The DOGE data breach at the Social Security Administration with Whistleblower Chuck Borges

Justin Beals: Hello everyone and welcome to SecureTalk. I'm your host, Justin Beals.

The Social Security Administration holds the most sensitive personal data on roughly 550 million living and dead Americans. Full names, dates of birth, places of birth, parents' full names, citizenship status, address histories. It is the foundational identity record for nearly every system in the country, from banking to healthcare to voter registration.

In early 2025, DOGE staffers were granted access to that data. The Justice Department has since acknowledged that DOGE members accessed and shared Social Security data without the awareness of agency officials. According to federal reports, data was copied to unsecured cloud environments. There are credible allegations that records were exfiltrated on thumb drives. And the agency itself has admitted it cannot confirm whether that data remains on private servers outside its control.

The person who raised the alarm on these risks is our guest today. Chuck Borges was the first dedicated Chief Data Officer at the Social Security Administration. He arrived two weeks before the administration change and watched as his department was sequestered, data governance requests were denied, and work on sensitive datasets was siloed away from the officials responsible for protecting them. When he determined that the risk to the American public was too significant to stay silent, he spoke up, and it cost him his job.

What Chuck describes in our conversation is not an abstract policy debate. It is a firsthand account of what happens when data governance breaks down inside an organization that touches every American. We talk about the specific risks this data exposure creates, from identity theft to political manipulation to national security vulnerabilities. We discuss what effective data governance looks like and why it was systematically undermined. And we hear from someone who made the decision that his obligation to the public outweighed his risks to his career.

Chuck Borges is a digital strategist, data and analytics leader, and combat veteran with a distinguished career spanning military service, federal government, and the private sector. A graduate of MIT with a B.S. in Astronomy, he also holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Maryland and an M.S. in Aviation Systems from the University of Tennessee, complemented by training at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. Chuck built his foundation through nearly two decades of naval service, holding roles ranging from Project Test Officer and Department Head to Assistant Air Operations Officer aboard the USS Harry S. Truman. He later transitioned into data leadership at Naval Air Systems Command, serving as Chief Data Officer before moving into roles at the CDC, Deloitte, and the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, where he supported the Public Health Data Modernization Initiative and the EOP/OMB Data Team. Most recently, Chuck served as Chief Data Officer at the Social Security Administration and continues to serve on the board of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation.

Join me today on SecureTalk for this important conversation with Chuck Borges.

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Justin Beals: Chuck, thanks for joining us today on SecureTalk. We're really grateful that you're spending some time today with us.

Chuck Borges: Hey Justin, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Justin Beals: You have led an excellent life, my friend, a really wild background of things that I think I dreamed about when I was a kid. So I'm just gonna call out a couple of these things.

You went from MIT astrophysics to Navy test pilot to a chief data officer, not a typical career arc. And I'd love for you to just connect some of these experiences in your background. Yeah.

Chuck Borges: Sure, so you hit the major points. Let me start by saying, before that, my father was an air traffic controller. He was fired by Reagan and the PATCO strike in 81. So we went from a very solid middle-class background to a very poor, lower-middle-class background. We were never poor, but we struggled. And he made pizzas and tended bar, and at one point sold vacuum cleaners, if you remember Electrolux back in the day, door to door.

Justin Beals: I do, yes. I think my parents entertained that vacuum cleaner.

Chuck Borges: Maybe he knocked on your door if you're in the New York area. I don't know. But it gave me a good appreciation for the value of hard work and he worked very hard. And so did my mother to make sure that we had enough to get by. I applied to MIT. I worked really hard in school, got in, put myself through college on an ROTC scholarship. My goal was to be an astronaut. I did not expect to be here today. I expected to be on the tail end of a nice astronaut career, and that was always my childhood goal.

So I looked at the life and I said, here's the boxes I need to tick off. I need to go to a good school. I need to get some kind of a hard science degree. I need to go into the Navy because they produce the most astronauts. need to go to test pilot school. So I checked off all those boxes, but you know, it's really competitive to be an astronaut. I didn't quite make the last leap. But as I moved through that journey, I found that I really enjoyed the service aspect of my career more than the personal achievement aspect of it. So after I didn't make astronaut, the Navy moved me into the data space at one point, literally bringing me into a program manager's office, and he said, see what you can do with our data. Nice open-ended challenge, you're an MIT guy, go nuts. So I made the best of it. I moved into the data space, did some new and novel things in the early 2010s with Hadoop and associative learning that brought me to the attention of more senior Navy leadership.

