At least 10 people associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now working at the Social Security Administration (SSA), according to government records reviewed by WIRED; this includes a number of young engineers whose presence at the SSA has not been reported. The ballooning of DOGE’s presence at the federal agency—which Bloomberg, citing sworn statements filed in federal court Wednesday, previously reported—comes as Musk and his cohorts are publicly threatening social security benefits, citing unsubstantiated claims of mass fraud.
The DOGE-affiliated personnel in question are currently listed in the agency’s internal organizational chart. Background checks for two are still pending, according to a filing by the SSA in federal court in Maryland opposing a motion for a temporary restraining order filed by unions that would prevent DOGE from accessing SSA records. (A sworn statement attached to the filing from the SSA’s deputy commissioner of human resources claims that six of the background checks are still pending.)
The operatives—whom the government did not name in its filing—are, according to internal documents, Akash Bobba, Scott Coulter, Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, Antonio Gracias, Gautier Cole Killian, Jon Koval, Nikhil Rajpal, Payton Rehling, and Ethan Shaotran. This team appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.
Ten of the DOGE-affiliated staffers are listed as part of the same group within Microsoft Teams, which SSA employees use for internal communication, according to a screenshot shared with WIRED. They are listed as “IT Specialists” based at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, except for Bobba, who is listed as “Front Office” in the office of the chief information officer (CIO).
Many of them have worked or interned at Musk companies such as Tesla and Space X, and the majority of them have also appeared at other government agencies in recent weeks, as part of DOGE’s incursion into the government. Musk has made wild claims about the social security system, calling it a “Ponzi scheme” and falsely claiming that millions of 150-year-olds were fraudulently collecting benefits.
According to the SSA court filing and accompanying sworn statements, seven of them have read-only access to several datasets including the Master Beneficiary Record, which contains detailed information about individuals and their benefits. Those same DOGE representatives also have read-only access to Numident, a database containing information about everyone who’s ever applied for a Social Security number, as well as data referred to as “Treasury Payment Files Showing SSA Payments from SSOARS.” (The Social Security Online Accounting and Reporting System is a set of systems containing “information on SSA’s financial position and operations,” according to the SSA.)
These records contain a great deal of personally identifying and financial information; in filings the government says DOGE accessing them is necessary to “detect fraud.”
While it’s been unclear even to well-placed insiders what specifically DOGE is doing inside the SSA, Musk has repeatedly voiced his desire to “eliminate” large parts of the system in the US, recently claiming that the fact that there are more Social Security numbers than there are US citizens—a well-known quirk of the SSA system—“might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Sources have told WIRED that one of the tasks the DOGE cohort will be assigned is how people identify themselves to access their benefit payments. Experts with decades of experience at the agency are now worried that DOGE operatives working across multiple agencies increases the risk of SSA data being shared outside of the agency, or that their inexperience will lead to them breaking systems entirely.
In the SSA filing, lawyers for the agency claim that the DOGE operatives have “no access to SSA production automation, code, or configuration files.” A previous sworn statement from Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff, claims that its DOGE-aligned CIO, Michael Russo, was DOGE-aligned and demanded that Bobba be given access to “everything, including source code.”
Last month, president Donald Trump’s administration appointed Russo as the SSA’s new CIO, despite his having no apparent previous government experience. Russo came to DOGE from payments company Shift4, which was founded by Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee to run NASA. The office of the CIO works on “implementation of a comprehensive systems configuration management, database management and data administration program,” according to the agency’s own website, and is responsible for strategic planning.
According to an affidavit filed on Friday as part of a lawsuit designed to halt what the suit called DOGE’s “unprecedented” seizure of SSA data, Flick outlined how she tried to educate Russo on how information at SSA is handled and the measures in place to prevent fraud.
“Mr Russo seemed completely focused on questions … based on the general myth of supposed widespread social security fraud, rather than facts,” Flick said, adding that Russo was unwilling to understand SSA’s complex systems and instead seemed fixated on conspiracy theories about fraud within the system, such as Musk’s claim that millions of 150-year-olds were receiving benefit payments. Flick also wrote that she was “not confident” DOGE operatives had “the requisite knowledge and training to prevent sensitive information from being inadvertently transferred to bad actors.”
Flick’s affidavit named Coulter and Bobba as two of the DOGE associates joining SSA, alongside Russo. Coulter was a New York-based hedge fund manager whose fund, Cowbird Capital, was shuttered last year, according to Business Insider. (Coulter appears to be the DOGE lead at SSA. While the affidavit from the deputy commissioner of human resources doesn’t name him, it does identify the lead as a worker detailed from NASA, and Coulter is the only one of the 10 DOGE workers listed in internal NASA records reviewed by WIRED.)
Gracias, another private equity figure who is now part of the DOGE team at SSA, is the founder of Valor Equity Partners. Men named Jon Koval and Payton Rehling are listed on Valor’s website as a vice president and a data engineer, respectively.
Gracias, Koval, and Rehling don’t seem to have any prior government experience, but Gracias does have a long history with Musk—he worked at Tesla for 14 years as a company director and helped Musk take the company public. Gracias spent time with Musk at Mar-a-Lago ahead of Trump’s inauguration, and later described their conversations about how they believed the government functioned on the All In podcast. (“It’s broken now. And so literally, money is flowing out,” went one confusing Gracias claim, about how money is moving from the Treasury department to other agencies.) Later, Gracias mentioned the SSA. “The only audit that I’ve seen is actually from the Social Security Administration. When you read it, I’ve got one of the partners who have read the thing, it’s just riddled with material weaknesses.”
