Democratic House lawmakers are calling for a criminal investigation and congressional action into the Department of Government Efficiency after court filings showed that DOGE may have misused Social Security data.
Rep. John B. Larson of Connecticut, ranking Democrat on the House Social Security subcommittee, along with Democratic Reps. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts and Joe Morelle of New York, also called for the courts to revisit the decisions that allowed DOGE to access the Social Security systems.
“This is a crime. This needs the fullest investigation across all committee jurisdictions,” Mr. Larson said at a news conference Thursday. “We are going to demand subpoenas and demand accountability.”
Court filings revealed that DOGE employees were in touch with a political advocacy group, and one signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with the unnamed group whose aim was to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in [a] certain state” that may have given access to Social Security Administration data to match with state voter rolls.
The SSA told the courts it did not know about the agreement.
The filing was a part of a list of “corrections” submitted to the case from last year over DOGE’s access to SSA data. It aimed to clarify that statements made by SSA officials were thought to be true at the time.
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“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,’” the filing said. “This agreement was not reviewed or approved through the agency’s data exchange procedures. SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025.”
The filing also noted it’s unclear whether the SSA data was actually shared with the group, only that emails reviewed by the administration “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”
“It’s hard to believe this is where we are – our government signed an agreement to share Americans’ highly sensitive private information with a MAGA-affiliated group,” Mr. Morelle said at the conference. “That should stop everyone cold.”
Another correction said that SSA found that Steve Davis, a senior adviser to then-DOGE leader Elon Musk and the team, was copied on a March 2025 email that contained a password-protected file that is believed to have information “derived from SSA systems.”
SSA doesn’t know whether Mr. Davis accessed the file.
Another correction in the filing said DOGE employees shared SSA data through a non-secure third party server called Cloudflare.
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“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” the filing said. “SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.”
Mr. Larson and Mr. Neal called for the DOGE employees to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for these abhorrent violations of the public trust.”
“We have been warning about privacy violations at Social Security and calling out Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ for months,” Mr. Larson and Mr. Neal said in a joint statement Tuesday.
The filings said SSA referred both DOGE employees for possible violations of the Hatch Act, which restricts civil service employees in the executive branch from engaging in political activity.
