A whistleblower complaint has sparked a federal investigation into the alleged theft of sensitive Social Security data by a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee.
The allegations, which have raised fresh concerns about the security of Americans' personal information, involve databases containing the personal details of hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, birth details, and parental information.
The whistleblower claims that a DOGE staffer, who had extensive system access, downloaded information from key government databases, including the 'Numident' and 'Master Death File' databases, which contain information on over 500 million Americans.
The engineer allegedly stored at least one dataset on a portable drive and may have taken it to a new private-sector job, prompting investigators to review the allegations and examine the potential scale of the data involved.
The case, if confirmed, could represent one of the most significant insider-access data security incidents affecting US government records, and has sparked public concern about data access and privacy.
