in a list of “corrections” to sworn testimony by senior SSA officials during litigation last year over DOGE’s access to sensitive Social Security data. The filings reveal that DOGE team members shared data through unapproved third-party servers and may have accessed private information that a court had explicitly barred them from viewing at the time.
Possible Use of SSA Data for Election Activity
Shapiro said the conduct of the two DOGE employees undercut earlier assertions by SSA that DOGE’s work was solely aimed at identifying “fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security programs and modernizing agency technology.
“SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate,” Shapiro wrote. She added, however, that the agency was unaware of the employees’ contacts with the advocacy group or of a document described as a “Voter Data Agreement.”
“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group,” Shapiro wrote. “Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement.’”
The two DOGE team members and the advocacy group were not identified in the filing. Shapiro said it remains unclear whether any Social Security data were actually shared. But she said internal emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”
The White House and SSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Senior Musk Adviser Copied on Sensitive File
Shapiro also disclosed that Steve Davis, a senior adviser to Musk and a key figure within DOGE, was copied on a March 3, 2025 email containing a password-protected file with private information on roughly 1,000 individuals drawn from Social Security systems.
It is unclear whether Davis ever accessed the file, Shapiro said. She added that current SSA officials have been unable to open the file to determine precisely what information it contained.
While SSA continues to maintain that DOGE “never had access to SSA systems of record,” Shapiro said it is possible that restricted data “derived from” Social Security systems were transmitted to Davis.
Davis did not respond to a request for comment.
Court-Blocked Access and Security Lapses
Among the additional corrections, the Justice Department revealed that one DOGE team member was briefly granted access to private Social Security profiles even after a court order prohibited such access. Shapiro said the access was never “utilized.”
In another case, a DOGE team member retained access for roughly two months to a “call center profile” that contained private personal information.
“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was accessed,” Shapiro wrote.
Shapiro further acknowledged that, contrary to earlier representations to the court, DOGE team members were sharing data using links routed through the third-party server Cloudflare.
“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” she wrote.
SSA officials only discovered the use of Cloudflare during a recent internal review, Shapiro said. Because the service is operated by a third party, the agency has been unable to determine what data were shared or whether the information remains stored on the servers.
Legal and Political Fallout
The disclosures add to mounting scrutiny of DOGE’s operations across federal agencies and raise fresh questions about whether sensitive government data were accessed or used for political purposes.
Potential Hatch Act violations can result in disciplinary action, including termination, though Shapiro did not indicate what penalties, if any, the Justice Department might pursue.
The revelations are likely to intensify ongoing legal challenges and congressional oversight of DOGE, particularly as lawmakers examine whether the initiative crossed legal boundaries in its aggressive push to access federal data systems.
