DOGE Mishandling of Critical Data Brings Country to Edge of ‘Catastrophe’
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee released a report titled “Unchecked and Unaccountable: How DOGE Jeopardizes Americans’ Data Without Regard for Law and Congress.” The report, based on whistleblower testimony and oversight visits to several federal agencies, reveals that DOGE operates in the dark outside of any accountability to the agencies they’re supposed to answer to.
The report also notes that DOGE staffers were involved in uploading the personal information of more than 300 million Americans from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to a vulnerable digital cloud, and that the potential breach of this cloud could force the government to reissue every single Social Security Number across the entire country. More specifically, “an internal SSA risk assessment determined that the likelihood of a data breach with ‘catastrophic adverse effect” is between 35 and 65 percent,” and that this risk included “fatalities to individuals.”
In response, Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert issued the following statement:
“Public Citizen has been warning about the unlawful and harmful conduct of DOGE from day one, but now we know just how close they’ve brought our entire economy, and possibly the lives of Americans, to the brink of utter devastation. While the Trump administration’s disregard for the wellbeing of America is evident in just about every policy decision Trump takes, this revelation presents a punctuated moment of urgency where DOGE has to be reined in, and immediate action must be taken to secure the private data of our citizens. Every moment’s delay is a gamble we can’t afford to take.”