Trump Ordered Agencies to Open Their Records to DOGE. Safeguards Failed at Treasury and Social Security.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) keeps bank information, tax records and medical histories on nearly everyone in the United States.¹ When DOGE demanded sweeping access to those files, a standoff followed and career officials resigned.¹ In February 2025, President Donald Trump named a new acting commissioner, who granted it.² The next month, the agency's DOGE staff shared data through a third-party server it had not approved.³ The agency later told a court it could not determine exactly what they shared, or whether the data were still there.³

It began with an order. On January 20, 2025, Trump signed the order that created DOGE and directed agency heads to give it "full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems."⁴ The same order required rigorous data protection.⁴ The charge is that Trump opened protected federal records to an operation he created, that agencies failed to enforce the safeguards, and that people's information left the systems meant to protect it.⁴⁵³

Trump Installed the Official Who Approved Access

Tiffany Flick, the agency's former acting chief of staff, described the demand in a sworn declaration that a federal judge recounted in her opinion.² DOGE's representative, Flick said, repeatedly insisted on access to everything, including source code, but never supplied the detail SSA normally required to justify it.² Anti-fraud reviews, she said, normally begin with anonymized data and expose identities only for the records investigators find suspicious, not for everyone at once.² Flick also said SSA supplied an anonymized Numident file, but its expedited preparation produced technical glitches; DOGE officials then demanded full access without waiting for SSA to resolve them.² Numident is SSA's file of Social Security card applications; it includes names, birth dates, citizenship and Social Security numbers.⁶ Of roughly 57,000 SSA employees, Flick said, only thirty to forty had access as broad as DOGE sought, and those employees were highly trained.²

A federal appeals court later summarized what happened next.¹

AFSCME v. SSA, No. 25-1411, Part I¹

A standoff ensued, and career officials resigned. A new acting administrator was installed and granted DOGE the sweeping access it sought.

The new administrator was Leland Dudek. The district court's opinion records that Trump selected him on or about February 16, 2025, after Michelle King's resignation, and that Dudek approved the data access.² King, Flick said, had asked why full access was necessary and received no answer; she then received a White House email announcing that the President had named Dudek.² Flick understood that Dudek was on administrative leave, and Senator Elizabeth Warren's March letter cited reports that the leave concerned an investigation into his sharing unauthorized access with DOGE.²⁷

The Government Corrected Its Assurances

On January 16, 2026, SSA corrected what it had told the court about DOGE's data access, calling the newly identified actions potentially outside its policies or noncompliant with the court's order.³

The unapproved server was Cloudflare.³ From March 7 through March 17, 2025, DOGE staff used links to share data through it, outside SSA's security protocols.³

The access also outlasted a court order. On the morning of March 24, 2025, four days after the judge issued a temporary restraining order against it, a DOGE team member searched personal information in Numident.³ SSA reported cutting off DOGE's access to personal information around noon, before filing its declaration of compliance that day.³

Separately, a political advocacy group contacted two SSA DOGE staffers seeking analysis of state voter rolls to find voter fraud and overturn election results in certain States.³ One signed a voter-data agreement in his capacity as an SSA employee and sent it to the group on March 24, 2025, without the agency's review or approval.³ SSA made two Hatch Act referrals to the Office of Special Counsel in December 2025; its filing reported no evidence that SSA data had been shared with the group.³

Whistleblower Accounts: Living People Marked Dead, a Database Copied

Sharing records was not the only thing done with them. In a sworn disclosure, former SSA associate commissioner Jeremiah Schofield said officials marked more than 6,000 living people dead for immigration enforcement after career staff refused.⁸ The accompanying complaint attributes the directive to SSA's then-chief information officer, a former member of its DOGE team, and says the entries were later removed.⁸ Schofield also described refusing a later Department of Homeland Security request to mark 2.7 million people dead; his account does not show that the larger plan was carried out.⁸

A second whistleblower's allegation concerns Numident itself. In an August 26, 2025 disclosure, Charles Borges, then SSA's chief data officer, alleged that DOGE personnel created a live copy of the database without independent security oversight or tracking of who accessed it.⁶ The complaint places the copy inside SSA's own Amazon Web Services infrastructure, not on the Cloudflare server.⁶³

