DOGE Track

Viral Waste

The Times investigation found that Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency first approached U.S.A.I.D. as a source of useful anecdotes of what it called “viral waste” - government spending that seemed foolish, and could be exploited to support the case for cuts.

From the start, DOGE has declared that its mission has included fighting fraud, and there are now multiple examples where DOGE teams have been directed to go into agencies and find something salacious that Elon Musk or Trump could tweet about as confirmation of the view that government is riddled with waste and fraud. Unfortunately, many of these examples turn out to be DOGE misunderstanding the data rather than finding a problem.

You might notice that many of these examples are from the SSA, illustrating the vicious cycle that is kicked off by DOGE’s conviction that waste and fraud are rampant. An initial accusation leads to a swarm of DOGE engineers descending on the agency. Those engineers then make further mistakes when trying to find other fraud. Which leads to more DOGE pressure on the agency, with experts sidelined and ignored when they attempt to correct the record. All of this leads to wasted work and deliberate falsehoods as DOGE makes claims without any investigation and then refuses to admit that it made a mistake.

System Access

Name Description
SSA
NUMIDENT files that have been extracted from SSA systems, these contain SSNs for everybody
Akash Bobba (2/10)
Jon Koval (3/17)
Marko Elez (3/17)
Edward Coristine (c.6/23)
SSA
SSN application process data (Phone). This is a data extract file rather than an independent system.
Payton Rehling (3/14, read-write access)
Aram Moghaddassi (3/14, read-write access)
Used by federal government agencies to securely create, certify, and submit payments to the Fiscal Service.
Marko Elez (1/28/25-2/06/25, source-code access)
Marko Elez (2/05/25-2/06/25, read-write access)
Date Event
1/28/25
Source
The White House press secretary reports the astounding statistic that USAID spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip. This figure was actually for a variety of family planning services (largely birth control medication) and, more importantly, it was for the Gaza province in Mozambique.
February 2025
2/07/25
Source
After gaining access to the PAM DB system for payments, DOGE members at the Treasury department discover what appear to be payments flowing to recipients without Social Security numbers. Other recipients appear to be dead. These discrepancies lead to Musk accusing SSA of massive fraud on his Twitter feed, but later analysis by SSA staff reveal these were cases of DOGE not understanding how the data was structured. (fuzz: article just reports this as early Feb; but Musk tweets said he was informed on 2/7)
2/09/25
Source
Elon Musk posts more tweets claiming to have discovered sources of “massive fraud” within the SSA. These appear to be a misunderstanding of how erroneous records that exist in the SSA database are already filtered out from receiving benefits. Instead, he assumed that all erroneous records had received benefits and thus this was the massive fraud.
2/10/25
Source
A legal affadavit states a BFS payment was presented to the State Department as one to not process after it was reviewed by DOGE staff at Treasury.
2/10/25
Source
Mike Russo summons his new ally Leland Dudek to his office and asks him to explain data discrepancies identified by Elon Musk. Leland convenes a team of dozens of SSA engineers who review the data from the Treasury department and document fallacies of DOGE’s reasoning in a memo. Mike Russo rejects the memo’s conclusions by declaring that DOGE would not trust career civil servants and demanding that Akash Bobba must do his own analysis.
2/10/25
Source
CIO Mike Russo convenes his own internal informational group in SSA where he has conversations with DOGE staff at other agencies about novel ideas for sharing sensitive SSA data. He does not inform Acting SSA Director, Michelle King.
2/16/25
Source
The White House pressures the IRS to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) granting DOGE expanded access to internal systems at the agency containing confidential taxpayer information.
2/16/25
Source
Elon Musk posts a tweet claiming that DOGE had uncovered fraud of millions of people older than 120 who were collecting social security payments: “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.” This data issue is real, but there is no indication that millions of people were receiving improper payments
2/19/25
Source
SSA CIO Mike Russo emails Leland Dudek request access to SSA’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for several “members of [his] team.” This includes access to the NUMIDENT list of all social security records, Master Beneficiary Record (MBR) and Supplemental Security Record (SSR) master records, as well as copies of SSA payment files which SSA transmits to the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) for payment.
2/20/25
Source
The White House and Treasury Department come to an agreement for a Memorandum of Understanding about how DOGE access to IRS systems will be structured.
2/21/25
Source
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the IRS and DOGE is formally signed. It reportedly will not let DOGE access individual tax returns.
2/25/25
Source
Citing concerns that there is fraud in the federal payroll, the DOGE team at the Department of the Interior meets with the Interior Business Center Team to discuss their request to receive a log audit of all employee names, positions and hire dates as well as total pay for each pay period.
2/25/25
Source
The Post reports that DOGE staffers Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos are being granted access to only anonymized data from IDRS as was specified in an earlier MOU.
2/28/25
Source
Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, DOGE representatives embedded at the IRS, on Friday asked IRS lawyers to assist in creating an “omnibus” agreement with other federal agencies that would allow a broad swath of federal officials to cross-reference benefits rolls with taxpayer data.
