Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration became central to the 2026 voter-roll purge controversy after the Trump administration admitted that DOGE had worked with True the Vote to probe voter rolls using SSA data. A DOGE employee signed a voter data agreement with True the Vote on 24 March 2025, a year before the controversy became public. The arrangement meant SSA records, which include citizenship and death data, were channelled into the DHS SAVE System and then applied to screen state voter registration files.

The SSA administers retirement, disability, and survivor benefits for more than 70 million Americans and holds the most comprehensive individual-level US citizenship and death records outside the State Department. Its data was historically ring-fenced from electoral administration under Privacy Act protections and longstanding agency practice. A March 2026 executive order directed the SSA to compile citizenship verification lists for distribution to DHS, a significant departure from precedent.

The practical effect was a 17% error rate in the SAVE systems non-citizen flags: roughly one in six people identified as potentially ineligible turned out to be citizens. The DOJ privacy officer resigned rather than implement the data-sharing plan, and three federal courts blocked portions of the executive order directing the scheme.