Top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee Ron Wyden (Ore.) blasted the DOGE cost-cutting panel following a whistleblower report that alleged Americans’ financial and personal information was put on an unsecured cloud server.
He called it “a clear example of how the Trump administration is playing fast and loose with Americans’ most sensitive personal information.”
“[President] Trump and DOGE’s reckless treatment of Social Security data jeopardizes the financial security and personal safety of every single American,” Wyden said.
The whistleblower report was from Chuck Borges, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) chief data officer.
It said he had “become aware through reports to him of serious data security lapses, evidently orchestrated by DOGE officials, currently employed as SSA employees, that risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”
That data was allegedly put on a cloud server that lacks any security oversight from the Social Security Administration and doesn’t have a tracking function to see who could be accessing or copying the data.
The unsecured information includes names, birthdays, places of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, parents’ names, addresses, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers.
An SSA spokesperson told The Hill that the agency takes all whistleblower complaints seriously, that all data is secured, and that the “data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet.”
There are multiple lawsuits alleging privacy violations of agency records involving DOGE.