SSA data chief Charles Borges resigns 'involuntarily' days after claims DOGE putting citizen info at risk: 'It is never wrong to be….'

Charles Borges, chief data officer at the Social Security Administration (SSA), resigned on August 29, just days after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging DOGE has put citizen information at risk. In the filing, Borges alleged that employees from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had uploaded the nation’s Social Security data into a “vulnerable cloud environment.”


Borges joined SSA in January this year after working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and serving as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. He also held data handling roles at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and the Naval Air Systems Command.


Sharing a post on LinkedIn, Borges wrote: “It is never wrong to be morally and ethically right with yourself.”


The dispute comes weeks after the Supreme Court temporarily lifted a lower court’s injunction, allowing DOGE employees access to sensitive Social Security data. Two unions and an advocacy group had argued the move would violate privacy laws. Lower courts sided with the challengers, but Solicitor General D. John Sauer appealed, and the Supreme Court cleared access in June.


SSA denies allegations


According to a CBS report, a spokesperson for the SSA denied Borges’ allegations, saying the data in question was not exposed. “The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet,” the spokesperson said. “SSA is not aware of any compromise to this environment,” it added.


Borges resigns ‘involuntarily’, cites ‘hostile’ workplace
In his resignation letter to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, Borges wrote he was resigning involuntarily because “SSA’s actions against me… make my duties impossible to perform legally and ethically.” He described his departure as a “constructive discharge.”


Borges also claimed he faced retaliation since raising concerns internally and filing his complaint. “I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable,” he reportedly wrote in the letter.


He alleged SSA’s new IT and executive leadership created “a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination.”