And at some point, I said, you know, I have to get out of the Navy because while they like data geeks, it's really not an upwardly mobile career path. So I moved into civil service, CDC during COVID, OMB in the Biden White House, and then, like you said, social security. So I was gonna be an astronaut. I moved into the data space by accident, but it was a good natural fit because I have a creativity for problem-solving tha iis really beneficial in this space. The problems are complex. They need people that can step back and see the big picture. So it was just serendipitous how it happened, but definitely the right career path. And sometimes you just take things where they come.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I share your attraction to hard problems to solve. And in a similar, I think, scenario, early on in the 2000s, I was working in XML with a lot of natural language processing and text data and realizing kind of the interconnectedness of these things and what you could reveal. Hadoop was a really cool, innovative database and data modelling technique, and associative learning was cutting edge in the 2010s. It was really exciting what we were doing from a computer science perspective.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, the data at the time though, was so dirty. Like I remember dealing with one form that was an XML form, and all the XML extensible tags on the back were the same. So we literally had to rewrite the form and then go through the previous nine versions of the form and by hand and normalize it so that we could create a database that could be tied to the schema, and then we could kind of, you know, match it to other data. But back then, you had a lot of that manual work to be done in order to get the data ready. And that first experience, anybody can look it up, Google T-45 physiological episodes. There was a point in the mid 2010s where Navy pilots went on strike because they literally couldn't breathe in the aircraft. And so we had to figure out why. That early effort in manual data normalization and cleaning data really helped me appreciate that the data is the foundation, right? You know, we are putting the AI cart today before the data horse, and it's very concerning because garbage in garbage out is only amplified with an AI model. Yeah, that was two, mid-2010s was a little bit of the wild west with Hadoop and, and associative learning and the technology wasn't quite there yet, but we did what we could.

Justin Beals: It was fun. That must have been a powerful experience to realize that you were working in a data computer science space to solve a real problem for people you care deeply about. Mean, you sat in those cockpits yourself and realizing that you could have an impact on their lives with the right type of analysis of the information or revealing what the challenge was, must have been really exciting.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, it was. It was a nice blend. So there was a bit of urgency there because again, you know, not only, you know, was I someone who'd sat in those cockpits, but we needed to solve that problem imminently for military readiness. But it was a nice blend of seeing the impact because I was so close to that community and seeing them every day, and being at a strategic abstract level in the problem. You know, usually as you move up through leadership, you're abstracted out from the day-to-day impact. And this was a nice middle ground where I could see the community I was impacting every day, talk to them, get their qualitative understanding, but also step back and look at the larger problem. So it was really a rewarding experience. And then, like you said, saving pilot lives, reducing the amount of emergencies in the aircraft, because that's my community. We were all very not validated is not the right word. It was a very rewarding experience.

Justin Beals: Absolutely, yeah. Now, I can't imagine a more precious database, probably not the biggest in the world, but very sensitive information at the Social Security Administration. Did you have some trepidation in starting to work with that, or did your career in the Navy help you feel confident on the security side of what needed to happen as you moved into that area?

Chuck Borges: So I didn't have a lot of trepidation going to Social Security. As you said, it's not the largest database in the world, but I can't think of a more critical database that touches every American anymore. And I've touched all of them in the federal government in some way or another.

So I didn't have any trepidation from the security perspective. Every federal agency is relatively fragmented on the back end. Cybersecurity is a bit of a patchwork because of the way systems have evolved in the government over time. So you're never going to find an agency with a nice cohesive cybersecurity boundary. You're going to find those with stone. It's like the three wolves, right? Like some places, it's built of brick, and some places it's built of straw. And sometimes the big bad wolf can blow down the straw part.

So I never really had a trepidation of going there because I had experience in the security concerns in a large federal agency.

I just, I expected that I would be able to go in and the environment would be critical, but intentionally thought through so that we could put rules in place. Cause you know, the CDO, the chief data officer's role is governance, not day-to-day management of data. That being the first dedicated chief data officer at Social Security, I would really be able to drive towards better governance and rules around the data to make improvements. It just didn't happen that way. So.

