{"id":215307,"date":"2025-09-10T10:56:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/215307\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T10:56:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:56:20","slug":"the-untold-saga-of-what-happened-when-doge-stormed-social-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/215307\/","title":{"rendered":"The untold saga of what happened when DOGE stormed Social Security"},"content":{"rendered":"

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter<\/a> to receive stories like this one in your inbox.<\/p>\n

On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration\u2019s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security\u2019s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security\u2019s \u201cDead Sea Scroll.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.<\/p>\n

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. \u201cThere was kind of an excitement, actually,\u201d a longtime top agency official said. \u201cI\u2019d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old<\/a>. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s<\/a>, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines<\/a> of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who\u2019d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek\u2019s scroll, tracing connections between the agency\u2019s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: \u201cWho would know about this part of the architecture?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.<\/p>\n

Dudek\u2019s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.<\/p>\n

It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would \u2014 improbably \u2014 be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek 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.<\/p>\n

DOGE, he said, began acting like \u201ca bunch of people who didn\u2019t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run \u2014 thinking it should work like a McDonald\u2019s or a bank \u2014 screaming all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE\u2019s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency\u2019s top technology officials<\/a>. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker \u2014 \u201cBig Balls\u201d \u2014 has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA\u2019s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. \u201cYour bias has to be \u2014 because mine is \u2014 that DOGE is helping make things better,\u201d Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. \u201cIt may not feel that way, but don\u2019t believe everything you read.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made \u201cnotable\u201d initial progress and that \u201cthe initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.\u201d The statement asserted that \u201cunder President Trump\u2019s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it\u2019s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.<\/p>\n

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases \u2014 especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud<\/a> \u2014 while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.<\/p>\n

They could have worked to modernize Social Security\u2019s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools<\/a> to help staff navigate the agency\u2019s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.<\/p>\n

They did none of these things.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump \u2014 an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity \u2014 not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.<\/p>\n

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn\u2019t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.<\/p>\n

Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk\u2019s right-hand man, Steve Davis<\/a>, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could \u201chack\u201d Social Security\u2019s bureaucracy to \u201cget to yes,\u201d Dudek said.<\/p>\n

By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA\u2019s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events<\/a> that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: \u201cI confess,\u201d he posted. \u201cI helped DOGE understand SSA. \u2026 I confess. I \u2026 circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.\u201d The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.<\/p>\n

Between February and May, when Dudek\u2019s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely made<\/a>front-page news<\/a>. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy<\/a>, perhaps even a fool<\/a>. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE\u2019s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security\u2019s mission under duress.<\/p>\n

Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that \u201cthose who govern\u201d would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.<\/p>\n

To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE\u2019s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.<\/p>\n

Dudek knows what it\u2019s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek\u2019s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)<\/p>\n

At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he\u2019s had an underdog\u2019s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by \u201chow government worked and how it could change people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton\u2019s campaign at the time to \u201creinvent government<\/a>\u201d by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.<\/p>\n

In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university\u2019s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn\u2019t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that\u2019s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.<\/p>\n

After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.<\/p>\n

In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he\u2019d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.<\/p>\n

But the SSA wasn\u2019t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income<\/a> benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money<\/a> running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency\u2019s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security\u2019s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)<\/p>\n

Because of the SSA\u2019s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren\u2019t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. \u201cCertainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,\u201d Dudek said.<\/p>\n

In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a \u201csenior adviser,\u201d a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.<\/p>\n

Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson\u2019s seminal 1989 book, \u201cBureaucracy,\u201d which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration \u2014 and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (\u201cNo such law constrained Trump,\u201d Wilson wrote.)<\/p>\n

Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals<\/a>, he was becoming exasperated with the \u201cadministrative state\u201d and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that \u201ccapture\u201d government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. \u201cThe world has changed,\u201d he scribbled in a note to himself. \u201cWe must change with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who\u2019d been picked to lead DOGE\u2019s team at Social Security. \u201cWe\u2019re coming,\u201d Coulter said. \u201cBe prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n

DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn\u2019t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.<\/p>\n

Dudek wasn\u2019t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he\u2019d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They \u201creminded me of myself when I first got into computers,\u201d he said. He thought he could mold them.<\/p>\n

In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries\u2019 records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk\u2019s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.<\/p>\n

Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he\u2019d encouraged his classmates not to ignore \u201cnuance\u201d and \u201ccomplexity.\u201d He\u2019d lamented the \u201cincreasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits\u201d like \u201c280-character tweets,\u201d which \u201cperpetuates misinformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet<\/a> about \u201cvampires\u201d over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency\u2019s data.<\/p>\n

Bobba said he knew these people weren\u2019t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress<\/a> and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved \u201cshocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.\u201d (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedly<\/a>said<\/a> that \u201cthe work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn\u2019t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. \u201cIt was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,\u201d said a senior SSA official who was in the room. \u201cWere we still helping anything by explaining stuff?\u201d the official said. \u201cIt really wasn\u2019t clear by that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn\u2019t primarily the people he called the \u201cDOGE kids.\u201d It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.<\/p>\n

Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.<\/p>\n

Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn\u2019t even know their birthdays.<\/p>\n

Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.<\/p>\n

Killian was actually 24, just six years removed<\/a> from performing \u201cHotel California\u201d at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)<\/p>\n

Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,\u201d one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in \u201ctrying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent\u201d than in suggesting improvements.<\/p>\n

Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the \u201cincel DOGE boys\u201d were located and saying that \u201cthey are just warming up \u2026 just think what will come next.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He\u2019d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.<\/p>\n

During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on \u201cThe Apprentice.\u201d And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)<\/p>\n

Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. \u201cWhen the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,\u201d he said, \u201cyou get caught up.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he also claims he was just performing a role. \u201cEarly on, I put on a persona of a yeller,\u201d Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, \u201cThere\u2019s Lee, and then there\u2019s Leland-performingly-Dudek.\u201d)<\/p>\n

This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.<\/p>\n

But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek\u2019s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,\u201d Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, \u201cI don\u2019t know, let me think about it,\u201d Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, \u201cYou really aren\u2019t catching on, are you?\u201d and \u201cDo you know how many times I\u2019ve defended you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was supposed to get the message \u2014 and it would be \u2018my own decision,\u2019 so I\u2019d be stuck with it,\u201d Dudek said. \u201cHe can say he never told me to do anything.\u201d (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

One of Coulter\u2019s suggestions involved the SSA\u2019s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency\u2019s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.<\/p>\n

But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with \u201ctrans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE\u2019s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.<\/p>\n

Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they\u2019d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries\u2019 bank-routing information and steal their benefits.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.<\/p>\n

DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities<\/a> by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.<\/p>\n

When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n

Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. \u201cWell, Lee, you just fired that team,\u201d one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)<\/p>\n

Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times \u2014 for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check<\/a> on all calls \u2014 before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.<\/p>\n

Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials \u2014 most often from Katie Miller<\/a>, DOGE\u2019s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump\u2019s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk<\/a> before announcing plans to launch her own podcast<\/a>. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.<\/p>\n

As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. \u201cYou changed the president\u2019s policy,\u201d she said, according to Dudek.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018No, I\u2019m still with the president\u2019s policy,\u2019\u201d Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could \u201cachieve the same end.\u201d In that case, Dudek said, \u201cwe will do so and ease the friction point on the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow dare you,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n

Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were \u201ceasier to work with when their masters weren\u2019t around.\u201d<\/p>\n

But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. \u201cHave you ever worked with someone who\u2019s manic-depressive?\u201d he said of the Trump administration\u2019s leadership in one meeting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. \u201cIf it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,\u201d Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.<\/p>\n

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments<\/a> claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny<\/a> DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. \u201cHe just let me sit there with the volume up high,\u201d Vallas said.<\/p>\n

On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, \u201cElon loved that, but now it\u2019s time to walk it back.\u201d Afterward, Dudek told her, \u201cI don\u2019t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. \u2026 I\u2019m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek\u2019s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they\u2019ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.<\/p>\n

It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with<\/a> Maine\u2019s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to \u201cwrite the hell out of\u201d an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease cancel the contracts,\u201d Dudek\u2019s email read. \u201cWhile our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.\u201d That last phrase referred to Maine\u2019s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (\u201cDo I care about Janet Mills? No,\u201d Dudek told ProPublica.)<\/p>\n

As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology<\/a>, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. \u201cI screwed up,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cI\u2019m new at this job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. \u201cWhat the hell is going on?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis place leaks like a sieve,\u201d he answered. \u201cWhat can I tell you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.<\/p>\n

Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.<\/p>\n

And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities \u2014 worsened by Dudek\u2019s confusing actions \u2014 lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It\u2019s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.<\/p>\n

Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months<\/a>, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE\u2019s cost-saving mission.<\/p>\n

Dudek\u2019s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. \u201cI would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you\u2019re making are causing people to feel terror,\u201d she said. \u201cTerror is an apt descriptor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek acknowledges much of this. \u201cI\u2019m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. \u2026 But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. \u201cMy name is mud,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is as if I no longer exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek\u2019s story is \u201cthe story of a disposable pawn, and there\u2019s lots of those under Trump. They just used him<\/a>, and then they disposed of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica\u2019s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, \u201cis 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. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise<\/a> upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the \u2018real results\u2019 of the Social Security Administration, but now that he\u2019s bitter about being out of the top job \u2014 he\u2019s singing a different tune.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise<\/a> that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, \u201cyou saw the cabinet meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.<\/p>\n

Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security\u2019s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.<\/p>\n

Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA\u2019s 800 number. In a July press release<\/a>, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees<\/a> to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And \u201creaching an agent\u201d turns out to mean speaking to a human being \u2014 or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano\u2019s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as \u201czero-minute\u201d waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found<\/a>, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.<\/p>\n

In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that \u201cusing technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE\u2019s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano\u2019s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website<\/a> stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.<\/p>\n

The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is \u201cdoing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":215308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,255,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-215307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-personal-finance","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115179643403424920","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}