Democracy Dies in Darkness

He accused DOGE of risking Social Security data. It cost him his career.

Charles Borges says Musk’s cost-cutting team uploaded a copy of a mainframe database containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans.

10 min
Former Social Security Administration chief data officer Charles Borges at his home in California, Maryland. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Charles Borges, then chief data officer for the vast Social Security Administration, was alarmed this past summer when he learned that members of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service had copied a mainframe database containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including names, birthdays, addresses and more.

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