One of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest DOGE isn't supposed to have.
The staffer, Antonio Gracias, made the claims as part of larger about the SSA's enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE, which streamlines the process for granting Social Security cards to certain categories of eligible immigrants.
Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on that "5-plus million" noncitizens who "came to the country as illegals" received Social Security numbers "through an automatic system" and proceeded to "get into our benefit systems."
"And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted," Gracias said.
of have found few examples of noncitizens voting, which is a federal crime punishable with prison and deportation.
Later that week, Gracias furthered his claims on a . "I think this was a move to import voters," he said, echoing a that Donald Trump and Musk elevated during the 2024 campaign season and Republican lawmakers to push for stricter voting policies.
While Musk and some Republican lawmakers are , experts familiar with Social Security say Gracias is mischaracterizing the program, and voter registration experts say they doubt the accuracy of his claims about noncitizens voting.
From "no access granted" to data shared by Musk
Using Social Security data to imply that noncitizens are breaking the law also could have that prevents DOGE staffers from handling sensitive SSA systems.
It's the latest example of that DOGE's sweeping access to personal and financial information of millions of Americans may violate privacy laws and may be used for inappropriate purposes.
Gracias, the billionaire, is one of 10 DOGE staffers embedded in the Social Security Administration. That description matches in to sensitive SSA systems.
A description of Gracias' notes that he is tasked with work on death data and reducing improper payments and that within the agency's payment files and master Social Security databases.
It does not mention his analysis of how noncitizens are given Social Security numbers. Gracias is also not supposed to see or share personally identifiable information, or PII, within agency data,
"Appointee shall not share any Personally Identifiable Information accessed or obtained through the use of SSA systems or work performed for SSA, with any external entity, organization, or agency federal or state," an .
In a from the SSA's then-Chief Information Officer Michael Russo, Gracias is one of two SSA DOGE employees listed as not having access to sensitive databases or PII.
"No SSA data or personally identifiable information access, or access to systems containing such information, has been granted to Employee 6 and Employee 4," the . , listed in the record as a appears to be , an associate of Gracias at his venture capital firm, who is also detailed to DOGE.
A third Valor employee, , appears to be the listed as in court records who was given access to a starting March 4.
On March 20, a federal judge in Maryland issued a blocking DOGE employees from accessing SSA data. Gracias first publicized his claims alongside Musk at a rally in Wisconsin on March 30, ahead of the state's .
A federal the Trump administration's effort to lift that temporary restraining order April 1.
A few days after his Fox 暗黑爆料 interview on April 2, Gracias joined the on April 4 and offered more details on the data he says he used and the conclusions he drew, which has been subsequently shared by conservative media outlets and amplified by on his social media site X for several days.
In court documents filed Monday, lawyers for the government and did not list Gracias 鈥� or examination of the EBE program 鈥� in its explanation of .
Neither Gracias nor a DOGE spokesperson responded to NPR's questions about when and how any Social Security data was accessed and whether it complied with the court order.
NPR reached out to Social Security and initially spoke to acting press officer Nicole Tiggemann. In a subsequent email from a generic press account, the agency declined to answer detailed questions about DOGE's data access. It did confirm that showing totals of noncitizens with Social Security numbers through EBE was taken from an SSA dashboard 鈥� but claimed that the restraining order prevented them from responding to NPR's request for additional data from the program. The agency did not respond to inquiries asking to confirm who gave the emailed answer.
That leaves many questions still unanswered about the Social Security data behind DOGE's claims. It's possible the analysis was conducted before the March 20 TRO or that Gracias is not the DOGE employee who accessed any personal Social Security information. So far, there has been no evidence provided of any states sharing public or private voter data with the DOGE team at SSA either.
It's also possible that the data about noncitizens comes from non-DOGE activities. The judge overseeing the case that the TRO only applies to "SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. It has no bearing on ordinary operations at SSA."
One clue about the data's potential provenance comes from this week's court filing: a March 17 email exchange from someone identified as Employee 7 who copied Gracias and Koval on a request for access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' , which SSA uses to verify the immigration status of EBE applicants.
"This access is absolutely critical to get detailed immigration status for non-citizen SSNs to detect fraud and improper payments," the email reads.
appears to be DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who at the Treasury Department over past racist tweets 鈥� and who shared a spreadsheet of personal information in violation of data-sharing policies, 鈥� before being rehired at multiple federal agencies.
That includes the Labor Department and Health and Human Services Department, where a different court case revealed Elez was . The SSA lawsuit documents say is a Labor employee detailed to SSA who
Questions about DOGE's data on noncitizens
Gracias puts the EBE program at the center of his account about how his team decided to check voter rolls. The program started in 2017 during the first Trump administration but grew dramatically under the Biden administration, which allowed millions of asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. and expanded the categories of immigrants who could stay on a temporary basis.
Until recently, under the EBE program, noncitizens applying for work permits, green cards or naturalization with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services could apply for Social Security cards without visiting a field office. and other outlets reported that the EBE program , citing an internal email. NPR has not independently confirmed the reporting.
Lawfully present immigrants who are authorized to work get Social Security numbers to ensure they are "paying their taxes into the Social Security trust funds as required by law," said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Since immigrants in the process of naturalizing could use the EBE program, those individuals could be expected to appear on voter rolls once they became U.S. citizens.
It remains unclear which state records the DOGE team checked for noncitizens. On the All-In podcast, Gracias described checking the public voter rolls of four "friendly" states to find noncitizens on the rolls. He then said "we went even further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted."
Later in the program, he said "well over a thousand voted" in one state. He has said his team has referred those cases for federal prosecution. In the same unsigned email, the unnamed SSA spokesperson declined to respond to NPR's questions about the inquiry into individuals who allegedly were identified as illegal voters using Social Security data, citing "ongoing criminal investigations on this matter."
But voting experts say the data cross-checking Gracias describes raises legal questions and can be prone to many kinds of errors.
"There are huge accuracy questions here," said Charles Stewart, the director of MIT's Election Data and Science Lab.
Typically, states' public voter rolls would not include Social Security numbers, which would make data matching far less precise. with false matches when just using names and birthdays.
Furthermore, it is common for states to find voters who have since naturalized and become citizens when cross-checking databases of noncitizens against their voter rolls.
"DOGE has repeatedly made massive data errors," said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "I have some doubts that they've discovered anything more than maybe just some poor government data quality tracking or they don't understand the data they're looking at."
It's also not clear if the DOGE effort to combine Social Security data with other sources inside and outside the federal government runs afoul of data sharing and privacy laws that are designed to limit access to sensitive information to those who have a need to use it.
"The use has to be consistent with the reason that you're asking for the records in the first place, which has to be consistent with your own agency's mission," said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a voting policy adviser in the Biden administration. "'Because I'm curious' is not a thing when the federal government comes to data."
Gracias appeared to attribute some of his team's access to an that directs agencies to facilitate "both the intra- and inter-agency sharing" of records.
"President Trump had the courage to allow us to go across databases, he signed an executive order," he said on Fox 暗黑爆料. "It's never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases can talk to each other. That allowed us to connect all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records."
Another executive order, directs the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE to "review each State's publicly available voter registration list" among other requests, similar to Gracias' effort at SSA.
Both presidential actions include the caveat that any sharing must occur "consistent with law."
The latest in DOGE data concerns
Multiple federal judges have found the DOGE effort has in its effort to comb through agencies to find "waste, fraud and abuse." Court records have also shown the Trump administration is unable to account for the scope of DOGE's data access, or the need for a small number of staffers to have virtually unfettered access to sensitive, compartmentalized data across the government.
The claims made by Gracias and Musk about Social Security data underscores growing questions around how DOGE is using the data it has gathered. In a ruling blocking DOGE access to Treasury systems, Judge Jeannette Vargas that "a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law."
Additionally, DOGE has at times from , and the and has not found evidence of fraud.
But Gracias' latest claims about noncitizens voting continue to have an impact on policy in the Trump administration and with the Republican-controlled Congress. During Thursday's House debate over the SAVE Act, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., mentioned DOGE's allegations and the claim that the Biden administration had "imported" noncitizens as a reason to pass the bill.
"We have evidence that they're participating in our elections," Bean said. "The DOGE team just announced millions of illegals now have Social Security numbers. It's happening and it ends today when we vote on this SAVE Act."
Have information you want to share about DOGE access to government databases, Social Security, immigration and IT systems? Reach out to these authors through encrypted communication on Signal. is at stphnfwlr.25, and is at JudeJB.10.
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