Two staff members with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team at the Social Security Administration were secretly in contact with a right-wing advocacy group trying to “overturn the election results,” according to the Justice Department.
A court filing in a long-running lawsuit targeting DOGE’s efforts inside Social Security shows that at least one DOGE employee signed an agreement with the activist group that may have involved handing over 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 goal was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states,” according to the Justice Department.
Both employees were referred to the Department of Justice for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which generally prohibits political activities by federal employees.
It is unclear whether DOGE staff — none of whom are identified in court filings — actually shared data with the activist group, but the emails “suggest that DOGE Team members may have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing. [Social Security] data matching voter rolls,” according to the Department of Justice.
An Elon Musk-backed DOGE effort inside Social Security to eliminate ‘fraud’ may also have worked to investigate voter data alongside an activist group seeking to overturn election results (AFP via Getty Images)
The previously unreported disclosure follows a months-long case accusing the Donald Trump administration and DOGE of illegally accessing sensitive information to bolster allegations of politically motivated fraud, including the president’s false claims that millions of dead people are receiving benefits, as Musk hacked federal spending and the workforce.
Although the activist group is not named in the documents, the sequence of events have similarities with True the Vote’s public appeals to DOGE to investigate voter registration systems nationwide.
“We received word that this message is moving forward,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote of the effort last year.
The Independent requested comment from True the Vote.
Tuesday’s filing also comes more than six months after the Supreme Court allowed DOGE access to Social Security data while a decision by a federal appeals court is pending.
The latest filing also reveals that DOGE shared data on unapproved “third party” servers with the potential to access sensitive information, an 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 Department of Justice.
Cloudflare is not endorsed by the agency, which has yet to “determine exactly what data [was] shared with Cloudflare or if the data still exists on the server,” according to Shapiro.
And while the agency insists 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 on 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 about 1,000 people in the Social Security systems, the DOJ said.
“For now it is not known if there is [private information] was accessed,” according to Justice Department official Elizabeth Shapiro.
Musk previously labeled the nation’s retirement program a ‘Ponzi scheme’ as he used DOGE across the government to cut spending and lay off workers (AFP via Getty Images)
Through the US DOGE Service — which Trump repurposed from the US Government Service’s internal technology team — Musk intended to find “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, specifically targeting the nation’s largest retirement program.
He branded it a “Ponzi scheme.”
Two labor unions and a group of lawyers 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.
Disclosures filed with the government’s top ethics office last year alleged that a DOGE team had uploaded a copy of the agency’s data for virtually every American to a vulnerable cloud server.
The data included addresses, dates of birth and other sensitive information that could be used to steal identities.
The whistleblower disclosure by Charles Borges, the agency’s now-former chief data officer, accuses DOGE staff of copying a live dataset without any security measures or independent oversight in place.
His statement echoes earlier warnings from watchdog groups and lawsuits that have tried to block the group of young engineers founded by Musk from wreaking havoc across federal agencies.