Two staffers from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team at the Social Security Administration secretly contacted 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 Social Security efforts reveals that at least one DOGE employee signed an agreement with the activist group that would have involved providing Americans with Social Security information in an effort to match that data with state voter registrations.
That employee signed a “voter data agreement” and gave it to the unnamed group in March 2025. “The advocacy group’s stated purpose 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 Justice Department for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which generally prohibits political activities by federal workers.
It’s unclear whether DOGE employees — none of whom were identified in the 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 to match voter rolls,” according to the Justice Department.
An Elon Musk-backed DOGE effort at Social Security to stamp out “fraud” may also have worked to investigate voter data with an activist group seeking to overturn election results (AFP via Getty Images)
The previously unreported disclosure follows a months-long case in which Donald Trump’s administration and DOGE illegally accessed sensitive information to support politically motivated fraud allegations, including the president’s false claims that millions of dead people were receiving benefits while Musk hacked federal spending and labor.
Although the activist group is not named in the documents, the sequence of events is similar to True the Vote’s public calls for DOGE to investigate voter registration systems nationwide.
“We received word that this message is being carried forward,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote of last year’s effort.
The Independent requested comment from True the Vote.
Tuesday’s filing also comes more than six months after the Supreme Court allowed DOGE to access Social Security data, while a decision by 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 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 a March 2025 email that included a password-protected file containing private information belonging to about 1,000 people on Social Security systems, the DOJ said.
“It is not known at this time 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 deployed DOGE in 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 in-house technology team — Musk plans to find “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, and has specifically targeted the nation’s largest retirement program.
Labeled it a “Ponzi scheme”.
Two unions and an advocacy group sued to block DOGE’s access to private information such as tax records, Social Security numbers, bank information and other data, while a whistleblower at the agency claimed DOGE could have put the personal information of millions of Americans at risk of being breached or hacked.
A disclosure filed with the government’s top ethics office last year alleged that a DOGE team uploaded a copy of the agency’s data on nearly 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 disclosure of the complaint from Charles Borges, now the agency’s former chief data officer, accuses DOGE staff of copying a live data set without independent safeguards or oversight.
His statement underscores previous warnings from watchdog groups and lawsuits that have tried to block the group of young engineers founded by Musk from wreaking havoc on federal agencies.