Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data

[JohnTHaller]

Link for when flagged: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/20/trump-musk-doge-soc...

[montroser]

> Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”

Wreckless incompetence at the highest levels of government.

[CamperBob2]

Wreckless incompetence at the highest levels of government

You mean reckless incompetence. There was plenty of wrecking.

[N_Lens]

I think there's an unprecedented level of lawbreaking and disregard for consequences by this administration. So far they haven't been held to account, it remains to be seen if they ever will.

[antiochIst]

You can track how this story spread from CNN at 3:32 PM as first to report, then whistleblower.org, peters.senate.gov, and eventually scienceblog.com and democracydocket.com. Yandori shows 54 sources picked it up with 48 citations: https://yandori.io/news-flow/story/2026-01-20-9734134-trump-...

[LastTrain]

Why is this flagged? It is a security breach.

[soco]

There might be a population overlap, or at least ideology overlap, between doge and hn.

[bediger4000]

Wow this is bad. Will there be any accountability?

[jfengel]

According to the OSC:

https://osc.gov/Documents/Public%20Files/Press%20Release/OSC...

Violations are sent to the President for disciplinary action.

So, no.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Will there be any accountability?

FTA: "SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act."

Probably nothing under this administration. But there is a paper trail–now cited in public–for folks in the future to pursue.

In the meantime, I'm curious what civil damages they may be liable for.

[defrost]

Pam Bondi's already tasked with assembling a crack team of WWW legal interns to gaslight and ignore the issue as we type.

[banga]

The dogs of DOGE Whining for relevance Shit on everything

[mdhb]

Because the headline underplays it quite a bit the actual story here is that the Social Security Administration has referred two DOGE employees for Hatch Act violations after discovering contacts with a political group seeking SSA data to overturn election results.

[dang]

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700527.

[JumpCrisscross]

> a political group seeking SSA data to overturn election results

Guesses as to what they were looking for?

[donkey_brains]

Wow, this is bad. Almost as bad as that time Hunter Biden got his laptop stolen am I right?

/s