DOGE has all of your personal information and Republicans don't care to know why

A social security whistleblower says “the risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is significant.”

Mar 13, 2025

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Closed captioning catches a line from Rep. John Larson at yesterday’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing.

There’s a lot of news in today’s edition of American Doom, but there’s even more coming down the pike. This feels like the beginning of my time looking into election deniers working as local election officials, which resulted in bombshell after bombshell for years, blowing up in a big way at this newsletter and Rolling Stone in the final months of the 2024 election. If you want to support all the work I’m doing and directly fund independent, confrontational journalism that will hold the Trump administration, Elon Musk, DOGE and congressional Republicans accountable, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom or dropping a few dollars into our Coffee Fund. Now, on to the news…

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Yesterday, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee killed efforts by Democrats to learn more about what Elon Musk’s DOGE is doing inside government agencies.

Democrats had introduced two resolutions demanding information from the White House and DOGE about what Musk’s teams are doing inside the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Treasury Department. Republicans dismissed those resolutions in addition to rebuffing requests for hearings on DOGE’s activities.

There’s a few things going on here. The first is that Democrats and those in-the-know on Social Security—including my sources within the agency—are very concerned that the Trump administration and DOGE are seeking to privatize aspects of the system.

Secondly, there is the obvious matter of no one really knowing what DOGE is doing with all of the data they’ve gained access to. Republicans have been defaulting to talking points about how it’s all going to be fine because DOGE is just looking for waste and fraud. Democrats say Republicans are completely incurious to the matter of why DOGE needs access to things like Treasury Department payment systems—which DOGE apparently took screenshots of, according to remarks yesterday by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas)—or the personal information of every single person in the country who has a Social Security number.

The issue of DOGE’s access to reams of data on everything from private companies, through its Treasury Department data pull, and everyday Americans, through its work at the SSA, has become the subject of enhanced scrutiny by congressional Democrats. So far, Republicans don’t want to play ball at all.

“Musk has accessed, and is attempting to access, the personal and confidential information of our fellow citizens without our knowing the full extent of what data he’s gotten to, what he’s copied, how the data is or will be used by him, and the names, clearance levels and the training of the individuals who access the data,” Doggett said yesterday.

Beyond the very open question of what Musk’s DOGE is doing with all this information on all of us is whether it’s even secure in the hands of Musk’s people, which at the SSA includes a 22-year-old former Meta and Palantir engineer named Akash Bobba. (Not to mention whether they have the clear legal authority to possess this data.)

Concerns about Bobba’s access to and securing of data on hundreds of millions of Americans are at the heart of a deposition filed last week by a 30-year veteran of the SSA. In that deposition, the former SSA worker, Tiffany Flick, said she was “not confident that DOGE associates have the requisite knowledge and training to prevent sensitive information from being inadvertently transferred to bad actors.”

Considering that Bobba had accessed the data outside of an SSA facility, “the protections built into SSA’s data systems may not work,” Flick testified in her deposition. “Others could take pictures of the data, transfer it to other locations, and even feed it into AI programs. In such a chaotic environment, the risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is significant.”

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The former heads of Treasury and the SSA resigned in protest when DOGE demanded access to the data now being argued over in Congress. Rep. John Larson (D-Ct.) has introduced a bill that would protect the personal information in the SSA dataset that DOGE now has access to. Republicans don’t appear willing to support this or other measures that would require the Trump administration and DOGE to disclose more about their operations. (Larson also introduced the resolution of inquiry that would have required Musk and Trump to provide documents and information about their work dismantling government agencies, which Republicans killed yesterday.)

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that DOGE is likely subject to the Freedom of Information Act, thanks to a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Additionally, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is encouraging citizens to file Privacy Act requests with DOGE to learn what private information Musk’s operation may have on them. And on Wednesday night, another federal judge, Tanya Chutkan, ruled that DOGE and Musk have to turn over documents and information related to their work inside the government thanks to a lawsuit brought by 14 Democratic attorneys general.

This is just the beginning of what will be a very interesting few weeks. DOGE has been operating inside scores of federal agencies for nearly two months now. They’ve had virtually no oversight from Congress, and Americans have only been able to learn what Musk’s teams have been doing inside the government by reading lists of contracts and leases that DOGE has cancelled, and hearing from whistleblowers like those in, and close to, the SSA and other agencies, and who have been speaking to reporters like myself.

Now, Democrats in Congress are catching up. It’s a good start to call for hearings to be able to grill people like Musk and his DOGE workers, but it might already be too late. One SSA source wondered to me why Bobba and others needed access to Social Security data in such an “urgent” manner, according to Flick’s deposition. The answer could simply be that DOGE needed the data quickly so they could break Social Security before anyone who could stop them—like congressional Democrats or the courts—and find out what they are up to.

Yesterday’s hearing, Larson’s bills and the dual resolutions that were killed are a beginning of sorts. They’ll likely mark the beginning of Americans’ understanding of everything that DOGE has done up to this point—and if my reporting is any indication, many people won’t be happy about it. That’s because DOGE now has access to personal information tied to every single person in the nation who possesses a Social Security number. More on that, what it means, and who could be harmed by it, is coming soon.

But for now, Republicans don’t want to hear any of it. For now, they’re totally fine with a 22-year-old engineer plucked from obscurity by Musk having access to the personal information of every legal resident in the United States. Or at least, that’s what they said yesterday in the halls of Congress.

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