Two people brought into the Social Security Administration under President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force have been referred to the Justice Department for allegedly conspiring to give sensitive agency information to a group trying to prove election fraud conspiracy theories.
According to Politico, "Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes."
"Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of 'corrections' to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data," said the report. "They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved 'third-party' servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time."
“At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement,’” Shapiro wrote in a filing.
The name of the "election integrity group" these employees were working with is not identified in the document, and Shapiro did not clarify whether this group actually got its hands on SSA data.
DOGE was a pet project of tech billionaire Elon Musk, which was tasked with identifying waste and fraud in federal agencies and saving taxpayers money. The project brought in a number of outside people who effectively did an end-run around standard federal government hiring practices, and triggered a flurry of lawsuits over their access to confidential data.
Ultimately, DOGE helped dismantle a number of important public programs like the U.S. Agency for International Development, but didn't actually reduce government spending or identify any meaningful fraud. Musk left the Trump administration amid a furious fight with the president over tax policy, but remains an active megadonor in GOP campaigns.