Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data(www.politico.com)
115 pointsby mdhb18 days ago10 comments
  • montroser18 days ago
    > 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.

    • CamperBob217 days ago
      Wreckless incompetence at the highest levels of government

      You mean reckless incompetence. There was plenty of wrecking.

  • N_Lens17 days ago
    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.
  • antiochIst15 days ago
    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-...
  • LastTrain16 days ago
    Why is this flagged? It is a security breach.
    • soco16 days ago
      There might be a population overlap, or at least ideology overlap, between doge and hn.
  • bediger400018 days ago
    Wow this is bad. Will there be any accountability?
    • jfengel17 days ago
      According to the OSC:

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

      Violations are sent to the President for disciplinary action.

      So, no.

      • JumpCrisscross17 days ago
        Which in practice means he has (more) lackeys loyal to him on pain of criminal prosecution.
    • JumpCrisscross18 days ago
      > 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.

      • toomanyrichies17 days ago
        Not only will there be no punitive action taken by this admin, but I fully expect Trump to extend the current flurry of lame-duck pardons to most if not all members of his administration, for any and all actions they may have taken, before his term is out.

        I hope I’m wrong, but in his 5 years as President he has yet to display any hint of restraint or ethical compass, so I would be very surprised if this doesn’t happen.

        EDIT: “to punitive action” => “no punitive action”

        • galleywest20017 days ago
          Surely they must have committed some state crimes, which are not pardonable by the president.
        • JumpCrisscross17 days ago
          > I fully expect Trump to extend the current flurry of lame-duck pardons to most if not all members of his administration

          I expect he will. At that point, Biden will have pardoned his son for felony gun and tax crimes, as well as pioneered the preëmptive pardon, while Trump will have pardoned violent insurrections, drug lords, fraudsters and his corrupt inner circle. If that isn’t enough to build consensus on striking pardon power from the Constitution entirely, I don’t know what will be.

          • CamperBob217 days ago
            Question: what kind of father would fail to protect his son from an endless bullshit performative Republican inquisition that we all know would have happened?
            • simmerup16 days ago
              Especially considering Trump is an obvious vindictive, narcissistic bully who would love to torment Biden
              • CamperBob216 days ago
                Exactly, that's my point. It's silly to play the game in good faith when you know damned well that you're the only one doing so. At the time Biden promised not to pardon his son, it still seemed vanishingly unlikely that we'd re-elect Trump, and in fact he hadn't even been nominated yet.

                So many things changed between June and December 2024. The country's wheels came off, and the undercarriage dragged on the road and caught fire.

          • tzs16 days ago
            Several presidents have given preemptive pardons before Biden: Ford, Carter, the first Bush, and Trump in his first term.
          • 15 days ago
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    • defrost17 days ago
      Pam Bondi's already tasked with assembling a crack team of WWW legal interns to gaslight and ignore the issue as we type.
  • banga17 days ago
    The dogs of DOGE Whining for relevance Shit on everything
  • mdhb18 days ago
    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.
  • antibull18 days ago
    [dead]
  • donkey_brains17 days ago
    Wow, this is bad. Almost as bad as that time Hunter Biden got his laptop stolen am I right?

    /s