2/28/25
Source
Via email, SSA-05 (Cole Killian) at the DOGE team at SSA requests and receives approval from Leland Dudek to run a program to identify unrealistically old people in the SSA database. Scott Coulter is cc’ed on the approval.
March 2025
3/XX/25
Source
In a response to a Trump EO on tracking grants, the DOGE team is granted approval by HHS CIO Clark Minor to build an API to retrieved data from the Payment Management System system.
3/07/25
Source
Starting from this data and continuing until March 17, members of the DOGE team at SSA were using servers at Cloudflare to share SSA data (the exact product is not identified, but it could be the D1 system for SQL databases). Needless to say, Cloudflare is not approved by SSA for storing sensitive data, and SSA staff have been unable to determine what data was shared and if it is still hosted on Cloudflare systems.
3/14/25
Source
Leland Dudek grants approval for SSA-05 (Cole Killian) to run the proposed tool for modifying the death data records to eliminate implausibly old people. DOGE was convinced these data errors were a massive source of fraud, despite evidence to the contrary from SSA staff and concerns that correcting the data would be a waste of time.
3/19/25
Source
Leland Dudek approves access for “Employee 9” of the DOGE team at SSA to view some additional schemas in the PSSNAP database of Social Security Applications conducted over the phone.
3/20/25
Source
President Trump issues an executive order demaning that agency heads must share all access to any unclassified datasets “related to the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse.” This is potentially in violation of the Privacy Act, so the order leaves it to individual agency staff to determine what sharing is allowed “to the maximum extent consistent with law.”
3/20/25
Source
In a ruling for AFL-CIO vs. SSA, Judge Hollander grants a temporary restraining order enjoining DOGE from having any access to SSA systems or installing any software as well as ordering them to delete any data in their possession.
3/20/25
Source
Leland Dudek threatens to shut down the entire Social Security Administration instead of complying with the order to block access for DOGE. He reportedly reaches this conclusion based on the advice of two unnamed senior DOGE leaders.
3/27/25
Source
The Social Security Administration ends a Biden-era rule that limited clawbacks for overpayments to 10% per check (to prior policy of taking entire checks).
3/27/25
Source
In a sworn declaration, Leland Dudek justifies access to PII in SSA records for SSA-01 (Akash Bobba), SSA-05 (Cole Killian), SSA-08 (Nikhil Rajpal) and SSA-09 (Payton Rehling) on the DOGE team. This access is granted through the SSA’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) system. He asserts that DOGE staff are being granted only the minimum levels of schema access required.
3/27/25
Source
In an interview on FOX News, Aram Moghaddassi mangles a statistic that 40% of fraud involved a call to a service center to change direct deposit information. He instead announces that 40% of all calls to the SSA are fraudlent. The claim is amplified across conservative media and the White House refuses to correct.
3/28/25
Source
The Deputy CIO for Infrastructure/IT at SSA acknowledges an increased number of network crashes due to a newly-introduced fraud checking system created and rushed into production by DOGE.
3/28/25
Source
As part of an interview on Fox News, Aram Moghaddassi spreads an incorrect statistic that states 40% of all phones calls to SSA are from people committing fraud.
3/30/25
Source
DOGE announces on X.com that it has made some changes to the loan application process at SBA to require a date of birth and to pause applications for certain age ranges. It’s unclear how much actual fraud this might have prevented.
3/30/25
Source
During campaign rallies in Wisconsin, Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias publish a chart claiming to show an increase in social security numbers being granted to noncitizens as evidence of voting fraud or benefits fraud by immigrants. The problem is that these numbers are necessary for immigrants to work in roles, and are used for paying taxes rather than receiving benefits, and the statistics were from a program to replace a more cumbersome process for assigning SSN IDs. Based on this interpretation, the Trump Administration argued for a change where applicants would have to instead visit an already overstretched field office, a change that is likely to both reduce tax income from immigrant workers and increase the per-person cost from $8 to $51,000
April 2025
4/01/25
Source
Alarmed at the viral spread of DOGE’s false claim that 40% of all calls to Social Security are fraud, agency staff at SSA draft a public statement to correct the errors in the claim. They are specifically ordered by Katie Miller not to release it. She asserts “the number is 40 percent.”
4/02/25
Source
In an interview on Fox, Antonio Gracias makes misleading claims that DOGE had discovered widespread voting fraud through joining social security data and state voter rolls.
4/07/25
Source
The Post confirms with multiple source that Social Security’s website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages ranging from 20 minutes to an entire day. They speculate this is due to the introduction of an expanded fraud check system created by DOGE that wasn’t tested for scalability before being deployed.
4/09/25
Source
Adam Ramada and Brooks Morgan are part of a cohort of 9 staffers detailed from the Department of Education to the Treasury, under the aegis of supporting federal student aid functions at Treasury.
4/23/25
Source
DOGE has reportedly added 10 million records into the Death Master File since March, both as part of addressing errors in the NUMIDENT files as well as deliberate effort to harm immigrants from being able to interact with the financial industry. As a reuslt, some very alive Americans have been declared dead by DOGE.
May 2025
5/16/25
Source
