An anonymous whistleblower has come forward to accuse a former DOGE engineer of absconding with Social Security data on a thumb drive, with the intent of providing it to his new employer.
John Solly is said to have had access to two sensitive agency databases during his time working for DOGE, and stored information from them on a thumb drive with the intent of bringing it to his current employer Leidos. Both Solly and Leidos deny the accusations. A Social Security Administration (SSA) spokesperson has also told media sources that the agency “strongly refutes” the accusation and that the information provided by the anonymous source has yet to be verified by a third party.
Engineer working on NUMIDENT data projects accused of sensitive information theft
Solly was one of 12 engineers assigned to work on SSA cleanup and information verification. He reportedly had access to a social security number (SSN) verification API and the “death master file” used to ensure that the SSNs of deceased people are not used for fraud, among other sensitive items at the agency. Solly is accused of taking copies of the death master file as well as “NUMIDENT,” the master SSA database containing all personally identifiable information that is included in a SSN application.
Solly currently works in the health IT division of Fortune 500 engineering firm Leidos, which receives a very large amount of money from SSA contracts. The whistleblower said that Solly asked them for help in transferring purloined social security data from a thumb drive to a personal computer and “sanitizing” it before uploading it to Leidos. When asked about potentially getting in trouble for this, Solly allegedly said that he believed he could get a presidential pardon.
Leidos spokesperson Todd Blecher has countered this story by telling media sources that the company has conducted an internal investigation using digital forensics and found that Solly never uploaded any social security data of this sort to the company or connected any storage devices to his company-issued laptop.
Solly was previously named in a complaint by SSA’s chief data officer Chuck Borges. In 2025, Borges filed a complaint about DOGE members uploading sensitive SSA data to a cloud server. Solly was named as one of the members that specifically asked for NUMIDENT data to be moved to an insufficiently secure cloud server. Borges would go on to resign from the SSA just days after filing this complaint.
Social security data breach could be one of the largest in history
If the claims of stolen social security data are substantiated, it would be the one of the biggest breaches in national history in terms of number of people impacted. The Government Accountability Office has begun reviewing DOGE member access to social security data, and the Social Security’s Office of Inspector General has opened an investigative review of the allegations against Solly. Some Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are calling for an even broader investigation into potential DOGE leaks.
This is far from the first accusation of inappropriate handling of social security data by DOGE, which was founded by President Trump via executive order just days after he took office. Elon Musk was a co-developer of the concept, dating back to 2024, and was appointed as its head as a special temporary government employee. The Supreme Court has ruled that the agency’s status as essentially an outside consultant means that it does not have to divulge details of much of the work that it does to the rest of the government or the general public. Musk promised extreme transparency ahead of and during the early days of the project, but drifted away from it in mid-2025 after a public falling-out with the president. The program is presently administered by Amy Gleason and is set to sunset in July of this year, though most of its activity seems to have wound down at this point and numerous of its key figures have moved on.
In January, a new court filing in an ongoing lawsuit against DOGE accused two of its staffers of making inappropriate contact with a right-wing advocacy group seeking evidence of voter fraud to use to overturn state elections. At least one of the staffers signed an agreement with the group to search for such information in social security data, and both were referred to the Justice Department for potential violations of the Hatch Act. However, it remains unclear if the staffers actually followed through with providing any data. The DOGE team has also repeatedly been accused of using insufficiently secure cloud servers to share social security data and other sensitive items, but this is another area in which the opacity of the operations make it impossible to say what or how much information was transferred in this way as of yet.
