Inside DOGE’s Takeover of the Social Security Administration — ProPublica

On Feb. 10, on the third ground of the Social Safety Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that prolonged to twenty toes in size. It was a visible information that the company had stored for years to elucidate Social Safety’s many technological methods and processes. The paper was lined in stream charts, arrows and textual content so minuscule you virtually wanted a magnifying glass to learn it. Dudek known as it Social Safety’s “Useless Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Safety Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll throughout a wall of a windowless govt workplace. This was the place a workforce from the brand new Division of Authorities Effectivity was going to arrange store.

DOGE was already terrifying the federal paperwork with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into beforehand sacrosanct databases. Nonetheless, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues have been hopeful: If any company wanted a dose of effectivity, it was theirs. “There was sort of an pleasure, truly,” a longtime high company official stated. “I’d spent 29 years attempting to make use of expertise and information in ways in which the company would by no means get round to.”

The Social Safety Administration is 90 years old. Even as we speak, hundreds of its bodily information are saved in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software program dates back to the early 1980s, and only some programmers stay who perceive the intricacies of its greater than 60 million lines of code. The company has been speaking about switching from paper Social Safety playing cards to digital ones for 20 years, without making it happen.

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, appeared completely designed to beat such obstacles. And its younger members have been initially interested by how Social Safety labored and what most wanted fixing. A number of occasions over these first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the primary of them to reach, held his face near Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the company’s venerable IT methods along with his index finger. Bobba requested: “Who would learn about this a part of the structure?”

Earlier than lengthy, although, he and the opposite DOGErs buried their heads of their laptops and plugged of their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out targets on a whiteboard. On the high: Discover fraud. Rapidly.

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper began to unpeel from the wall, and it will definitely sagged to the ground.

It solely acquired worse from there, stated Dudek, who would — improbably — be named performing commissioner of the Social Safety Administration, a place he held via Could. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and the way he tried first to collaborate, after which to guard the company, leading to turns that have been at varied occasions alarming, confounding and tragicomic.

DOGE, he stated, started performing like “a bunch of people that didn’t know what they have been doing, with concepts of how authorities ought to run — considering it ought to work like a McDonald’s or a financial institution — screaming on a regular basis.”

The shock troops of DOGE, on the Social Safety Administration and myriad different federal companies, have been the advance guard in maybe probably the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. authorities because the New Deal. And regardless of the extremely public departure of DOGE’s chief, Elon Musk, that marketing campaign continues as we speak. Key DOGE workforce members have transitioned to everlasting jobs on the SSA, together with because the company’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Massive Balls” — has made him some of the memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in Could. “Your bias must be — as a result of mine is — that DOGE helps make issues higher,” Bisignano informed senior officers weeks after changing Dudek, in accordance with a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It could not really feel that approach, however don’t imagine every part you learn.”

In a press release, a Social Safety Administration spokesperson stated that Bisignano has made “notable” preliminary progress and that “the initiatives underway will proceed to strengthen service supply and improve the integrity and effectivity of our methods.” The assertion asserted that “below President Trump’s management and his dedication to guard and protect Social Safety, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Safety and the packages it gives for Individuals now and sooner or later.”

For all of the controversy DOGE has generated, its time on the Social Safety Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as a lot as something, is a missed alternative, in accordance with interviews with greater than 35 present or just lately departed Social Safety officers and employees, who spoke on the situation of anonymity largely out of concern of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a overview of tons of of pages of inner paperwork, emails and courtroom information.

The DOGE workforce, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring fast wins that enable them to publish triumphant tweets and press releases — particularly, within the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — whereas squandering the prospect for systemic change at an company that genuinely wants it.

They may have labored to modernize Social Safety’s legacy software program, the present and former staffers say. They may have tried to streamline the stupefying quantity of documentation that many Social Safety beneficiaries have to supply. They may have built search tools to assist employees navigate the company’s 60,000 pages of insurance policies. (New hires usually want at the very least three years to grasp the nuances of even one kind of case.) They may have executed one thing about wait occasions for incapacity claims and appeals, which regularly take over a 12 months.

They did none of these items.

