A whistleblower has alleged that a former employee at the Department of Government Efficiency claimed he had access to two highly sensitive Social Security databases and planned to share the information with his private employer.
The Social Security Administration's Office of Inspector General has launched an investigation into the complaint and alerted members of Congress to its existence, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The Post cited a letter it reviewed from the acting inspector general to top members of four congressional committees.
The inspector general's office has also shared the disclosure with the Government Accountability Office, which has been conducting its own audit of DOGE's access to Social Security data.
The Post reported it reviewed the complaint and spoke with the whistleblower, who issued the complaint anonymously for fear of retaliation.
Jessica Baxter, a GAO spokeswoman, confirmed in an email to the Post that the GAO's review is ongoing and did not provide a timeline for when a report would be issued.
The Post did not name the former DOGE member or his private employer because it has not independently confirmed the accusations in the complaint.
The whistleblower filed the complaint in January. When the Post contacted the Social Security Administration and the company that month, both said they had not heard of the complaint.
Both later said they looked into the allegations and did not find evidence to confirm the claims. The company said it conducted a "thorough" two-day internal investigation and concluded the assertions were unsubstantiated.
Reached this week, both declined further comment.
The complaint stated the former DOGE software engineer, who worked at the federal agency last year before joining a government contractor in October, allegedly told co-workers he possessed two tightly restricted databases of U.S. citizens' information and had at least one on a thumb drive.
The databases, Numident and the "Master Death File," contain records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, birth information, citizenship status, race, ethnicity, and parents' names.
The complaint does not include specific dates when he is said to have told colleagues this information, but at least one of the alleged events occurred around early January, according to the complaint. While working at DOGE, the engineer had been granted access to Social Security data.
The engineer allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive "to his personal computer so that he could 'sanitize' the data before using it at [the company]."
He told colleagues that once he removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it to the company's systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal.
The complaint does not allege that the engineer was successful in uploading the data to the company's systems.
An attorney representing the former DOGE employee told the Post his client denied all alleged wrongdoing.
Social Security Administration spokesman Barton Mackey told the Post in a statement before the inspector general's office launched its investigation that "[t]he allegation by a singular anonymous source has been found to be false based on evidence and investigations by all involved."
When asked about the whistleblower complaint, Leland Dudek, who served as acting commissioner during the early stages of DOGE's work, said he was unaware of the details of the allegations but that such actions would violate agency rules governing government data sharing.
"Sharing Numident data with unauthorized third parties, whether via the cloud or a personal thumb drive, violates the law," Dudek said.
A separate complaint filed in August by the agency's former chief data officer, Charles Borges, alleged that members of DOGE improperly uploaded copies of Americans' Social Security data to the cloud, putting individuals' private information at risk, according to the Post.
In January, the Trump administration acknowledged DOGE staffers were responsible for separate data breaches at the agency, including sharing data through an unapproved third-party service and that one DOGE staffer signed an agreement to share data with an unnamed political group aiming to overturn election results in several states.
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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