Another source warned that law enforcement and intelligence sources living in witness protection could be exposed by the data, as well as everyday Americans who could be viewed by Musk and the Trump administration as political enemies.
Some of those perceived enemies could include transgender Americans, according to Zinnia Jones, a transgender activist and researcher. Jones warned that the SSA data could be used to “identify nearly all likely transgender people in the US with 99 percent confidence.” Jones cited a 2015 U.S. Census Bureau study that utilized the same SSA data accessed by DOGE to estimate the number of trans Americans.
“For all we know, they may already know about the possibility of doing this and it’s part of why they insisted so forcefully on full access” to the data, Jones tells Rolling Stone. In her deposition, Flick noted that Bobba requested and was eventually given access to the SSA’s full dataset, “including source code.”
A former federal employee speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution agreed with Jones’ assessment, telling Rolling Stone that the Trump administration could use the SSA data — as well as agency hiring paperwork and passport applications — to identify and purge transgender employees from the government.