Welp. I finally got around to reading the Social Security whistleblower report and, well, if you were worried about DOGE stealing our Social Security numbers - you were right.
Chuck Borges, the Chief Data Officer at the Social Security Administration, has laid it all out in black and white. Borges says DOGE operatives - a team that included 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine - got their hands on the crown jewels: a live copy of the NUMIDENT database, which holds everything tied to your Social Security card. That means names, birthdates, citizenship, race, parents’ names and SSNs, phone numbers and addresses - and Borges warns other SSA data, including health and banking information, could be pulled into the same cloud.
Here’s what he says happened. Back in March, a federal court ordered DOGE cut off from SSA’s data after unions sued over the reckless access Musk’s team was demanding. SSA briefly complied - then, within 24 hours, DOGE insiders had their access restored with even more privileges than before. Borges says this may have violated a federal judge’s restraining order and federal law.
By June, things escalated. Under the leadership of DOGE-aligned CIO Aram Moghaddassi and adviser Michael Russo, the team created a live cloud copy of the entire Social Security database. Not a sanitized test version - a full working duplicate of every American’s record - parked, he says, in a self-administered server environment with no independent oversight. (SSA says its own security team oversees it.) The agency’s own IT security staff flagged it as “very high risk,” warning that a breach would be catastrophic. The warning was overridden - the new CIO signed off that “the business need is higher than the security risk.”
And that’s where Big Balls comes in. Edward Coristine - a teenager the complaint says has a “lengthy history of facilitating, soliciting, or possibly participating in cybercrime,” with a company that owns Russian-registered domains - somehow got high security clearances at SSA. Borges says people like him were granted unrestricted access, bypassing normal approval channels, and even given the ability to edit data in core systems.
So what does this mean? If that cloud copy gets compromised - or misused by insiders - Americans could face identity theft on a scale we’ve never seen. Benefits for seniors could be disrupted. Healthcare and SNAP records could be manipulated. In the worst-case scenario, the government might have to reissue Social Security numbers to everyone - a logistical and financial nightmare.
Borges raised alarms internally, but the SSA’s lawyers reportedly told staff not to answer his questions. That’s why he went public. According to him, right now there is no independent security control over the duplicate database holding the personal information of over 300 million Americans.
The bottom line: the nightmare scenario critics warned about - Trump and Musk’s DOGE operatives taking control of Social Security’s most sensitive data - isn’t hypothetical. It’s already happened. And who knows who has access to it now.
Correction, October 7th, 2026: This post first said Borges called the restored access a flat violation of federal law and the judge’s order - he said it may have violated them. It also said the NUMIDENT database holds medical and financial data (Borges warns other SSA data, including health and banking information, could be pulled into the same cloud), that the security warning was ignored (it was overridden in writing), and that Coristine had top-level clearance (the complaint says high security clearances).
Update, October 7th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so - Borges’s account of the cloud copy, with SSA’s answer that its security team oversees it - and the post now links to his disclosure.