Finally, nobody had a extra full view of the missed alternative than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad construct that means an growing old former linebacker, Dudek is a determine seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key publish, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles earlier than vanishing into obscurity — not not like Anthony Scaramucci within the first Trump administration.

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a desire for his personal concepts, had failed in his one previous try to handle a small workforce inside the SSA, main him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Regardless of that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 individuals as performing commissioner of the company this spring.

Dudek acquired the job, wittingly or not, via an end-run round his bosses. After Trump gained the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT workforce started to swirl, Dudek requested individuals he knew at large tech firms for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with different DOGE figures about how they may “hack” Social Safety’s paperwork to “get to sure,” Dudek stated.

By February, Dudek had develop into the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting high company officers that DOGE needed to work at headquarters. And in contrast to Michelle King, the performing company chief on the time, Dudek was keen to hurry up the new-hire coaching course of to present DOGE entry to nearly the entire SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that started with him being positioned on administrative depart, the place he wrote a LinkedIn publish that propelled him into the general public eye for the primary time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE perceive SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to attach DOGE with the individuals who get stuff executed.” The identical weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at dwelling in his underwear watching MSNBC, acquired an electronic mail stating that the president of the US had appointed him commissioner.

Between February and Could, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and choices routinely made front-page news. He was usually portrayed as a DOGE patsy, even perhaps a fool. However in his interviews with ProPublica this summer time, he revealed himself to be a way more advanced determine, a dissatisfied believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he might to guard Social Safety’s mission below duress.

Dudek is the primary company head to talk intimately on the document about what it’s prefer to be thrust into such an essential place below Trump. He informed ProPublica that he determined to talk as a result of he needs that “those that govern” would have extra frank and sincere conversations with the general public.

To the 73 million Individuals whose monetary lives rely upon the viability of Social Safety, these first months have been a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Contained in the company, Dudek, ill-prepared for management or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling via the chaos partly by creating a few of his personal.

Dudek is aware of what it’s prefer to rely upon Social Safety. When he was a child in Saginaw, Michigan, his mom turned to Social Safety incapacity advantages to assist him and his siblings after she acquired injured at a Ford-affiliated elements manufacturing facility; she additionally had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who labored for Normal Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, in accordance with the household.)

In school, Dudek was remoted and bullied for being poor, his sister informed ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s fast mood ever since. However he was at all times a complicated scholar, and he developed an early curiosity in laptop science and politics. As a youngster, he usually watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he stated, by “how authorities labored and the way it might change individuals’s lives.”

Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic College of America. He was the kind of earnest younger man who was enthralled by President Invoice Clinton’s marketing campaign on the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with non-public sector-style effectivity, a lot as Trump and DOGE later stated they might.

In school, he additionally displayed the tendency to buck authority that may mark his skilled profession. He had an evening job working the college’s laptop labs; if there have been issues, he was imagined to name his boss. He wasn’t supposed to put in new software program on all of the computer systems, however that’s what he did. It labored, though he acquired a talking-to about realizing his position.

After graduating, Dudek spent almost a decade working for tech firms that contracted with the federal authorities on modernization tasks, earlier than migrating to a number of jobs inside federal companies themselves.

In 2009, he arrived on the Social Safety Administration as an IT safety official. The company was identical to the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek stated: an insular, hidebound place the place everybody knew everybody they usually all thought innovation would price them their jobs.

However the SSA wasn’t the one establishment at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility necessities for incapacity and Supplemental Security Income advantages, forcing the company to expend huge amounts of time and money working these packages. On the similar time, lawmakers had capped the company’s administrative funding simply as tens of hundreds of thousands of Child Boomers have been growing old into retirement, exploding Social Safety’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing degree in a half-century, even because it has taken on 40 million extra beneficiaries.)

Due to the SSA’s stultifying tradition, Dudek stated, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he might do it higher, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving cash or consideration, he went round his superiors. In a single occasion, he approached potential companions at bank card firms, hoping they want his concepts for combating fraud and would relay these concepts to the Social Safety commissioner on the time. “Actually from an inner perspective inside SSA, definitely from a congressional perspective, I used to be violating guidelines,” Dudek stated.

