Back in March, Social Security officials swore to a federal judge that members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team never had access to individuals’ personal information held at the agency, and certainly could not have misused it even if they had.
The Social Security Administration has now taken all that back.
The agency also admitted in its filing that two members of the DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration had contact with a political advocacy group seeking to overturn election results in several states, and that one signed a secret agreement to share Social Security data with the group.
This in itself sounds like a joke. The Hatch Act is one of our most toothless federal statutes. Violators face nothing more serious than firing, reduction in salary grade, a ban on federal employment for up to five years, suspension, reprimand or a fine of up to $1,000. Since the DOGE staffers may already have left their government jobs, what would they care?
“This week’s revelations are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, who urged Congress to launch an investigation. “We need to know exactly who has our data and what they are doing with it.”
The [Administration’s] “corrections” document bristles with lawyerly dodges asserting that agency officials were telling the truth, as they knew it, when they denied that DOGE was rummaging through private data… The government basically contends that willfully turning a blind eye to something you know is going on is tantamount to not knowing. That won’t do.
The latest filing demolishes the timeworn claim that DOGE was infiltrated into Social Security in order to responsibly ferret out fraud and overspending. In truth, Musk and his DOGE minions mined Social Security data possibly for private purposes, while working to undermine confidence in the program.
As for what steps Social Security officials are taking to retrieve personal data that DOGE may have sent into the world, the filing says only that “a review of the SSA DOGE Team’s actions is ongoing.”
There is no excuse for the dereliction of duty by Social Security officials in all this. Bisignano’s appointment as commissioner provoked misgivings about his suitability for the job among Social Security advocates.
His silence about the latest disclosures, unfortunately, speaks volumes, none of them good. If people can’t trust Social Security to keep their privacy inviolate, confidence in the entire program may well be shattered. Sadly, that would be consistent with conservatives’ long war against this most popular and important government program, but maybe that’s what Trump has wanted all along.
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