DOGE-linked engineer allegedly copied Social Security databases to thumb drive

A former staffer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is alleged to have copied Social Security Administration data onto a thumb drive, including two databases that can contain records for more than 500 million living and dead people. TechCrunch, citing a whistleblower complaint reported by The Washington Post, says the engineer later told co-workers at a government contractor that he still “possessed” the files and planned to use them at his new job. The SSA inspector general is investigating, according to the report.

The episode lands on top of earlier allegations tied to DOGE’s rapid insertion into the SSA after Donald Trump took office. TechCrunch notes that in January two DOGE members were suspected of accessing and sharing Social Security numbers that were off limits to them, and that a separate whistleblower last year said DOGE staff uploaded hundreds of millions of records to a vulnerable cloud server. A judge also previously blocked DOGE from accessing SSA systems, describing the effort as a “fishing expedition” for fraud.

The pattern is familiar in Washington: a political project is sold as “efficiency,” the agency receives outsiders with broad technical privileges, and the ordinary controls that make accountability legible—clear roles, audit trails, segregation of duties—arrive late or not at all. The bureaucratic instinct then is to respond not with transparency but with a tighter internal perimeter: fewer people allowed to see what happened, more secrecy around systems, and more pressure on staff who raise objections. That can reduce public scrutiny while leaving the same underlying problem untouched: too many hands on high-trust systems, and too little clarity about who bears the cost when something goes wrong.

The economic logic is straightforward. The upside of aggressive “cleanup” work accrues to the political sponsors who can claim a win; the downside of a data breach is dispersed across citizens who now face identity theft risk for years. The contractor ecosystem benefits either way—first through rushed modernization work, then through remediation, monitoring and security spending. Meanwhile the public sector’s most valuable datasets remain attractive targets precisely because they are centralized, difficult to change, and used as identity anchors across banking, healthcare and benefits.

TechCrunch reports the former employee claimed to have had “God-level” access to SSA systems. If that description is even partly accurate, the most consequential detail is not the thumb drive but the access model that made it plausible in the first place.