Partially due to strikes like this, Dudek acquired reassigned inside the company a number of occasions. Through the years, he was given a number of roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he stated is for federal staff who’re both incompetent however too established to fireplace or extremely competent in a technical approach however missing in administration or individuals abilities.

Dudek was cussed. He might come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when talking. However he’s additionally considerate and properly learn. In our interviews, he introduced up every part from the origins of the idea of Social Safety amongst sociologists and psychologists within the Melancholy period to the bureaucrats who have been left behind in faraway locations after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 e book, “Paperwork,” which spills appreciable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Safety Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how one can reduce via crimson tape to get constructing tasks executed. (“No such legislation constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)

Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. However, like some other liberals, he was changing into exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest teams, together with firms, unions and social-justice organizations, that “seize” authorities and stifle reform. If it took Trump to chop via that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has modified,” he scribbled in a notice to himself. “We should change with it.”

Instantly after Dudek turned commissioner in February, he acquired a name from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund supervisor with a $12 million Manhattan condo who’d been picked to guide DOGE’s workforce at Social Safety. “We’re coming,” Coulter stated. “Be ready.”

DOGE arrived able to embark on a selected mission: Its operatives on the Treasury Division had seen information suggesting that the Social Safety Administration wasn’t protecting its loss of life information updated. They thought they noticed indicators of fraudulent funds. Musk was very, very .

Dudek wasn’t initially involved about this focus, which he and his colleagues considered as misguided. To him, the younger coders have been nerdy outsiders identical to he’d as soon as been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “jogged my memory of myself once I first acquired into computer systems,” he stated. He thought he might mould them.

Specifically, Dudek appreciated Bobba, who had a delicate air and a thick pile of darkish hair that lined his brow. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, attempting to get him to deal with concrete issues like how beneficiaries’ information have been saved, usually as cumbersome PDF and picture recordsdata. As a substitute, Bobba, who didn’t reply to a request for remark, prioritized Musk’s quest to show that useless individuals have been receiving Social Safety advantages.

Bobba had accomplished highschool in New Jersey simply three and a half years earlier. As a category speaker at his commencement, he’d inspired his classmates to not ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “growing willingness to simplify even probably the most advanced narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”

But Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a nationwide misinformation firestorm: A desk he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly amassing Social Safety checks. Bobba had sorted individuals with a Social Safety quantity by age and located greater than 12 million over 120 years previous nonetheless listed within the company’s information.

Bobba stated he knew these individuals weren’t truly receiving advantages and tried to inform Musk so, to no avail, in accordance with SSA officers. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the identical statistics with both houses of Congress and a nationwide tv viewers, claiming the numbers proved “stunning ranges of incompetence and possible fraud within the Social Safety program for our seniors.” (The White Home declined to touch upon this episode. Bisignano, the brand new SSA commissioner, has repeatedly said that “the work that DOGE did was 100% correct.”)

Contained in the SSA, the DOGE workforce tried to seek out proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it surely didn’t appear to know how one can go about it, leaping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of subject A to subject G to subject C to subject Q,” stated a senior SSA official who was within the room. “Have been we nonetheless serving to something by explaining stuff?” the official stated. “It actually wasn’t clear by that time.”

Dudek started to comprehend that the issue wasn’t primarily the individuals he known as the “DOGE youngsters.” It was the senior leaders who have been issuing orders with out heeding what the younger DOGErs have been studying.

Dudek was maybe probably the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Loads of company officers have been already postpone by the DOGErs, who usually issued peremptory orders to satisfy with them and reply questions.

Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the company, was instructed to take one of many DOGE individuals, Cole Killian, via earnings information and historic information to research the instances of extraordinarily previous individuals whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Safety information. She discovered herself having to elucidate to him, time and again, that many of those individuals have been born earlier than states reported births and deaths to the federal authorities and a long time earlier than the arrival of digital document protecting. Within the early days of the company, some individuals didn’t even know their birthdays.

Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing directions to her workforce. However he often stored his digital camera turned off throughout video conferences. When he lastly turned it on for one name, the face she noticed appeared like that of a youngster.