Many of the other DOGE names listed in SSA’s internal records have previously been reported by WIRED as young, inexperienced technologists working at other government agencies.
Individuals having access to the records of multiple agencies is highly unusual and problematic, experts say. “Federal law places strict controls on personal data held by agencies, including limits on cross-agency transfers and rigorous training requirements for personnel who have a legitimate need for access,” says John Davisson, the director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Ignoring those safeguards and haphazardly putting systems at multiple agencies under the thumb of a single engineer obliterates those protections. They’re hotwiring the federal government with a total disregard for privacy and data security.”
Bobba, a former Palantir intern and recent UC Berkeley graduate, was first appointed to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) before moving to the General Services Administration (GSA). According to Flick’s testimony, “there were challenges with Mr. Bobba’s background check that took a few days to resolve.” Flick did not expand on what those issues were, but stated that Bobba was eventually granted access to sensitive SSA systems after Russo and Musk lieutenant Steve Davis directly pressured top SSA administrators. The acting commissioner was ultimately replaced by Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer who was, Flick asserted, on leave after having communicated with DOGE outside normal channels—something he later bragged about in a LinkedIn post.
Farritor, a 23-year-old former Thiel Fellow and Space X intern who helped to recruit other young engineers to join DOGE on a Discord group for SpaceX interns, has also appeared internally at GSA, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Department of Energy, and Department of Education.
Rajpal, a former Twitter and Tesla employee, now at the SSA, has also appeared at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), OPM, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
WIRED previously reported that Elez, a 25-year-old engineer also on the SSA list, at one point had read and write access within the federal payment system at the Treasury department. He was also deployed at Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to The New York Times. Elez briefly resigned from DOGE after racist comments posted by an account he was linked to were discovered by the Wall Street Journal, but returned after Musk and Vice President JD Vance posted in defense of him on X.
Shaotran, another young DOGE employee, is a 22-year-old Harvard student and a runner up at an xAI hackathon. (xAI is Musk’s artificial intelligence company.) He has been deployed at GSA, the Department of Education, and was recently onboarded at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to internal documentation.
Killian is a 24-year-old former computer science student who matriculated at McGill University, and has been part of DOGE’s work at the EPA and GSA, as well as the SSA.
The SSA did not respond to a request from WIRED about what the DOGE operatives are working on inside the agency.
In a Tuesday meeting, United States DOGE Service (USDS) administrator Amy Gleason told staff that Musk-affiliated engineers and some legacy USDS workers would be headed to SSA to improve “identity proofing,” say sources who were in the meeting. The US DOGE Service is a permanent rebranding of the US Digital Service. Identity proofing is the process SSA uses to identify that users are who they say they are in order to access their benefits. The process includes registering with identity apps such as the government’s own Login.gov or third-party services such as ID.me.
At a meeting last week, according to the Washington Post, Dudek, the SSA’s acting commissioner, told staff that the “DOGE people” were effectively in charge of day-to-day operations at the agency and they “were going to make mistakes.” He also made it clear that he had been in direct contact with the White House.
“I work for the president,” Dudek said, according to a longer recording of the meeting obtained by ProPublica. ”I need to do what the president tells me to do, I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it.”
Last month, Dudek outlined plans to fire 7,000 employees at the SSA and close more than half of the agency’s regional offices, while confirming that many of the SSA’s most senior staff were departing. This week, the agency reportedly gave up on the idea of fully abandoning phone service for clients after the Washington Post reported on the plan.
The SSA houses a highly complex system built on decades-old technology, and contains some of the most sensitive personal information held anywhere within the US government. The threat posed by DOGE engineers making mistakes within these systems, experts say, is huge.
Martin O’Malley, a former SSA commissioner, warned last week following DOGE’s incursion that within months, the SSA system could ”collapse” and recipients would see “an interruption of benefits.” This warning was repeated by Flick, who wrote in her affidavit that DOGE’s lack of knowledge of the SSA systems “combined with the significant loss of expertise as more and more agency personnel leave, have me seriously concerned that SSA programs will continue to function and operate without disruption.”
“It’s a valid fear that personally identifiable information will be exfiltrated, or source code messed with without necessary controls and rigor,” John McGing, a former SSA employee who worked at the agency for almost four decades, tells WIRED.
Additionally, DOGE has imposed a $1 spending limit on federal credit cards, which has led to some regional SSA offices experiencing issues buying basic supplies, including paper and toner, according to details shared with WIRED by one SSA employee.
“We have started rationing paper,” the source says. “People like to ask for four copies of their benefit verification letter. We’ve been giving them one and telling them to make their own copies.”
The provision of sign language interpreters for appointments at the SSA have also been interrupted, due to the $1 spending limit. “We have to go back to that client and tell them we can’t provide an interpreter even though everything on our website says we will provide that,” the source said, citing an incident that happened this week.
SSA staff are also now unable to order death certificates which are used to verify if someone within the system is dead or not, according to an email reviewed by WIRED.
The source added that the office is also unable to pay the company that shreds mountains of documents it prints out on a daily basis, raising fears that piles of paper with highly sensitive personally identifiable information could soon be left lying around the office.
Timothy Marchman contributed reporting.
