The Social Security Administration’s chief data officer resigned from his job Friday, saying the agency punished him for revealing its failure to safeguard sensitive records.
In a scathing letter to his fellow Social Security employees, Charles Borges said agency leadership had made it impossible for him to do his job after he told Congress this week that Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” acolytes had put everybody in America’s Social Security details on a potentially insecure cloud server.
“As a result of these events, I am put in the intolerable situation of not having visibility or oversight into activities that potentially violate statutes and regulations which I, as the CDO, may legally or otherwise be held accountable for should I continue in this position,” Borges wrote in the email, which was obtained by HuffPost.
The resignation is only the latest example of civil servants either leaving or being thrown out of government after refusing to go along with potentially illegal directives from President Donald Trump’s political appointees in his second term.
Before his falling out with Trump and exit from the White House earlier this year, Musk made bogus fraud claims about Social Security and sent his DOGE minions to try to prove him right. A federal court said they had no right to grab the data, but the Supreme Court told them to go ahead.
Borges filed a formal whistleblower complaint with members of Congress detailing the alleged mishandled data earlier this week. The complaint warned that if bad actors gained access to the server in question, “Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost.”
The Social Security Administration said it couldn’t comment on personnel matters. The agency previously said the server was “walled off from the internet.”
Phil Lewis contributed reporting.