Killian was truly 24, just six years removed from performing “Resort California” at his highschool expertise present at Cambridge Rindge and Latin College outdoors of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE duties additionally concerned work on the Environmental Safety Company, didn’t reply to a request for remark from ProPublica.)

Kowalski was exasperated by having to reply to such inexperience, whilst so lots of her colleagues have been being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.

“Many people had truly believed within the marketed concept of genius technologists coming in to make issues work higher,” one senior SSA official stated. However DOGE ended up being extra , the official stated, in “attempting to show that the Social Safety Administration was fully incompetent” than in suggesting enhancements.

Workers at headquarters took their time strolling previous the glass-walled convention room the place DOGE staffers had arrange, obvious in at them as they labored amongst stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at completely different companies. On a weblog widespread amongst SSA staffers, the temper within the feedback part turned darkish, with some nameless posters figuring out the place within the constructing the “incel DOGE boys” have been positioned and saying that “they’re simply warming up … simply suppose what’s going to come subsequent.”

Dudek sensed the rising rigidity. He felt it, too. He’d been getting nameless loss of life threats mailed to his home. He determined to maneuver the DOGE operatives to a extra secluded space of the campus and assigned an armed safety element to guard them.

Throughout his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his govt conferences in bombastic style, as if he have been Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he despatched out insulting full-staff emails pressuring profession staff to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 extra anticipated to observe.)

Dudek says this habits stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was immediately answering to. “When the president of the US asks you to do stuff,” he stated, “you get caught up.”

However he additionally claims he was simply performing a job. “Early on, I placed on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek stated. (A number of longtime colleagues and buddies observed the change, they informed ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, after which there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)

This, he hoped, would persuade the White Home and DOGE of his dedication, which might in flip give him credibility as he stored attempting to push them towards the actual points at Social Safety.

However the Trump administration stored having different plans. Its calls for often got here via Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s workplace unannounced a number of occasions per week, Dudek stated.

“I actually suppose it might be useful should you have been to do that tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating a whole division of the SSA or slicing extra employees, in accordance with Dudek. To him, these strategies felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me give it some thought,” Coulter would name just a few hours in a while the encrypted-messaging app Sign to ask, “You actually aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Have you learnt what number of occasions I’ve defended you?”

“I used to be imagined to get the message — and it might be ‘my very own resolution,’ so I’d be caught with it,” Dudek stated. “He can say he by no means informed me to do something.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in latest months, didn’t reply to a request for remark.)

One in all Coulter’s strategies concerned the SSA’s Workplace of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of growing an internet utility to interchange lots of the company’s paper-based types and in-person interviews. The workplace had been working with aged, low-income and disabled individuals to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most assist them if these have been redesigned.

However as a substitute of facilitating this effort at better effectivity, Coulter informed Dudek to shut the workplace, in accordance with Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Company employees joked that DOGE shut it down as a result of its identify included a phrase that started with “trans.”

Dudek and his colleagues generally tried to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions within the hope that they may deal with a real drawback on the company. This technique was not profitable.

Such was the case with the problem of cellphone fraud. Realizing that the DOGErs would perk up on the point out of something fraud-related, Dudek and different officers made some extent of explaining that they’d been engaged on an initiative to dam bots that had been calling the company. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, utilizing dates of start and different data that may be discovered on the web, to attempt to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing data and steal their advantages.

In 2024, Dudek had been on a workforce that spearheaded an effort to fight this kind of fraud. The plans included working all phone-based requests for checking account adjustments towards a Treasury Division database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to confirm whether or not they have been being produced from the neighborhood of the deal with on file of the particular person purportedly calling.

DOGE ignored the proposed options. As a substitute, the White Home instructed Dudek to finish all claims and direct-deposit transactions by cellphone. Beneficiaries must verify their own identities by utilizing an often-confusing net portal or by touring to a subject workplace to do it in particular person. For hundreds of thousands of aged or disabled individuals, these have been daunting or unimaginable choices.

When this coverage was rolled out on the finish of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to subject workplaces to preemptively present proof of their identities even after they didn’t have to.

