A Catastrophic Risk: Whistleblower Reveals Reckless Handling of 300 Million Social Security Records

5 minutes read time.

In a stunning and deeply alarming disclosure, the Social Security Administration’s own Chief Data Officer has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that political appointees from Elroy Muskrat’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have recklessly endangered the personal information of more than 300 million Americans. The complaint, filed by Charles Borges, a career civil servant and 22-year Navy veteran with a long history of public service at agencies like the CDC, details how DOGE staffers, in a brazen act of ideological arrogance, bypassed critical security protocols to copy the nation’s entire master file of Social Security data to a vulnerable, unsecured cloud server. This is not a story of a simple data breach or a technical error. It is a story of “gross mismanagement” and “abuse of authority,” a scandal that, according to the agency’s own internal risk assessments, poses a “catastrophic” threat to the financial and personal security of nearly every American.

The Smoking Gun: “I Accept All Risks”

The heart of the whistleblower complaint is a series of internal documents, including more than two dozen pages of emails and memos, that paint a damning picture of political ideology trumping basic security competence. According to the complaint, career cybersecurity officials at the Social Security Administration (SSA) explicitly and repeatedly warned against the data transfer. In a formal risk assessment, they stated that “unauthorized access to the NUMIDENT would be considered a catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs.” The Numident file is the crown jewel of government data, a comprehensive database containing the names, birth dates, parents’ names, and addresses of every single person who has ever been issued a Social Security number—more than 548 million records in total. The assessment warned that DOGE wanted “uninhibited” control over the server to “expedite” its work, but had provided no documentation of how it would maintain security, and that as a result, “sensitive data could be made public.”

Despite this explicit “high risk” warning, DOGE-affiliated political appointees at the agency pushed forward. The decision was finalized in a shocking memo from Aram Moghaddassi, the SSA’s Chief Information Officer and a former employee at Musk’s companies X and Neuralink. After being presented with the dire risk assessment, Moghaddassi wrote, “I have determined the business need is higher than the security risk associated with this implementation, and I accept all risks.” This is not just a smoking gun; it is a written confession of a political appointee deliberately and knowingly overriding the warnings of his own career experts. It is a decision the whistleblower’s complaint alleges constitutes a “violation of law, rules, and regulations” and a “substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.”

A History of Conflict and a Pattern of Recklessness

This reckless act was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of a months-long power struggle between Musk’s tech-focused DOGE and the career officials at the SSA. For months, DOGE had sought unfettered access to the agency’s most sensitive data, advancing false claims of widespread fraud in Social Security programs to justify their intrusion. The conflict became so intense that it led to the ousting of the previous acting SSA commissioner, Michelle King, who had stood in their way. After a Supreme Court ruling in June cleared the way for DOGE to access the data, they immediately moved to create their own copy on a private cloud server, one that, according to the whistleblower, lacks the “independent security, monitoring, and oversight” required for such sensitive information.

This fits a broader, deeply disturbing pattern of behavior by DOGE across the federal government. The complaint from the SSA’s Chief Data Officer is just the latest in a series of whistleblower disclosures. In April, a separate whistleblower alleged that DOGE officials had improperly taken sensitive data from the National Labor Relations Board and attempted to cover their tracks. Other reports have detailed how DOGE has used government data to advance the administration’s political goals, from immigration enforcement to unsupported claims of voter fraud. This is not a story of a single rogue agency; it is a story of a systemic, politically-driven operation with a wanton disregard for security protocols and the rule of law.

A Self-Inflicted National Security Crisis

While the Social Security Administration has issued a pro forma statement insisting that the data is secure and “walled off from the internet,” the details of the whistleblower complaint paint a far more terrifying picture. The Chief Data Officer of the agency, the man whose job it is to protect this data, was reportedly kept in the dark about the transfer and was stonewalled by the agency’s legal counsel when he began to ask questions. His complaint warns that a breach of this unsecured server could be so catastrophic that the government “may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost.”

This is a national security crisis of the highest order, and it is entirely self-inflicted. It is the predictable result of a political project that prioritizes ideological loyalty over professional competence and sees government data not as a sacred public trust, but as a resource to be exploited. The alarm has been sounded by a credible and courageous insider. “He would not risk his career and the job that he is very passionate about if he did not think that this was a huge security risk for the American public,” his attorney stated. The question now is whether Congress will act with the urgency this “catastrophic” threat demands.