DOGE staffer pushing election lies based on Social Security data he's not allowed to see

One of Elon Musk's lieutenants in the Department of Government Efficiency has been improperly using the Social Security Administration to push dubious claims about voter fraud, according to a new report.

DOGE staffer Antonio Gracias told "Fox & Friends" on April 2 that more than 5 million noncitizens who came to the U.S. illegally had received Social Security numbers "through an automatic system," and he then claimed they had then been added to voter rolls and cast ballots – which is already a federal crime and virtually nonexistent, reported NPR.

"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.

State-level audits of voter data have found few instances of noncitizens voting, but that didn't stop Gracias from pushing his baseless claims citing data that court records suggest he should be allowed to access in the first place.

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"I think this was a move to import voters," Gracias told the All-In Podcast, echoing a conspiracy theory Donald Trump and Musk promoted during the 2024 election campaign.

Gracias is among 10 DOGE staffers embedded at the Social Security Administration, and a court has ordered them from handling sensitive systems at the agency, including payment files, master databases and personally identifiable information.

Musk and Gracias have both claimed that undocumented immigrants are receiving payments from Social Security, although they actually help finance the system without collecting benefits of their own, and having a Social Security number does not mean that a person is registered to vote.

NPR asked the SSA's acting press officer Nicole Tiggemann about DOGE's access to data, and while the agency declined to answer detailed questions about that access it did confirm that a chart Gracias publicized showing totals of noncitizens with Social Security numbers was taken from an online dashboard maintained by the agency, but then claimed a restraining order prevented them from providing additional information.

"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."