Days after filing a whistleblower complaint claiming that the Department of Government Efficiency put Americans’ Social Security data at risk, the agency’s chief data officer “involuntarily” resigned.
Charles Borges, who served in the post at the Social Security Administration since late January, wrote in his resignation letter that agency has taken actions against him that make it impossible for him to do his job “legally and ethically” and have caused him much distress.
“After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens’ most sensitive personal data, I have suffered, exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable,” Borges wrote in the letter, which CNN has viewed.
Borges on Tuesday filed a whistleblower complaint saying that Elon Musk‘s DOGE employees embedded at the agency put the records of more than 300 million Americans at risk by creating a copy of the data in a vulnerable cloud computing server. The data includes people’s names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other personal information.
The complaint was filed by the Government Accountability Project, which also posted Borges’ resignation letter.
Borges reported his concerns – “a disturbing pattern of questionable and risky security access and administrative misconduct” – to the agency but is not aware of any remedial action being taken, the complaint said.
In his resignation letter, Borges wrote that the agency’s newly installed leaders created “a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction.“ His repeated requests for more information into projects and incidents that could violate federal laws and regulations were “rebuffed or ignored,” he wrote.
“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,” he wrote.
The Social Security Administration said it does not comment on personnel matters.
Maintaining the privacy and security of people’s personal information has been a major concern since the Trump administration allowed DOGE to embed in multiple federal agencies, including Social Security.
Former officials have raised red flags about DOGE’s need to access and handling of the records, and a coalition of labor and advocacy groups sued to stop the group from gaining access to Social Security records. The Supreme Court in June allowed DOGE to review the data in its stated effort to root out fraud and modernize the agency’s technology.
