US government employees “improperly” shared sensitive documents, including White House blueprints, with thousands of federal workers, the Washington Post first reported on Sunday.
Staff with the General Services Administration (GSA), an independent agency that oversees the construction and preservation of government buildings, shared a Google Drive folder contacting confidential files to all GSA staff members, totaling more than 11,200 people.
The folder was mistakenly uploaded to a Google workplace with the incorrect settings, making it accessible to all workers, a source told the Axios website after the Post’s story broke.
The inadvertent leak began in 2021 under the Biden administration and was later discovered by GSA’s IT team as apart of a routine audit last week, the Post reported. Banking information for a vendor who helped with a Trump administration press conference was also included in the shared folder, the Post reported.
Related: ‘Full-blown meltdown’ at Pentagon after Hegseth’s second Signal chat revealed
At least three documents have been shared in the folder during the second Trump term, including one shared just last week. The agency’s IT team is still investigating the inadvertent leak, the Post added. A cybersecurity report was also filed on the incident. The GSA did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
It is unclear if any of the documents shared were classified, but experts have warned that sharing some documents, including White House floor plans, poses obvious security risks.
“Even if they were not formally classified … they would be closely held for obvious security reasons,” said Steven Aftergood, a former director for the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, to the Post.
If any documents contained information such as private passageways or security procedures, such information could be considered classified under executive order 13526, Aftergood added to the Post. The order, issued in 2009, created a system for classifying, declassifying and protecting national security information.
The incident is the latest security mishap plaguing the Trump administration. Last month, several senior Trump officials, including Vice-President JD Vance and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, discussed secret military plans in a Signal messaging chat involving US attacks against the Houthi group in Yemen.
The breach was first reported by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, who was mistakenly added to the group chat. Top Democrats, including the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned the leak as a calamitous security blunder.
Hegseth came under fire again this week after news broke that the defense secretary shared strike plans with family members, including his wife and brother, in a separate Signal group chat, the New York Times reported.
The Guardian has independently confirmed the existence of Hegseth’s own private group chat.
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