‘Another Hoax’: White House Refutes Claims DOGE Released Classified Data

The White House is calling out what it says is “another hoax” after the media and at least one Democrat in Congress perpetuated allegations that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was releasing classified information.

It started on Friday with the left-leaning HuffPost reporting that DOGE, which is led by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, was posting to its new website classified information about the size and staff at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

An unnamed Defense Intelligence Agency employee claimed DOGE posted “secret” data, resulting in people “scrambling to check if their info has been accessed.” Anonymous Senate aides claimed NRO’s headcount and budget were classified over concerns about foreign adversaries taking advantage of it.

Upon initial publication, HuffPo’s report quoted an NRO spokesperson deferring questions about the data to DOGE. HuffPo’s story also said the White House did not immediately return a request for comment. It was updated later, after publication, with a White House denial.

Other news outlets picked up on the report. The Daily Beast re-aggregated it. ABC News also pursued the story, citing its own intelligence community sources who asserted that what DOGE did likely represented a significant breach. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) also pushed the notion.

“Yesterday, the DOGE guys post classified information on their website, and they had to realize, oh, we didn’t realize that agency was a classified agency. You shouldn’t let people run rampage through offices that have classified information,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

But, as former House investigator and journalist Jerry Dunleavy pointed out in a series of posts on X, the NRO headcount information is publicly available on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) website and DOGE says on its site that workforce data comes from OPM.

“DOGE even says under “Sources” that it’s pulling its data from OPM’s publicly available data set as of March 2024,” he said. “OPM posted then NRO has 1,097 employees. DOGE posts now NRO has 1,097 employees. So… is the claim here that OPM has been publicly posting classified info for years?”

An email from White House Principal Deputy Communications Director Alex Pfeiffer said the “controversy” is really just DOGE reformatting data that is already publicly available and denying that there was a “breach” of sensitive information.

“DOGE is sharing OPM data from under the Biden administration,” Pfeiffer said in a statement. “The headcount for this agency is publicly available on OPM’s website. These attacks are just another hoax meant to undermine the great work the Trump Administration is doing.”