“A way to view this is as an attack by an insider threat,” John Skiles Skinner, a former consulting engineer and project leader at 18F, a prestigious and influential US government digital services agency that DOGE eliminated in March 2025, tells CSO. “There is a group of people, apparently handpicked by Elon Musk, who want to manipulate government data in some way, and they put themselves in positions of power and signed blank checks to themselves to move that data around however they want.”
What has yet to be determined, however, is whether the DOGE workers violated several US laws by abandoning security protocols and why they engaged in what Borges says are highly risky and unsafe data management practices.
What did the DOGE workers do?
Borges’s complaint identifies four DOGE personnel as the culprits behind this move, including Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls,” a 19-year-old DOGE programmer who became a full-time government employee in May, landing at the SSA in June; Aram Moghaddassi, who worked for DOGE at the Department of Labor and became CIO of SSA in June; John Solly, described as a DOGE-aligned hire, reportedly joined the SSA in March 2025 in the office of the CIO; and Michael Russo, who served as CIO of the SSA from February 2025 until late March 2025, when he was replaced by Scott Coulter and transitioned to a special advisor role in the SSA focused on “modernizing its archaic technology.”