Borges's complaint says copying the data is not inherently dangerous when proper controls exist; his allegation is that the independent controls were missing.⁶ The government's response, recounted in Judge Robert King's dissent in the SSA appeal, was that no evidence showed the Numident data had actually been compromised.¹ King added that Borges could not tell either way, because he was locked out of the DOGE-controlled cloud server.¹

The Spreadsheet That Left Treasury

At Treasury, a documented failure came ten days after Trump signed the order.⁴⁵ The department's Bureau of the Fiscal Service disbursed over $6 trillion in fiscal year 2025.⁹ That was more than 88% of all federal payments.⁹ On January 30, 2025, a Treasury DOGE employee emailed two DOGE staffers at the General Services Administration a spreadsheet of names and payment amounts for over 350 people USAID had paid, employees and private individuals among them, without the required encryption or approval.⁵ The password traveled in the same email as the file.⁵

Treasury's inspector general confirmed the transfer in an audit dated June 8, 2026, and found that the department's data-loss-prevention tools failed to stop it.⁹ Bureau officials called the disclosure low risk because the file held no Social Security numbers, addresses or birth dates.⁵ The Government Accountability Office (GAO) could not obtain documentation showing that the Privacy Officer had agreed.⁵ The inspector general also found contradictory guidance on when low-risk personal information required encryption and approval, warning that users may not know the steps needed to send it outside the agency.⁹

Judge Jeannette Vargas found that Treasury gave its DOGE team access through a process that "was rushed and undertaken under political pressure."¹⁰

What the Audits Found, and What They Did Not

The court reported that DOGE engineer Marko Elez mistakenly received permission to change Treasury's payment-certification database.¹⁰ GAO found no evidence of changes to system data, and the inspector general found that an unnamed employee's mistaken write access went unused.⁵⁹ The accounts give different dates: the court described Elez's mistaken write permission on February 5, 2025, while the inspector general dated the unnamed employee's permission to January 31 and its correction to February 1.¹⁰⁹ The inspector general also found generally adequate access and payment controls, alongside weaknesses and improper payments, and no evidence of administrative or criminal violations constituting fraud in its audit.⁹

GAO found that the bureau had fully implemented only five of 14 selected security controls for overseeing users with broad access.⁵ The employee who sent the spreadsheet left without completing security training or signing the bureau's IT security rules.⁵ Bureau officials said the employee left within the 60-day training period; GAO warned that the employee had already received access to sensitive payment systems.⁵ Neither Treasury nor the bureau conducted an exit interview or obtained the employee's acknowledgment of the duty to protect data after leaving.⁵ As of September 2026, Treasury had implemented none of GAO's six April recommendations to repair those weaknesses.¹¹

At USAID, the government's answer to an employee lawsuit admits that the agency authorized two DOGE staffers to access its unclassified systems, that security officials attempted to restrict that access, and that USAID placed its security director and deputy on administrative leave.¹²¹³ The government says the officials refused lawful instructions and were put on leave for insubordination, lack of candor with senior leadership and lost confidence in their ability to do their jobs; the lawsuit was still in discovery in October 2026.¹²¹⁴

More Than 23 Systems, Incomplete Records

At six more agencies, GAO reported on September 29, 2026, the auditors could not establish what access DOGE had.¹¹ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Education Department, NOAA and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said DOGE teams had access to more than 23 systems handling such work as contracts, personnel and finances.¹¹ Their records were insufficient for GAO to determine the extent and level of that access.¹¹ The Small Business Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs did not supply the information identifying which systems DOGE accessed.¹¹

The missing records also kept GAO from determining whether agencies implemented security controls and DOGE staff followed the rules.¹¹ The consumer bureau and the SEC reported no DOGE-related cybersecurity or privacy incidents, but did not give GAO the system access it needed to verify compliance.¹¹

The Small Business Administration supplied no explanation, and Veterans Affairs told GAO it would neither provide the requested information nor give a reason.¹¹ The other four cited redundant or disruptive requests, ongoing litigation, confidentiality, or a dispute over GAO's authority to conduct the review; GAO answered that it had statutory authority to obtain the records.¹¹ The consumer bureau called the report misleading and inaccurate, and GAO stood by its findings.¹¹

