Current and former employees, both Republican and Democratic, are raising alarms about the damage cost-cutting efforts could do to the agency’s ability to serve the public.

In March 2025, a rumor spread that U.S. President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency was closing 47 Social Security Administration offices across the country. The claim surfaced after Trump tasked DOGE at the beginning of his second term with shrinking the size of the federal workforce to make it more "efficient and effective.

The team working at the Social Security Administration appears to be among the largest DOGE units deployed to any government agency.

Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer working at the U.S. Treasury, emailed a spreadsheet with unencrypted personally identifiable information to two Trump administration officials prior to his resignation in February after racist social media posts linked to Elez surfaced online .

The 25-year-old DOGE staffer was also "mistakenly" given read-and-write access to Treasury systems during his time at the department.