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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. 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.

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE's work was intended to "detect fraud, waste and abuse" in Social Security and modernize the agency's technology.

"SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate," Shapiro wrote, adding "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, a longtime DOJ veteran, said it's not yet clear whether either of the two DOGE team members " who are not identified in her filing " actually shared data with the advocacy group, which is also unidentified. But she said emails "suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls."