Days after submitting a whistleblower criticism claiming that the Department of Government Efficiency put Americans’ Social Security data at risk, the company’s chief information officer “involuntarily” resigned.
Charles Borges, who served within the publish on the Social Security Administration since late January, wrote in his resignation letter that company has taken actions towards him that make it inconceivable for him to do his job “legally and ethically” and have precipitated him a lot misery.
“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 within the letter, which NCS has seen.
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 delivery and different private data.
The criticism was filed by the Government Accountability Project, which additionally posted Borges’ resignation letter.
Borges reported his considerations – “a disturbing pattern of questionable and risky security access and administrative misconduct” – to the company however just isn’t conscious of any remedial motion being taken, the criticism mentioned.
In his resignation letter, Borges wrote that the company’s newly put in 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 mentioned it doesn’t touch upon personnel issues.
Maintaining the privateness and safety of individuals’s private data has been a significant concern for the reason that Trump administration allowed DOGE to embed in a number of federal businesses, together with Social Security.
Former officers have raised pink flags about DOGE’s have to entry and dealing with of the data, and a coalition of labor and advocacy teams sued to cease the group from getting access to Social Security data. The Supreme Court in June allowed DOGE to assessment the info in its said effort to root out fraud and modernize the company’s expertise.