Two sworn statements filed in federal court late Wednesday show that the SSA has staffed up in recent weeks to include four special government employees and six more DOGE staffers on loan from other departments.
Their mission: detecting waste, fraud and abuse in the nation’s 90-year-old social insurance agency.
[A]t least six DOGE staffers at the agency are working with death data. The Social Security Administration maintains a Master Death File of more than 94 million reported deaths collected from state records and funeral directors.
Other databases being used in the hunt are the Supplemental Security Record, which contains data on disability benefits and Treasury Department payment files. The benefits databases can also contain limited taxpayer information used to calculate eligibility for benefits.
DOGE has access to copies of the databases, limiting the ability to make changes, the agency’s chief technology officer, Michael Russo, said in a sworn statement. There are safeguards to ensure there are no private servers connected to SSA data, he said.
Two DOGE team members also have access to the National Directory of New Hires, a database kept by the Heath and Human Services Departments’ Office of Child Support Services to help states enforce child support orders.
And one Social Security DOGE team member will soon be dispatched to the Small Business Administration.
The court filing also shows how DOGE team members can move around from agency to agency. Six Social Security DOGE staffers are on loan from other agencies, including the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, Labor Department and General Services Administration.
And one comes from the US DOGE Service, the White House agency created by Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order creating the cost-cutting initiative.
Russo’s statement was included in a court filing late Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. The public employees union filed suit against DOGE and the Maryland-based Social Security Administration, trying to block what it calls an “unprecedented data grab.”
“The overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs,” Russo said. “This level of access ensures these employees can review records needed to detect fraud but does not allow them the ability to make any changes to beneficiary data or payment files.”
Neither Russo nor Deputy Commissioner Florence Felix-Lawson, who filed a separate sworn statement, would identify the DOGE staffers by name, “to avoid exposing them to threats and harassment.”
But special government employees and DOGE detailees at the agency include former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners; Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital; and Marko Elez, re-hired by DOGE and sent to Social Security after resigning from the Treasury Department over reports of racist social media posts.
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