The Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee asked the Social Security Administration on Wednesday for more information about a whistle-blower’s claims that the agency had put the confidential personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk.
In a letter to the agency, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, the chairman, described the “seriousness” of the allegations made by Charles Borges, the agency’s former chief data officer, in a complaint last month.
“Given the large amount of sensitive data under S.S.A.’s control, I consider the protection and security” of the information “to be a matter of first importance,” Mr. Crapo wrote.
The letter signaled that Republicans were examining the allegations made by Mr. Borges. He sat down last week with Republican and Democratic staff members of the Finance Committee, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private session.
In his whistle-blower complaint, Mr. Borges said that members of the Department of Government Efficiency had uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database to a vulnerable cloud server. The database contained records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government, in addition to names, addresses and other details that could be used to steal identities.
Mr. Borges said that DOGE had bypassed the “independent security monitoring” normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data, putting it at risk of being leaked or hacked.
Mr. Crapo’s letter was addressed to Frank Bisignano, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration. It asked him for information about how the agency had responded to Mr. Borges’s concerns, and whether it had followed normal risk-assessment protocols in allowing DOGE to copy the data to the server. The agency was asked to respond by Sept. 23.
Andrea Meza, an attorney at the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blower group representing Mr. Borges, said in a statement that she welcomed Mr. Crapo’s letter as an “initial step.”
But she said it did not go far enough in seeking answers about the specifics of Mr. Borges’s complaint. She pointed out that Mr. Crapo was not seeking documents from the agency.
“Later this week, we will provide Congress with a recommended list of records to request that would offer far more insight than any self-assessment by the agency accused of wrongdoing,” Ms. Meza said. “If everything was proper, those documents reviewed by an independent investigator will show it.”
Mr. Borges’s complaint, which was first reported by The New York Times, did not indicate that the server set up by DOGE had been breached. A Social Security Administration spokesman said that the agency was not “aware of any compromise” to the database and that it was “dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data.”
Mr. Borges resigned three days after submitting his complaint, saying the agency had made it “impossible” for him to perform his duties “legally and ethically.”
Democrats on the Finance Committee this week called for Mr. Crapo to hold a hearing about Mr. Borges’s allegations and the broader state of Social Security. The agency was thrown into turmoil by Elon Musk, then the leader of DOGE, and his team of young software engineers, who advanced false claims of widespread fraud as they sought extraordinary power over closely guarded data.
Taylor Harvey, a spokesman for the Democratic members of the committee, said Mr. Crapo had not yet responded to their request for a hearing.
Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reporting.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.
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