In a bizarre court filing last week, the Justice Department conceded that in March 2025, two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team who were working at the Social Security Administration were in touch with an advocacy group that hoped to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”
The DOJ says in the filing that one of these DOGE staffers signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with the advocacy group, and may have sought to use Social Security data to analyze state voter rolls as a way to search for instances of voter fraud.
“[A] political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired,” the filing says. “The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”
“In connection with these communications, one of the DOGE team members signed a ‘Voter Data Agreement,’ in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group,” the filing reads. “He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.”
The filing, dated Jan. 16, 2026, was first flagged by Politico Tuesday. The filing is a correction to the record, revising a March declaration by SSA’s then-chief information officer describing the scope and objectives of DOGE’s work. The filing seems to be an effort to correct the omission of these two employees’ actions.
It’s unclear exactly what came from the DOGE employees’ contact with the advocacy group.
“Email communications reviewed by SSA suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls, but SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group,” the filing states in a footnote.
SSA made two Hatch Act Referrals to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in December for these violations, the filing states.
The DOJ noted in its filing that, as it stands now, 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.’”
“SSA first learned about this agreement during a review unrelated to this case in November 2025,” it states.
These recent filings contradict earlier statements from the SSA that asserted that the agency has “IT safeguards to ensure no private or commercial servers have been integrated with SSA systems,” an omission the filing appears to acknowledge.
The employees and the advocacy group in question are not named. The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
