Saginaw native who led Social Security embraced, then resisted Musk’s DOGE, report states

SAGINAW, MI — A Saginaw native temporarily put in charge of the U.S. Social Security Administration earlier this year at first embraced changes pursued by an Elon Musk-led federal government agency, ProPublica reported.

But, as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and officials with President Donald Trump’s administration worked to dismantle services there, then-Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek began to resist the effort, the nonprofit news agency reported.

Dudek’s time in charge of the Social Security Administration lasted less than four months.

Trump chose Dudek as acting commissioner to replace Michelle King in February while the Republican president awaited Senate confirmation of his choice for the permanent job: Frank Bisignano. The Senate provided Bisignano’s confirmation in early May.

Dudek’s tenure, though, overlapped with a period of heightened public concern over the future of the agency, which oversees government-funded benefits including retirement, disability, survivor and family benefits.

That public concern extended to the Social Security Administration office in Dudek’s hometown of Saginaw, where he graduated from Arthur Hill High School in 1995. In March, the downtown facility, 611 E. Genesee Ave., was among a list of more than 400 federal buildings the General Services Administration identified as federal sites that could be closed or sold. Hours later, the agency — which leases and manages commercial real estate for the federal government — removed the list from its website.

Later that month, Dudek said he visited the office to assure its staff the facility was not in danger of closing.

But the threatened closure of offices was not the only worry for advocates and beneficiaries of Social Security services.

In the first months of Trump’s new term as president, the agency was among the federal programs identified as potential targets for massive funding and job cuts outlined by Musk’s DOGE.

Musk in March pushed debunked theories about Social Security while describing federal benefit programs as rife with fraud, suggesting they would be a primary target in his crusade to reduce government spending.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who was advising Trump until Musk exited the role in late May, had suggested $500 billion to $700 billion in waste needed to be cut.

The ProPublica report this month stated Dudek, in 15 hours of interviews after his exit from the agency, described “the chaos of working with DOGE” and how “he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.”

“DOGE, he said, began acting like a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time,’” the ProPublica report stated.

In response to the ProPublica story, a White House spokesperson said the report “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position.”

To read the full report from ProPublica, click here.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.