DOGE accused of duplicating critical Social Security database on unsecured cloud (August 2025)
www.theregister.com

... A Social Security Administration employee has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has put the records of every single American at risk by duplicating an agency database in an unauthorized cloud environment.

It's not just any SSA flunkie making the accusations either. The complaint, filed today by the Government Accountability Project (GAP), comes from the SSA's own chief data officer, Charles Borges, who has been in the position since January, capping off a more than 30 year government IT career that began with 22 years in the US Navy.

DOGE, which is not an official government agency approved by Congress, was established through an executive order from President Trump, and was initially led by Tesla impresario and centibillionaire Elon Musk before the two had a public falling out. Along the way, federal employees and investigators complained that the informal body, which was led and staffed in large part by young Musk acolytes with no government experience, moved aggressively and often without respect for established protocols, congressional oversight and, in some cases, the law.

Most damningly, Borges alleges DOGE took the NUMIDENT database, which "contains all data submitted in an application for a United States Social Security card," and reproduced it in a test cloud environment that wasn't managed by the SSA and was "lacking independent security controls." The database was copied in June, according to the complaint, and the only people who had administrator access to the duplicate were two DOGE employees - not the Division of Infrastructure Services admins that the SSA requires to manage its digital services.

Borges claimed that he received reports that the NUMIDENT copy's cloud environment had "no verified audit or oversight mechanisms," and that no one outside DOGE had insight into any code being executed against the data. ...