Again at headquarters, in a weekly employees assembly, Dudek requested who might soar on the more and more pressing process of creating it simpler to schedule subject workplace appointments through the SSA web site. “Nicely, Lee, you simply fired that workforce,” one official answered, referring to the Workplace of Transformation. (Dudek stated he requested this query on objective to ensure DOGE heard the reply.)

Over the course of six weeks below Dudek, the cellphone coverage zigged and zagged a half dozen occasions — for instance, the SSA adopted, then deserted, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — earlier than lastly ending up almost the place it started. Transactions may very well be carried out by cellphone once more.

All through this saga, Dudek was nonetheless getting calls from White Home officers — most frequently from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the spouse of Stephen Miller, one among Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk earlier than asserting plans to launch her own podcast. She didn’t reply to a request for remark.) Miller usually known as properly into the night, Dudek stated, to chastise him about something the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.

As Dudek restored the cellphone coverage to its pre-Trump model, Miller acquired angrier. “You modified the president’s coverage,” she stated, in accordance with Dudek.

“I’m like, ‘No, I’m nonetheless with the president’s coverage,’” Dudek informed Miller. However, if Social Safety officers might implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his workforce had beforehand been planning, he stated, they may “obtain the identical finish.” In that case, Dudek stated, “we are going to accomplish that and ease the friction level on the general public.”

“How dare you,” Miller stated.

More and more dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that appeared to embody his combine of excellent intentions, hubris and melodrama. He determined he would proceed to play together with DOGE on the floor, partly in order that Coulter and the opposite bigwigs would suppose he was nonetheless dealing with their enterprise and thus spend much less time on the company. The youthful DOGE workforce members, he stated, have been “simpler to work with when their masters weren’t round.”

However behind the scenes, he started to undermine DOGE nonetheless he might. Generally he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would discover their approach into the press and draw consideration to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever ever labored with somebody who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.

Different occasions Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was usually an nameless supply for articles in The Washington Submit and The New York Occasions. “If it was silly stuff from the DOGE workforce, loads of occasions I might exit to the press and instantly tattletale on myself in order that it might blow up the subsequent day,” Dudek stated, including that he did this partly to assist Social Safety advocates perceive and produce consideration to the rising disaster on the company.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit Nationwide Academy of Social Insurance coverage, stated she was in a one-on-one assembly with Dudek in March when he began getting calls from DOGE officers and the media. The calls have been about his latest public comments claiming he may need to close down the whole Social Safety Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE entry to delicate Social Safety information. “He simply let me sit there with the amount up excessive,” Vallas stated.

On one of many calls, she stated, somebody informed Dudek, “Elon beloved that, however now it’s time to stroll it again.” Afterward, Dudek informed her, “I don’t know the way we get out of this with out hurting big numbers of individuals. … I’m simply attempting to present advocates some ammunition.”

Dudek’s technique was simpler to drag off with out DOGE catching on if it got here off because the blundering of an beginner, he informed ProPublica. In probably the most placing instance, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, in accordance with Dudek and different SSA officers. The contracts, which all 50 states have lengthy had variations of, allowed Maine to routinely report births and deaths to Social Safety. Canceling them would impede authorities effectivity: Births and deaths within the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That will doubtless trigger advantages to proceed to be despatched to hundreds of Mainers after they’ve died, precisely the sort of factor that Trump and Musk had been railing towards.

It appeared clear to Dudek that he was being informed to do that solely as a result of Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White Home declined to touch upon this episode.) So he determined to “write the hell out of” an electronic mail directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a approach he thought would nonetheless earn him factors with Trump and DOGE however that may, concurrently, be so inflammatory that it might create a serious storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.

“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s electronic mail learn. “Whereas our improper funds will go up, and fraudsters might compromise identities, no cash will go from the general public belief to a petulant baby.” That final phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been preventing with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek informed ProPublica.)

As Dudek had hoped, the press consideration he generated compelled him to do what he already needed to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he defined that he was solely belatedly realizing the potential hurt of what he (alone) had executed. “I screwed up,” he informed reporters. “I’m new at this job.”

