DOGE employee stole Social Security data and stored it on thumb drive, report says

A former employee of Elon Musk’s Office of Government Efficiency reportedly stole Americans’ personal data from the U.S. Social Security Administration and stored it on thumb drives, according to a whistleblower report reported by the Washington Post.

The former DOGE software engineer told colleagues at his new job that he had “two highly restricted databases of U.S. citizen information” that he intended to use at his new company, according to the report. It added that the Social Security Administration’s inspector general is investigating the whistleblower complaint.

The former DOGE employee, whose name was not disclosed by The Washington Post, worked for the Social Security Administration last year. Then in October, he left to work for a government contractor, where he told colleagues he had obtained two databases called “Numident” and “Master Death File,” the Post reported. The database could contain the records of “more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, location and date of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names,” the researchers said.

The man also reportedly claimed that he previously had unlimited “god-level” access to SSA’s systems.

A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration, which is still under DOGE control, denied that former employees stole data on Americans. A spokesperson said the Washington Post is “desperate for clicks and wants to publish fake news to scare older people.” Office of the Inspector General. The company, which is independent from the Trump administration, did not respond to requests for comment.

This is the latest incident of alleged compromise of Americans’ personal data related to intrusions into DOGE and the Social Security Administration. In January, two DOGE members allegedly accessed and shared prohibited Social Security numbers in support of an advocacy group aimed at “overturning election results in certain states,” according to the complaint.

Last year, another whistleblower within the agency said DOGE members uploaded hundreds of millions of Social Security records to vulnerable cloud servers, putting Americans at risk. Also last year, a judge blocked DOGE’s access to the SSA system, accusing Musk’s agency of seeking fraud and “essentially engaging in a fishing expedition.”

After President Trump took office last year, several DOGE members were installed at the Social Security Administration. According to the Washington Post, DOGE had at least a dozen employees, most of them technical staff or engineers, but their actual roles and activities were not communicated to the rest of the staff.