The Defense and the Court Victories

Trump's order displaced prior executive orders and regulations that could obstruct DOGE's access, insofar as he could amend them directly.⁴ The strongest defense is that the same order required access to be consistent with law, and that the Privacy Act permits disclosure to agency employees who need records for legitimate duties, including modernization and fraud detection.⁴¹⁵² SSA said DOGE staff were agency employees who received privacy and ethics training and needed identifying information, and that anonymizing the data would obstruct or slow their work.² Judge Ellen Hollander, who heard the Social Security case, rejected speed in a preliminary ruling as a reason to bypass privacy protections when anonymized data were a viable alternative.² Dudek said the SSA DOGE team was addressing fraud costing up to $521 billion annually; Hollander noted that GAO's estimate covered the entire federal government, not SSA alone.² Senators Blumenthal and Warren wrote in June 2026 that DOGE's government-wide efforts "never realized even a small fraction" of the $50 billion in fraud savings a whistleblower says its team sought at SSA.⁸

At Treasury, the administration won substantial relief.¹⁶¹⁷ Vargas restricted DOGE's access on February 21, 2025, finding the States that sued likely to prevail on their claim that Treasury had acted arbitrarily and capriciously by failing to consider the privacy and security problems the access created.¹⁰ But she found most of the States' statutory claims unlikely to succeed and later allowed five vetted DOGE staffers into Treasury's systems.¹⁰¹⁶ Future staff could also gain access after satisfying the required training, vetting and mitigation procedures, without another judicial determination.¹⁶ She closed the case on September 23, 2026: the team had disbanded, the court found no continuing harm that kept the access claims alive, and the States had not plausibly alleged a final agency action or any specific funding paused by automated payment review.¹⁷

At Social Security, Hollander restricted DOGE access to identifying SSA data on April 17, 2025 as a likely Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act violation and ordered the personal data returned and deleted.² The Supreme Court allowed access to resume in June 2025, applying stay factors that included the government's likelihood of success.¹⁸ The Fourth Circuit removed the injunction on April 10, 2026; its lead opinion said later damages or a corrective order could remedy the privacy harm.¹ The court also held that the plaintiffs could sue over the privacy intrusion, and Judge Heytens wrote that the government's later acknowledgments "are alarming and raise serious questions about its earlier conduct before the district court."¹ He left them for the lower court to consider.¹ The case continues: in June 2026, Hollander rejected the argument that it should end, and the public docket checked on October 10 lists no later merits ruling.¹⁹²⁰

None of these rulings finally decided whether the access complied with the Privacy Act.¹⁷¹⁸¹ The answer to the defense is the conduct: legitimate duties do not excuse sending protected payment information without approval or using an unapproved server outside SSA's security protocols.⁵³

Access to Public Records Is a Public Trust

DOGE's temporary organization terminated on July 4, 2026, the date Trump's order had fixed; GAO distinguished that expiration from the broader U.S. DOGE Service, which the order did not terminate.⁴¹¹ Treasury's team no longer existed by its July 2026 declaration, which identified two former members still in senior federal posts: Samuel Corcos as Treasury's chief information officer and Todd Newnam as the IRS's chief financial officer.²¹ GAO left open whether DOGE work continued through other staff.¹¹

Article II makes abuse of presidential office answerable through impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors, offenses Hamilton described as "the abuse or violation of some public trust."²²²³ The House Judiciary Committee's second Nixon impeachment article charged an effort to obtain confidential tax-return information for purposes not authorized by law.²⁴

Trump signed the order that created DOGE, directed agencies to open their systems to it and required protection of the data.⁴ At SSA he installed Dudek, who approved the sweeping access.² The impeachment charge is abuse of public trust: opening Americans' protected records to a presidential operation through processes that failed to enforce safeguards, exposed information and left Congress unable to verify protection.^4105311 The court victories limit the remedies obtained. They do not change what was done with information people entrusted to their government.¹⁷¹⁵³