Trump admin error exposed health workers’ SSNs in Medicare portal

According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of health care providers in a database powering a new Medicare portal. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the administration’s initiative to modernise health care technology.

But a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. The report notes that the exposure concerns a database used to feed the Medicare portal, which was described as the portal’s underlying data source. Read more at The Washington Post. This piece was reported on 4 May 2026 by DataBreaches[.]Net.