Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, resigned Friday — days after filing a whistleblower complaint about Department of Government Efficiency employees at the SSA.
He said in the complaint that the DOGE employees had uploaded a copy of the entire country’s Social Security information to a “vulnerable cloud environment.” Borges’ resignation from the SSA was confirmed by the Government Accountability Project, which is providing his legal representation.
A Social Security Administration spokesperson refuted the claim in a statement, saying that the data referenced had been “walled off” from the internet, and the SSA is “not aware of any compromise to this environment.”
“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.
In June, the Supreme Court temporarily lifted a lower court’s injunction and cleared the way to allow DOGE to access sensitive Social Security information. Two labor unions and an advocacy group had filed a complaint claiming that allowing the access would violate the Privacy Act and a federal law. A lower court agreed with the plaintiffs and issued an injunction, and an appellate court also declined to lift the stay. Solicitor General D. John Sauer then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the injunction was forcing the executive branch to stop federal employees tasked with modernizing government systems from accessing the data contained within them.
In Borges’ resignation letter, sent Friday to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, he wrote that he was resigning involuntarily because of “SSA’s actions against me, which make my duties impossible to perform legally and ethically.” He said his departure constituted a “constructive discharge.”
Borges said in his letter that he has faced retaliation since he reported his concerns internally and subsequently submitted his whistleblower complaint. “I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable,” he wrote.
He alleged that “newly installed leadership” in the IT and executive offices at SSA “created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination.” And Borges claimed that repeated requests for visibility into activities he found questionable were “rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership.”
Andrea Meza, a GAP attorney representing Borges, said in a statement that Borges “no longer felt that he could continue to work for the Social Security Administration in good conscience given what he had witnessed.” Meza said Borges “will continue to work with the proper oversight bodies.”
Borges had served as SSA’s chief data officer since January. Before that, he worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was a White House Presidential Innovation fellow during the Biden administration, according to LinkedIn. He had also served in data handling roles in the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and the Naval Air Systems Command.
On LinkedIn Friday, he wrote, “It is never wrong to be morally and ethically right with yourself.”
Asked about Borges, an SSA spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters.
