The Social Security chief data officer who blew the whistle on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, claiming it uploaded 300 million people’s data to the digital cloud in a “serious data security lapse,” has quit the agency.
A bombshell whistleblower report by Charles Borges earlier this week claimed that DOGE put people’s personal information, including addresses, birth dates, and other sensitive data that could be used to steal identities, at risk of being leaked or hacked into.
In a letter to Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, Borges said that he was “involuntarily leaving” his role at the agency, according to The Washington Post.
Borges wrote that new leadership in the technology and executive offices “created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction,” the outlet reports.
His disclosure earlier alleged “systemic data security violations, uninhibited administrative access to highly sensitive production environments, and potential violations” of security protocols and federal privacy laws by DOGE personnel — including Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the 19-year-old at the center of a wave of controversial policies inside the federal government.
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital health care and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost,” according to Borges’ complaint.
As a result of the alleged breach, Borges “no longer felt he could continue to work for the Social Security Administration in good conscience given what he had witnessed,” his attorney, Andrea Meza, said in a statement to the Post.
Borges, a U.S. Navy veteran who began working as the chief data officer at the agency in January, provided more than two dozen pages of emails, memos and other communications outlining how DOGE “potentially violated multiple federal statutes” designed to protect government data.
In response, one of his superiors noted the possibility that the agency might have to re-issue Social Security numbers, according to the complaint.
The findings were shared with the Office of Special Counsel as well as members of Congress by lawyers at the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection group.
Borges had discovered a “disturbing pattern of questionable and risky security access and administrative misconduct that impacts some of the public’s most sensitive data,” according to Meza, who is also director of the project’s campaigns for government accountability.
In a statement to The Independent earlier this week, a spokesperson for the Social Security Administration said commissioner Bisignano and agency personnel “take all whistleblower complaints seriously.”
The agency “stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information,” and the data referenced in the complaint “is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet,” according to the agency.
“High-level” officials have access to that system with oversight by the agency’s Information Security team, according to the agency.
“We are not aware of any compromise to this environment and remain dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data,” the spokesperson said.
