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 had been the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer since late January, said in his resignation letter that the agency took actions against him that made it impossible for him to do his job “legally and ethically” and caused him a lot of stress.
“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 seen.
On Tuesday, Borges filed a whistleblower complaint saying that Elon Musk‘s DOGE employees working at the agency put the records of more than 300 million Americans at risk by copying the data to a vulnerable cloud server. The data includes people’s names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and other personal details.
The complaint was filed by the Government Accountability Project, which also shared Borges’ resignation letter.
Borges told the agency about his concerns—a “disturbing pattern of questionable and risky security access and administrative misconduct”—but said he is not aware of any actions being taken to fix the problems, the complaint said.
In his resignation letter, Borges said that the agency’s new 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 about projects and incidents that could break federal laws were “rebuffed or ignored.”
“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.
Protecting people’s personal information has been a big concern since the Trump administration allowed DOGE to work inside multiple federal agencies, including Social Security.
Former officials warned about DOGE’s access to the records, and a group of labor and advocacy organizations sued to stop DOGE from getting the data. The Supreme Court in June allowed DOGE to review the information as part of its plan to fight fraud and modernize the agency’s technology.
