Two staff members with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with a right-wing advocacy group trying to “overturn election results,” according to the Department of Justice.
A court filing in a long-running lawsuit targeting DOGE’s efforts inside Social Security reveals that at least one DOGE staffer signed an agreement with the activist group that may have involved providing Americans’ Social Security information in an effort to match that data to state voter registrations.
That employee signed a “voter data agreement” and delivered it to the unnamed group in March 2025. “The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” according to the Justice Department.
Both staffers were referred to the Justice Department for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which broadly prohibits political activities from federal workers.
It’s unclear whether the DOGE staffers — neither of whom are identified in court filings — actually shared data with the activist group, but emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing [Social Security] data to match to the voter rolls,” according to the Justice Department.
The previously unreported disclosure follows a months-long case accusing Donald Trump’s administration and DOGE of illegally accessing sensitive information to bolster politically motivated allegations of fraud, including the president’s spurious claims that millions of dead people are receiving benefits, as Musk hacked federal spending and the workforce.
Though the activist group is not named in the documents, the sequence of events bear similarity to True the Vote’s public appeals to DOGE to investigate voter registration systems nationwide.
“We’ve received word that this message is being carried forward,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote of the effort last year.
The Independent has requested comment from True the Vote.
Tuesday’s filing also arrives more than six months after the Supreme Court allowed DOGE to access Social Security data while a decision from a federal appeals court remains pending.
The latest filing also reveals that DOGE shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers with the potential to access sensitive information, activity that had been blocked by the courts.
Members of the DOGE team used links to share data through the third-party server Cloudfare, according to the Justice Department.
Cloudflare is not approved by the agency, which still has “not been able to determine exactly what data [was] shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server,” according to Shapiro.
And while the agency insists that DOGE “never had access” to Social Security’s “systems of record,” some of that restricted data “derived from” Social Security systems was shared with a senior adviser to Musk’s team, according to the Justice Department.
Steve Davis, a Musk ally who worked with DOGE, was included in an email from March 2025 that included a password-protected file containing private information belonging to roughly 1,000 people in Social Security systems, DOJ said.
“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was accessed,” according to Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro.
Through the U.S. DOGE Service — which Trump repurposed from the government’s in-house tech team U.S. Government Service — Musk intended to find “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, and specifically targeted the nation’s largest retirement program.
He labeled it a “Ponzi scheme.”
Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued to block DOGE’s access to private information, such as tax records, Social Security Numbers, banking information and other data, while a whistleblower from the agency alleged that DOGE may have put personal information for millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked into.
A disclosure filed to the government’s top ethics office last year alleged that a DOGE team had uploaded a copy of agency data for virtually every American to a vulnerable cloud server.
The data included addresses, birth dates and other sensitive information that could be used to steal identities.
The whistleblower disclosure from Charles Borges, the agency’s now-former chief data officer, accuses DOGE personnel of copying a live set of data without any independent security or oversight measures in place.
His statement underscores prior warnings from watchdog groups and lawsuits that tried to block the Musk-founded group of young engineers from wreaking havoc across federal agencies.
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