Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek threatened to shut the whole agency down because he’s angry that a federal judge temporarily blocked co-President Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency goons from accessing sensitive information at the agency.
“Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,” Dudek said, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Dudek is angry that U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander ruled that DOGE staffers have improper access to Americans’ sensitive personal information as they attempt to sort through Social Security data to prove Musk’s lies that millions of dead people are fraudulently receiving benefits.
“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote in her decision. She added, “To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest. But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.
If Dudek follows through with his petulant temper tantrum, he’d be hurting the more than 73 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits annually.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills
Without those benefits, the elderly and disabled people who rely on the social safety net program could have problems affording their housing and other necessary living expenses.
Dudek has already done vindictive things. He canceled a contract in Maine that automatically processed Social Security numbers for newborns, which would have forced new parents to go in-person to register them.
Dudek admitted this week he canceled that contract in part to punish the state's Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who stood up to President Donald Trump at a meeting with governors from across the country.
“I was upset at the governor’s treatment, and I indicated in an email as such,” Dudek said, when asked by HuffPost about why he canceled the contract. “But the actual facts of the matter was it looked like a strange contract.”
Dudek was even fired from his job in February for giving DOGE access to Social Security beneficiary data, which Bloomberg News reported is "a highly sensitive and controlled system that includes the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, work histories and bank account information of millions of Americans."
But Musk and Trump rehired Dudek and put him in charge of the agency.
“There ARE good people in the government who want to eliminate fraud & waste. Amazingly, Leland was fired by Social Security Administration upper management for helping @DOGE find taxpayer savings. Can you believe that??” Musk wrote in a post on X. “Thanks to President Trump, Leland was brought back right away and now HE is upper management.”
Social Security Works, a group that works to expand Social Security, slammed Dudek’s behavior.
“Plucked from administrative leave, Dudek was elevated over more than 100 higher-qualified civil servants because he was willing to give Musk’s DOGE complete, unfettered access to Americans’ most personal, sensitive data,” the group wrote in a post on X. “Dudek’s leadership has been the darkest in Social Security’s nearly 90 year history. He has sown chaos and destruction. Now, he is threatening to shut down Social Security completely.”
Musk, for his part, has been actively lying about Social Security fraud to justify making cuts to the overwhelmingly popular social safety net program which allows millions of elderly and disabled Americans to afford their cost of living.
Related | GOP zooms in on Social Security cuts to fund Trump’s tax scam
Those lies have led to serious negative consequences for Americans, including some people who have been wrongfully declared dead and lost their Social Security income and Medicare—and had to jump through hoops to get it back.
DOGE has also forced the closure of Social Security offices across the country and fired thousands of staff, which will make it harder for Americans to get claims processed or correct errors.
And now, DOGE is forcing elderly Americans to either use an online system to verify their identities or else be required to go to one of the remaining Social Security offices in person, a major burden that could cause people owed Social Security benefits to be unable to receive them.
A memo obtained by the newsletter Popular Information said the DOGE change would cause an additional 75,000 to 85,000 people going to Social Security offices per week, which would lead to “longer wait times and processing times.” Already, wait times for appointments are more than a month.
“By requiring seniors and disabled Americans to enroll online or in person at the same field offices they are trying to close, rather than over the phone, Trump and Musk are trying to create chaos and inefficiencies at SSA so they can privatize the system,” Rep. John Larson (D-CT), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement. “We must bring them before the Ways and Means Committee to provide answers for the American people, but our Republican colleagues are protecting them from even having to turn over documents to the United States Congress.”
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