Two employees of Elon Musk's DOGE team, who worked at the US Social Security Administration (SSA), may have illegally used the agency's private data for political purposes, including cross-referencing data with state voter lists, the US Department of Justice said in new court documents. This was reported by Politico, writes UNN.
Details
As noted by senior DOJ official Elizabeth Shapiro, the SSA referred both DOGE employees for investigation into possible violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their official authority for political purposes.
Documents show that DOGE team members communicated with an advocacy group that sought to "overturn election results in certain states." One employee signed an agreement that could have involved using SSA data to verify voter lists
Shapiro added that it is currently unknown whether DOGE employees transferred data to the advocacy group, but emails indicate that they may have been asked to do so. It was also found that some SSA data was stored on a third-party Cloudflare server, which did not comply with the agency's security protocols.
The documents emphasize that cases of potential data misuse are limited to DOGE team members only, and other SSA employees were unaware of these actions.