DOGE walked into the Social Security Administration and took the personal records of nearly every working American. Then they moved that data to an unauthorized server, sent a password-protected file of it to people outside the agency, signed an agreement to use it for partisan election operations, and kept reading it after a federal judge told them to stop. That seemed illegal. So I read the law. Turns out I was right. So I wrote an article about it.¹ Readers across the country used the templates shared in that article and filed formal criminal complaints with police departments, county prosecutors, attorneys general, and governors. The responses came back, and they tell a specific story about where the system worked and where officials chose not to do their jobs.
Police departments accepted the reports without resistance. Attorneys general were largely procedurally honest; many correctly explained their states’ referral requirements, and Washington’s AG office pointed to the civil litigation it had already filed against the administration. Those suits matter, but civil suits and criminal prosecution are different tools. One often takes months or years before possibly dolling out fines or remediation. The other puts the people who sold out our country in a cell. Our readers asked about the one they involves handcuffs not the one that involves cease and desist letters.
On January 16, 2026, the Department of Justice filed a Notice of Corrections to the Record in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, admitting under oath that DOGE personnel transferred Social Security data to an unauthorized third-party server, sent an encrypted file containing the personal information of roughly 1,000 people to DOGE affiliates at other agencies, signed an agreement with a political group seeking to match SSA records against state voter rolls to overturn election results, and continued accessing that data after a federal judge ordered them to stop.² The SSA has since disclosed that it still cannot determine what data left the building or where it went.³ As of March 12, 2026, the SSA’s inspector general is separately reviewing a whistleblower complaint about a former DOGE software engineer’s potential misuse of that data.⁴ That account came from the government’s own attorneys, filed under oath in federal court. Hand any private citizen the same access DOGE had and watch what happens when they transfer that data to an outside server, send a password-protected file of it to their friends, sign an agreement to use it for partisan political operations, and keep reading it after a judge tells them to stop. Every state in this country has statutes covering exactly that conduct. Those statutes say nothing about the defendant’s job title…