Justin Beals: The thing that I have had conversations about, especially with folks on the commercial side, is they'll sometimes have this assumption that the commercial side is operating more efficiently because we operate in capital markets and competitive markets than the government. But it's never been true to me. Right? Like the same issues happen in the commercial space from a security perspective that happened on the government side.

And I really, I think this concept that working in a purely competitive or capital marketplace, you know, inside our economy, a free market makes everything better. It doesn't a lot of times. And so I really push back and appreciate that folks that come in with a mission mindset on the government side actually do really great work and have the same set of challenges as any other organization.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, I'd agree with that. From a cybersecurity perspective, I think you could make the argument that while the federal government has challenges that industry doesn't because it is so much harder inside the federal government to buy an app or install a service. Inside the federal government, it took me three months at CDC to get a certain number of JIRA licenses. Whereas JIRA is a commercial application for project management. Whereas at Deloitte, I was able to make a phone call and get a certain number of licenses the next day. So while there's flexibilities in industry that the government doesn't have.

There's also, like you said, when you bring in dedicated professionals with a mission mindset, with a mindset of service, they are much more, in my perspective, motivated to get it right sometimes than someone who's purely driven by profit and, you know, can think a little more from a mercenary perspective. Well, you know, I can move from company to company. Most of the people that come into government are dedicated, engaged civil servants trying to help people.

And that motivation actually, I think, helps find better solutions.

Justin Beals: Yeah, I'm passionate about the amount of respect that those civil servants deserve from us for working so hard for these outcomes. I get that we're all individuals and there are different levels of commitment. At the same time, I'm so grateful for the civil servants that I know that have made that contribution.

Now, you, as the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, you were front row seat as administration changes and that's very typical for civil servants to have to deal with. A lot of have been through multiple administrations. But I think the DOGE change at the Social Security Administration was something very painful, and also running counter to your mission around governance. Maybe you can just describe for us how that played out a little bit.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, I will. And I appreciate that. Touching on the civil servants really quick, because this will be relevant to the answer. All those lower-level civil servants, I appreciate your position on them. They deserve all of everybody's grace, right? Everybody is in a unique perspective. Those people at the GS 1413, lower levels, are working very hard to make sure that services still run. And give them all the grace that you can.

Senior leadership, executive leadership that is staying silent and putting people in uncomfortable positions. I view them as complicit at this point. If you're not willing to speak up and defend your people, I have a problem with that. But lower level civil servants are working very hard every day. Please give them grace and support because this is a hard time. But people need those checks to survive. Coming into social security, there were things that happened that were reported in the news that were not abnormal.

For instance, I remember seeing in the news the hiring freeze. Every administration that comes in puts on a short-term hiring freeze while they sort it out. President Biden did the same thing. I think President Obama did as well, if I recall, 90 days, 180 days. But Social Security was not unique. And when you put those aside, the agency, other agencies were completely shut down, like USAID, shuttered in like a week.

Social Security saw a level of disorder and chaos that I would characterize as unprecedented if unprecedented were a stronger word. I had been there for two weeks. I started the same week as the administration change, complete coincidence, because I was hired a couple months before, but government moved slowly. And within two weeks of my getting there, my entire department, not the CDO's office, but I reported to a deputy commissioner, was shuttered, and the agency started to see entire divisions be shuttered and reorganized. Some were eliminated completely. It got to the point in a very short period of time where it wasn't just impossible to do your day-to-day work because you didn't know who you were coordinating with anymore, and you spent most of your time trying to figure out whether people were taking the deferred resignation,or getting early retirement or having to get threatened with reassignments. But

It got hard to do things like I heard a story about a field office official who I know had trouble buying printer paper because, you know, everything in the government runs on a contract and if there were nine people that could sign off on a purchase and all nine of them have been reassigned or fired that contract is sitting there un-executable.

So it was a level of chaos that almost brought day-to-day operations in some respects to a halt, and when you pair that with the fear that civil servants experienced at the time, you know, they were afraid of getting fired. They were afraid of some of the things they were being asked to do verbally. Eyewitnessed experiences of visual, of verbal intimidation in meetings where you compare that chaos with that fear.