As soon as once more, Miller known as Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is occurring?” she stated.

“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I let you know?”

Trying again on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE weren’t as dangerous as they may have been, particularly in contrast with what occurred this spring at different federal companies, a few of which have been basically vaporized. Social Safety checks, he factors out, are nonetheless going out the door.

Nonetheless, the SSA is lowered in his wake, with hundreds fewer employees members to course of claims and enhance methods. These departed staff have been disproportionately skilled and educated; they have been those capable of get different jobs or to retire with a pension. They took loads of know-how with them.

And the emotional hurt that DOGE precipitated to older individuals and to individuals with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s complicated actions — lingers. Many of those individuals have had cash taken out of their paychecks their complete careers to pay for one thing extra than simply retirement advantages: safety. It’s a sense which will now be misplaced to them without end.

Certainly, DOGE and Dudek precipitated a lot consternation concerning the stability of the system that tons of of hundreds of individuals have filed early for retirement in recent months, although doing so just isn’t financially clever in the long run. The SSA should now pay out extra in advantages than anticipated, opposite to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.

Dudek’s sister again in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, depends on Social Safety incapacity advantages. “I might speak to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the choices you’re making are inflicting individuals to really feel terror,” she stated. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”

Dudek acknowledges a lot of this. “I’m not a chilly, callous son of a bitch, I actually do get it,” he stated. “I’ll without end be related to the ache of DOGE. … However a lot went on in such a brief period of time. I attempted to make the most effective choices I might given the circumstances.”

Since being dismissed from the company in June, Dudek has been struggling to seek out one other job. “My identify is mud,” he stated. “It’s as if I not exist.”

As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s numerous these below Trump. They only used him, after which they disposed of him.”

The White Home, offered with intensive questions for this text, despatched a one-paragraph assertion disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White Home spokesperson Davis Ingle stated, “is essentially based mostly across the feedback of a disgruntled former worker who brazenly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official place. On his final day as Performing Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘actual outcomes’ of the Social Safety Administration, however now that he’s bitter about being out of the highest job — he’s singing a special tune.”

Dudek stated the administration requested him to jot down the op-ed after which vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cupboard secretaries lavished on Trump just lately, he stated, “you noticed the cupboard assembly.”

Bisignano, the Social Safety commissioner, involves the position with a really completely different skilled background than Dudek (although, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Till this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his profession within the non-public sector. He was a high govt in operations and expertise at large banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to develop into CEO of the cost processor Fiserv.

But, like DOGE, he seems to have embraced the looks of effectivity quite than effectivity itself. He has repeatedly informed employees that Social Safety ought to be run extra like Amazon, with AI dealing with extra buyer interactions. However incapacity claims are extra sophisticated than ordering toothpaste, in accordance with SSA officers and consultants, and Social Safety’s buyer base is older and extra prone to have an mental incapacity than the typical Amazon Prime member.

Bisignano has additionally fixated on how a lot time it takes to succeed in an agent on the SSA’s 800 quantity. In a July press release, he claimed that the typical was down to 6 minutes, an 80% discount from 2024. He achieved this partly by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to cellphone obligation. Meaning preliminary calls are getting answered sooner, however there are considerably fewer employees members out there to deal with advanced, in-person instances. And “reaching an agent” seems to imply talking to a human being — or an AI bot. Inside SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats instances through which beneficiaries work together with a chatbot and go for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the typical. In the event you truly keep on the road, USA Today has found, it usually takes over an hour to succeed in a reside consultant.

In its assertion, the SSA reiterated that decision wait occasions have dramatically improved and that “utilizing expertise on our nationwide 800 quantity has enabled 90 p.c of calls dealt with to be served through automated self-service choices or handy callbacks.”

Even the newest cellphone fraud coverage looks like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s workforce quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million extra individuals must go into subject workplaces to confirm their identities as a substitute of having the ability to take action by cellphone, beginning Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA introduced that this was truly elective.

The DOGE period might formally be over on the company, however the strategy, it appears, is identical. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the identical essentially inefficient issues, extra effectively.”