The new guardian of the Social Security Administration declared this week that because of the U.S. DOGE Service, “Things are running in a way I have never seen in government before”. At the same time, it has instructed a group of supporters that it is scrambling hand in glove to lay thousands of workers off and cut its spending. “
In a Tuesday meeting with his top staff and about 50 of the legal-aid attorneys and other advocates for the disabled and elderly, acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek referred to the cost-cutting team of the tech mogul as “outsiders who are not familiar with SSA program nuances,” a meeting participant’s lengthy account obtained by The Washington Post has found.
“DOGE people learn and they are going to screw up, but we need to allow them to see what is happening at SSA,” Dudek told the audience, according to reports. “I am relying on experienced career individuals to direct my work, but I receive decisions without being asked. I need to put those decisions into practice.”
His remarks to skeptical supporters followed Dudek’s 12th day in a position the White House promoted him to after he secretly shared information with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. His short tenure — while President Donald Trump’s appointment to manage the agency permanently has stalled waiting — has been eclipsed by a frantic cut in staff responsible for managing the safety-net program 73 million disabled and retired Americans rely on.
Dudek stated he would reduce 7,000 workers, more than 12 percent of the workforce. He has moved to close regional centers and public field offices, eliminated entire programs, and consolidated departments.
A wave of departing senior executives under his watch — some voluntarily, others out of necessity — is rapidly draining decades of institutional knowledge. And this week, the long-embattled disability benefits program was put in peril as clogged state offices that handle claims were told there would be no new overtime or fresh hiring.
But it’s not yet clear what Trump and Musk see as an endgame for Social Security, a long-standing political third rail in Washington.
The president has vowed not to “touch Social Security” as DOGE struggles to reduce the size of government. Dozen or so tech engineers loyal to Musk have made their way into databases containing stacks of taxpayer documents, and budget-cutting priorities appear to converge with a sense of urgency to apprehend fraud.
He delivered the address before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, shortly after Musk was openly debunked over his claim that there were colossal huge numbers of centenarians fraudulently receiving retirement benefits. “We are also exposing some of the most shocking levels of incompetence and probably fraud in the Social Security programs for our seniors,” Trump said, in an outright-lie statement.
Musk’s recent criticism of Social Security — he referred to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” — has joined the alarm and anxiety among lawmakers, policymakers, and the public that Americans’ hard-earned benefits will be collateral damage.
“They’re saying that they’re discovering enormous fraud in the system,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “But where are they going with this? There’s not much fraud in the retirement system. Because they’re skewing the data so radically, it’s hard to know.” So this is one kind of a space where different interests clash. The a clash between the people who genuinely want to provide better services and the people who think that somebody’s trying to fool them.
On Thursday morning — three hours after this report was posted — a company-wide email was sent to SSA workers announcing they would be excluded “effective today” from being able to access certain websites on their government computers, including “online shopping,” “general news” and “sports.”.
“These additional restrictions will reduce risk and more effectively protect the sensitive data put into our many systems,” the email went on, The Post received a copy of.
The new policy will further limit the beleaguered workers’ ability to perform their job, one SSA worker warned, as news sites — especially obituaries — are a valuable resource employees utilize to prevent fraud.
Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, an illegal investment fraud that pays previous investors with the funds of subsequent investors in an attempt to seem profitable. It is a system of earned benefits for disabled Americans and retirees financed by payroll taxes that have never missed a payment — although doubts about the program’s solvency based on reduced birth rates and longer lifespans have made it a political minefield.