And it was, I keep coming back to unprecedented, but it is just not strong enough of a word. The amount of mental and psychic strain that civil servants went under in the springtime at Social Security and at other agencies was absolutely insane and honestly absolutely unnecessary because while the government needs to be fixed, there is a lot of places where we can improve efficiency. That needs to be done with intention because these are good honest civil servants working really hard and most of them are brilliant.

Justin Beals: I'm reminded of something that I try to carry with me in my role as an executive and as a manager and someone who wants to be a leader for my team, that great power comes great responsibility. And being intimidating, being cruel, being mean to people that you work around or work for you is absolutely unnecessary. There are times when hard decisions need to be made, of course, and I can't imagine being the psychopath that doesn't care about people when those decisions come up.

And it makes my job harder to care, of course, but I just feel a deep moral responsibility to those team members, especially when someone may need to have a very heart-to-heart conversation about what's not working well. To really try and treat them humanely in the work, you know, and definitely in a mission-driven organization, the emotional impact of not recognizing that desire to do a good job demolishes team morale, right? I mean, you operated in a unit. Team morale must have been everything when thinking about a frontline position for you.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, it took me a long time to learn this lesson because while Team RL is everything in the military, the military is also a very regimented organization. you're right, hard decisions need to be made. You need to approach hard decisions when you're inside the government or when you're supporting people, which everybody should be, from a position of empathy. And the lack of empathy that I experienced in 2025 from many, I think it was one part lack of life experience, and one part radicalization. And that's a very concerning combination when you're talking about putting people in positions of power to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, not just in the United States. I said, I learned that experience myself when I transitioned from active duty military, warheads on foreheads, of go out and fly missions to program management of civilians.

It was a hard transition for me, because I had an expectation that I would give orders and people would follow them. And that's not how the world works, right? You need to build, you know, empathy. You need to be able to not just feign interest in what people are saying and their lives, but actually be interested in what people are saying and in their lives to draw out the best from your team. So, you know, I didn't see that in 2025. I saw exactly the opposite. Difficult decisions were being made from my perspective with intentional cruelty.

At one point when we had to return to the office, we were given the direction not to have any return to the office parties. I mean, if you're going to make people return to the office and it's a morale dropper, a return to the office party might at least make it seem, for instance, a little bit happier of an occasion. You're meeting people, you're getting back together, you're socializing humans or social creatures. We were forbidden from doing that. That was intentional cruelty to me. And I think that was the point and personal opinion, you approach those hard decisions with empathy for people. And I didn't see that. was demoralizing.

Justin Beals: Yeah. Now, I think the lack of life experience is an interesting phrase with the new staffers that were brought in or the team, especially when you think that designing effective governance has a lot to do with good life experience on what good governance is. Maybe let's talk a little bit about the DOGE staff that came in and some of the experiences you saw there, of course what you can share with us, especially around the data.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, so the lack of life experience for me was a particular roadblock to actually implementing solutions. Now, some of the staffers that came in had some very good ideas. And I won't speak about anybody individually. But there were instances where you need to pair your, and it's hard when you're young. I remember when I was young, I was a Navy test pilot, right? I know arrogance better than most. And it took me a long time to think through that and try to be less of that young, brash person.

But when you're thinking through that at a very young age, and you're not willing to listen to career professionals, your good ideas are rapidly going to spiral into either unworkability or they're going to leave people behind. know, a lack of recognition that not every American has a passport. So those social security cards are very important to them. Or disbelief that elderly people have trouble accessing online services. So, in-person visits or the ability to answer the phone is very important to someone like my 90-something year old grandmother who couldn't even turn on a computer, never once turned on a computer in her life. So the lack of life experience was very concerning. It was just paired with a level of, from my perspective, disregard. It was disinterest. Even when I disagreed with people at work, at this point in my life,usually worked very hard to understand their perspective.

You know, I guess you're very myopic when you're young and you come into a new position and you're convinced that you're right. It's very easy to disregard those who have additional life experience. Again, in industry, in a small company, that might be fine. When you're providing services to 70, 80, 100 million Americans, that is a very concerning proposition. So.

Justin Beals: Tell me a little bit about the activities that were falling outside of effective governance inside the Social Security Administration as these new staffers came in and started working with the data.

Chuck Borges: Well, from my perspective, there was never effective governance at the agency. It was very hard to stand up, even on a board of executives, to try to start to elaborate on what are the rules we need to follow? Can you help me understand like cybersecurity at the agency?

Because some people quit, some people got fired, and there were at least three instances where I requested permission to stand up at data governance board and was denied. So what happened was when you add the chaos in to the fear that people felt on a daily basis, you started to get silos of work where information didn't even come to me on a regular basis. We've all seen the news reports of the 120-year-old people collecting social security. There were millions of them, right? There weren't millions of them. But that is an effort that someone latched on to despite the agency knowing that the problem existed and having publicly admitted it existed a couple of years ago. And that work happened entirely outside of my domain. In another instance, we had 7,000 or so plus or minus immigrants who had artificial death dates inserted into the death master file and then redacted. I found out about that in the media, not through social security channels. So there was a pattern from the very beginning of siloing and compartmentalizing work in service of an agenda or not. It could have just been people latched onto little pet projects for all I know, but that siloing and compartmentalizing of the manipulation of data was as the news got out of this or that, a very concerning pattern from the very beginning. And it was very easy for senior employees to lean on lower-level employees and make sure that they did their job and kept quiet about it, which as the CDO makes that a very difficult operating environment.

Justin Beals: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you had a shadow IT issue in a way. Data was being duplicated and put into cloud environments for folks to operate on outside of even the governance that did exist.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, there's definitely was a shadow IT issue again, exacerbated by that fear and that chaos. So, you know, normally in the government, there are policies and processes that need to be followed. You know, if a risk to a certain thing rises to a certain level, the appropriate authorities are informed or consulted on that risk. You know, when I disclosed the copying of the NUMIDENT data to an unsecured cloud server, you know, there was a risk assessment that was done, that painted that as a catastrophic impact to the agency relative to data security, it seems like a no-brainer that you would consult the chief data officer if you're concerned about data security or data safety or data access.

But again, that was something I found out about as a fait accompli; it had already been done. So, you know, the federal government, because every agency operates as an individual unit, has top-level rules, but then it pushes the execution of them down.

And what that ends up happening is that agencies vest a lot of executive power in certain officials like the CIO, some agencies utilize the CDO, but most don't, or the commissioner or director, whatever each agency calls it, to override or authorize things. And that is what happened in this case. And it's problematic. We need to rethink our IT policies to decentralize the power structure around executive authority, because if you put an executive authority in place that's willing to bend or break the rules, then you end up in a situation where personal information might have been downloaded to thumb drives, and nobody ever knew about it.

Justin Beals: Which is a recent report that's come out. think that's the one that's been in the media a lot lately and certainly terrifying. Let's start with the data, which is something we love. In any type of breach, we want to say, to your point, what's the risk here? What is numident data? Can you help us describe that?

Chuck Borges: Yeah. So yeah, I appreciate that. In a nutshell, Numident data is the data that you give Social Security when you apply for a Social Security card plus any updates to that data. So full name, date of birth, place of birth, mother's full name, father's full name, citizenship status, address updates. So it's the moving because your address changes over time, and also immutable data that defines not just you as a person. And people get scared about their own data. Think about that that's your mother's data, your father's data, your grandparents' data and your great-grandparents' data. So it is the immutable personal information that Social Security keeps on 550-ish million living and dead Americans.

Justin Beals: Yeah, okay, and that might seem like just a tabular bit of information, but you and I, having worked in the field of data science, understand that precise information about every American living citizen, as well as some of their dead relatives, is a very dangerous set of information.

Chuck Borges: Absolutely.

Justin Beals: I think of the impact of social media, the ability to contact all those people. the amount of data, you know, exhausts that you can pull from an economic perspective based upon where they lived, where they've moved, the types of scenarios that they've been in, who they're related to. It is very precise. And I sound like a conspiracy theorist sometimes, which I'm not, but we've seen it in the Cambridge Analytica issue, where it's not just about crafting a marketing message for broad sets of population. It's the ability of our computer science to

directly target a single individual with messages crafted for them that terrifies me.

Chuck Borges: And you know you're talking about just crafting messages right like I mean, let's think about the amount of high-quality full identity profiles that can be created for any person you know, the ability to use that data to Develop everybody understands identity theft right it's a data breach. It's identity theft. You know a synthetic identity profile for every person, where you can start blending social security numbers and places of birth with real names you know, with this data I could go out and get a duplicate birth certificate, request changes to it, and even when we unpack this and have to rethink digital identity, it will be very hard for the government to prove if I say I'm you and I have all the documentation to prove it and I'm another Justin Beals because I had your new ident data and got a new birth certificate with my address, my photo, which one of us is the real Justin Beals? And that's the easy thing to wrap your head around.

You know, when you start talking about micro targeting, you know, they're probably not coming after me or you. Let's think about the fact that this is data that could be used to blackmail, coerce, or socially engineer military families, intelligence operatives or people that manage critical infrastructure. Like you said, you can tailor disinformation campaigns to them, but think about the ability to conduct political manipulation, right?

Like think about the ability to understand voter demographics, and analyze that with data science and then go back maybe if you have access to these systems and flip a couple citizenship indicators for disadvantaged populations to non-citizen, which was something else that was noticed in the report. The report said that they can reach back into these systems. I got 1,000 people in this district that I want to make it more difficult to vote. I'll flip them as a non-citizen. They'll get flagged. Their voter registration will get pulled. They'll have to prove they're a citizen again.

You know, the limits of what can be done with this data is really only limited by imagination. And we also have to remember that every single industry, from banking to healthcare to schools, uses this information to prove identity to some degree or another. And so it's going to be a real challenge if this data is out there and something bad happens. What happens when your mortgage lender and your title insurer are trying to update their systems to account for the leak of this information in real time, and there's a mismatch, right? Right now, the theft systems and the identity verification systems don't operate well already. So now I'm using a new social security number over here and an old social security number over there. They don't match, and your mortgage gets denied or your benefits lapse for even a month. That's absolutely catastrophic to many people. So, you know, there's an identity theft issue. There's a national security issue.

And ironically, because this is the data that government uses for all of its services, DOGE, the organization that's supposed to eliminate fraud and waste, if this data was out there through their actions, would have made it easier to perpetuate fraud against the government than at any time in our history, which is unfortunately very ironic.

Justin Beals: Yeah, you say if the data, but the Justice Department has acknowledged in January of this year that the DOGE members access and shared this data, the Social Security data, without awareness of agency officials. Do we know what has happened with that data at all? Do we have any intelligence around it?

Chuck Borges: No, you know, that report was very concerning for two reasons. One, the one you just mentioned, that the data was shared, apparently. At least it was a small subset of data. But the real concerning piece of information in that was that the agency said something to the effect of, " We don't know if that data is still out there on private servers, and we have no way to track and manage that”. To me, that is a clear indication that, in fact, operators were acting independently and possibly the security settings around the environments were modified, manipulated or turned off, which really, it's only a thousand people, it seems like no big deal, but really keeps you up at night when you think about that with the entirety of the 550 million Americans personal information in New Medan. So yes, we know that the data was attempted to be shared, but more concerning is the fact that the agency admitted, we don't know if it's still out there.

And that is really the scary part of that January admission.

Justin Beals: The story about the thumb drive issue is doubly terrifying in a way. It was so easy to exfil with just putting the right person, kind of the, I think the fox and the hen's nest to coin a phrase. And now like any corporate data breach, we have no idea what the long-term effect of that data breach will be at this point. Yeah.

Chuck Borges:  Yeah, the exfil of that data in that way is literally the nightmare scenario that kept me up at night. As you know, when there's generally a breach, even though the damage is done through the movement of the data, you can understand the extent of that breach. You can understand where your boundary failed. You can usually track it through systems. And you can track or manage that. When you are giving someone full administrative access to an environment, and you're able to exfil that data without an audit trail,

You know, once it's on a thumb drive and it's left the building, and that's what the report says is that it was on a thumb drive. You have to assume the data is irretrievably lost because there could be one copy of that thumb drive, hopefully, and you get it back, or there could be a million, and we won't know until something bad does or doesn't happen, right? We won't know how pervasive the data loss is until Congress investigates it and actually digs into this issue. And even then, we might never know, because as you know, you can change the security boundary around anything to make it impossible to track movement.

Justin Beals: Absolutely. Now, I think that you described or you have been described as a whistleblower to these events. Could you talk a little bit about the courage to speak about what had happened and the personal impact to you and your family about speaking about what happened?

Chuck Borges: Yeah, it was was a I mean, Social Security Chief Data Officer was literally my dream job, right? I moved up through the data ranks. When you think about agencies that you want to work for as a CDO, you're talking about like, you know, maybe DoD, you know, maybe, you know, one of the other big ones, like maybe you want to be the data lead at OMB, and then, you know, Social Security, because it's the biggest federal outlay of funds in the world. So you know, it was an exciting job, it's a capstone career job. So it, but you you get to a point when you learn enough about a situation where you have to, and this is where my military training really helped, you need to understand and have thought through what your ethical and moral boundaries are.

And so if you know enough, and I didn't even allege that the data had been breached, downloaded or transmitted in my disclosure, but if you know enough that the risk is there and you say to yourself, if this happens, will I be comfortable having stayed silent? For me, the answer was no, because the risk to the American people is just that great.

It was very challenging to decide to burn down what had been in effect been a 30-year career moving up through the military ranks and then the civil service to raise this risk. But, you know,

you have to be morally and ethically right with yourself. And that's where I really look down very harshly on current executive leadership that is willing to be complicit rather than take personal and professional risk. That's what you sign on for when you sign on to be a leader. So it was very challenging. I did not sleep for probably a month or two, probably a month before and a month after, and we had to have some hard discussions in my family around how this would affect us. I'm still unemployed. I've actually had job offers pulled because of various things, but you need to be able to sleep at night. And at the end of your days, all the money in the world won't make up for a fact that if you feel like you've ethically compromised who you think you are. So, yeah, sorry, it's a bit of a philosophical answer.

It was extremely nerve-racking. I've told people it was harder than combat, and I think that's true, because while combat is a point action, you know, you go in, you do the thing people make shoot at you, you get out you don't have a lot of time to think about it You know and in combat, you're not thinking about that. You're putting your family at risk that you're putting your livelihood at risk. You're just doing your job. This was a long drawn-out, frightening process. So. to those others that are actual whistleblowers, I look at myself more as a canary in the coal mine. These people are real heroes and it takes an incredible amount of unshakable courage to stand up to billionaires these days. To those out there watching, thank you. To those out there that are watching that have information, now is the time to help bring this information out because there are people like me that will stand up for you. And that's part of the reason I came out publicly so people could see that. There are organizations out there that will defend you. Help us make this government accountable and transparent. Sorry, had to get that pitch in there while I know I have an audience.

Justin Beals: I'm, no, no, I'm ready to dive in, but just before I do, I want to hold some deep empathy for watching your father go through what must have been a similar cycle and stand up for what he felt was morally right, know, proper compensation for air traffic controllers, lose his job, impact your family. You were on the precipice of making a very similar decision, and taking probably a lesson from what you saw him do.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, the parallels are interesting, aren't they? You never really think you'd have that situation. I was like three or four. I was four when that happened. So I don't remember the actual impact. I look back on it after the fact and realize the impact on the family. I just thought, hey, this is four. There's people with signs, and there's chanting. It's like super cool party. But yeah, we made a very similar decision 40 years apart. The parallels are definitely interesting.

Justin Beals: Well, I think that you said to me as we were preparing for this recording that you're not done with civil service. And so let's move into what you're working on today. Yeah.

Chuck Borges: So I'm running for state Senate in Southern Maryland, District 29. I started speaking out around data security, data safety. Congress, when I whistle, did not listen. And they're not listening today. If they spent 1 % of the time grandstanding, that they spent grandstanding on protecting the American public, we would already have all the answers that we need. But that's not in their interest.

I urge people to call their congressmen. did some media appearances where I said similar things. And the local Democratic Party approached me about running for office. I talked about it with my friends. I decided that I'd done my duty to the country. But I wanted to make a difference in my community. Because while the grift in the local community is not as apparent, it's still there. There's still leadership that is more interested in profiteering than people.

I have that skill set in problem solving that I feel like can help us build locally a more resilient economy and actually feed kids, actually provide affordable housing. And if we are gonna survive as a country, I feel like local resilient economies that can work together across the region and regional boundaries is gonna be the kernel.

It's not gonna be a federal action that comes down and we get a new administration and everything is back to normal. It's gonna be grassroots, local change, where we can have local change that works together and scales up across states that will strengthen and renew the American dream. So I wanna be a part of that. So I looked at it and said, yeah, I'm not done with service yet. It's time to make a difference where I live.

Justin Beals: And well, that is really enticing and I'm very excited for you. think with your background, you have a lot of feet on the ground experiences as a citizen of the country.

Chuck Borges: I hope so.

Justin Beals: And I think that that is really valuable in a political office scenario because you can bring those experiences, you share them with your community. What's it been like?

running for office. Not anything I've ever done, so I'm a little curious how you're finding the work, Yeah.

Chuck Borges: So the campaigning is hard. If you look at legislation, legislation like anything else is an investment. You need to get into it early. So I'm in a light red area of a big blue sea and Maryland is a blue state. My area is rural red. But pragmatically, that means that we don't have leadership that can even affect positive change to bring it back to the community. So trying to get that message out there to people that we need to be pragmatic if we want our region to survive and do it in a way that resonates with their personal problems has been challenging. It's also challenging because, you like I said, it's a little red lake in a big blue sea that entrenched Republican leadership at the local level and at the state level is very, very well funded, is very, very cohesive and drives a lot of hate.

I've been sworn at at public gatherings by my opponents and supporters for no reason at all than I exist. So the campaigning has been very challenging, but it is very, very exciting to like, come back down and see and touch people's problems and realize you can make a difference in their lives. When I was at CDC, like writing the public health data strategy, I knew I was making a difference in public health. That is a lot different than talking through how you bring a primary care physician to your region with incentives and job training programs where you know that people will be going to see that person. So, you know, it's a very exciting thing to do.

But it is also really challenging and I'm not a natural politician. So, you know, I'm learning a lot. I will say one more thing also. The hardest part about politics is by far fundraising. it is impressive how much money moves the needle. Not so much in the development of logistics, although you need the money to build logistics. But also in a show of strength.

You know, when you can fundraise, you can show strength and, you know, that helps drive more fundraising. you know, while it's easily the hardest part, we're not we're not concentrating on fundraising. We're concentrating on meeting people. think that my superpower is going to be that empathy and that ability to meet people. And we're going to counter the fundraising disadvantages because I'm facing an independently wealthy, big business funded incumbent with community presence. And it's exciting to do that.

Justin Beals: That really resonates in my own personal experience in corporate work in the business world. We have a lot of competitors that are much better funded. I like to tell people that we haven't raised the hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, but we carry the best product on the market because we're closer to our customers' problems, not what our venture capital partners wanted to see out of their investment. And I think that resonates in the political sphere as well, right?

I hope Chuck, that your superpower is focusing on people's problems and that resonates no matter what their background or perception of labels of political party are. Because I think if we can solve problems as a community that will be a better community altogether.

Chuck Borges: I completely agree. And if we solve problems as a community, it doesn't matter which child I'm feeding, I'm feeding children. whether they voted for me or not, if those parents are feeling less stressed at home, maybe the fear and anger abate a little bit. And we build more community spirit. We're more open and engaged. We are not going to solve the divisions in our country from the top down. We are going to solve them from the ground up. And that's by making sure people are supported and they're valued.

Justin Beals: Chuck, thank you first off for your service. Thank you for your work as a civil servant and being innovative in managing the data and the impact data can have. And finally, thank you for continuing your mission. I'm very grateful and appreciate you spending some time with us today on Secure Talk to share all of these stories.

Chuck Borges: Yeah, thanks for having me. If anybody wants to reach out, like I said, if you have information, I'm happy to connect you to resources. If you'd like to follow the campaign, I'm on all the socials. It's Chuck the number four MD and the same thing as the website, chuck4md.com. I'm happy to connect with anybody.

I mean, we need to band together to protect people, to save this country. And we used to be the world leader in so many things, and we're losing our way. So let's elect ethical leaders, let's support our civil servants, and let's have dialogue, not division.

Justin Beals: Wonderful. Chuck, have an amazing day.

Chuck Borges: Thank you, Justin. Thanks for having me. Have a great day.

Justin Beals: Our pleasure.