An internal report at Social Security analyzes new fraud detection mechanisms that were mandated by DOGE for all phone claims. According to analysis, only 2 out of 110,000 claims made were possibly but not certainly fraudultent, and adding the system has slowed claims processing by 25% and degraded service overall.
c.5/25/25
Source
Over 200 loan recipients have their birth date voided and their accounts closed in the National Payment Service (NPS) system. This action was likely taken by Jordan Wick in response to discovering that some number of loan recipients had “1900” as their birth years (DOGE presumed similar circumstances at SSA indicated fraud when it was really issues with data entry). It is possible that this action was a pretext for closing other accounts. (fuzz: date just reported as late May)
June 2025
6/06/25
Source
In a 6-3 ruling on an emergency application, the Supreme Court rejected an injunction that prevented DOGE from accessing Social Security data. In a setback for privacy advocates, this will allow for SSA to share data with DOGE and other agencies, while the case about the legality of that proceeds.
6/12/25
Source
A career official writes up a Risk Acceptance Request Form to share with Aram Moghaddassi and another unnamed career official in the office of the CIO at Social Security about DOGE’s request to have administrative access to a separate Virtual Private Cloud within the Amazon Web Services infrastructure at SSA. The official classifies this as high-risk due a proposal to copy NUMIDENT data to a developer environment with looser access controls and security measures. DOGE developers would also be able to make this data publicly accessible without following the Authority to Operate (ATO) requirements for any new public services and install software not approved for operation in SSA infrastructure.
6/16/25
Source
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for SSA sends an email to Aram Moghaddassi with his assessment that moving NUMIDENT data to the cloud would be at an unacceptably high risk for being hacked or stolen (computed on a 1-5 scale with a 3 for probability of risk and 5 for the impact of this risk)
6/25/25
Source
Reportedly acting as a joint CIO at Social Security, Mike Russo overrides the concerns of junior staff in the Office of the CIO at the Social Security Administration and approves a request by John Solly to transfer NUMIDENT data into the new DOGE-controlled cloud environment.
6/27/25
Source
Ruling in the case AFL-CIO v. DOL, Judge Bates determines that he cannot issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent DOGE staffers from accessing sensitive systems at DOL and HHS. DOGE access was never suspended by this case.
July 2025
7/14/25
Source
The Social Security Administration begins to warn approximately half a million Americans who still receive their benefits by paper check that they will need to call the Treasury Department themselves and request a waiver. Those who have not had their waivers processed by the end of September may experience a delay in receiving benefits even if their waiver application is pending. This action is being taken to comply with EO 14247.
7/15/25
Sources
Acting in his role as the CIO for Social Security Administration, Aram Moghaddassi authorizes a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) for the project of moving the NUMIDENT data from Social Security’s controlled environment into the special cloud soley operated by DOGE. As the CIO, he is allowed to assume the risk of bypassing mandatory security requirements, but not if it violates federal law or puts sensitive data at risk of being stolen. According to the testimony of several whistleblowers, the cloud project is reportedly being run by Edward Coristine.
August 2025
8/11/25
Source
Expressing concerns that the lax security of DOGE’s cloud could lead to the leak of every American’s social security number (and the requirement ro reissue new ones), the Chief Data Officer of the Social Security Administration contacts Edward Coristine and John Solly to request information about the security of DOGE’s cloud. He is never granted a reply and learns that the SSA Office of General Counsel (headed by DOGE member Mark Steffensen) has advised employees not to respond to his inquiries.
8/12/25
Source
Citing a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling as precedent, a DC Appeals Court overturned a stay from February and ordered that DOGE should be allowed to access sensitive data at the Treasury Department, OPM and Department of Education.
8/26/25
Source
The Chief Data Officer of the Social Security Administration, Charles Borges, submits a public whistleblower complaint alleging that DOGE cut corners and skirted mandatory IT oversight in order to copy sensitive NUMIDENT data of the social security numbers of all Americans into a private cloud environment that only they controlled. He cites several specific events here in the timeline.
September 2025
9/25/25
Source
The ranking Democratic member of the Senate Comittee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs releases a report “Unchecked and Unaccountable” detailing DOGE security transgressions at several agencies, including poor security for the NUMIDENT data at SSA and activities within GSA and OPM
November 2025
11/03/25
Source
Posting from her personal account on X, the USDA Secretary asserts that the agency had uncovered massive fraud in the personal data of SNAP recipients that it had collected from 27 cooperating states. In an appearance on FOX News, she claims the administration had eliminated 700,000 people from SNAP benefits and had arrested 118 people. She provided no other details to verify her claims.
1/16/26
Source
In a filing in AFL-CIO v. SSA, the government amended several declarations that had been made in Leland Dudek’s testimony on March 24, 2025. For starters, although DOGE access was revoked on that day, a member of DOGE was running queries against PII in the NUMIDENT database up to the moment. Also, the DOGE team at SSA sent encrypted sensitive SSA data to DOGE and the Department of Labor. A member of the DOGE team also signed an agreement to share information with an outside advocacy group without clearing it through proper legal channels.
Elimination
Spending Control