Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.

Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.

Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.

“SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate,” Shapiro wrote, adding “At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement.’”

>https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/20/trump-musk-doge-social-security-00737245