Stephen Miller's wife ordered Social Security workers to cover up a lie from her new boss Elon Musk: report

Independent

3 hours ago

The wife of one of President Donald Trump's closest and most trusted advisers, Stephen Miller, served in the White House for only a brief time, but in that period used her position to pressure the Social Security Administration to lie on behalf of the White House and its then-special government employee, Elon Musk, according to a new report.
Katie Miller allegedly instructed the head of the SSA to tell reporters that 40 percent of all calls placed to SSA phone lines were linked to fraudulent Social Security claims — a number the president and Musk plucked out of thin air as the White House and Musk's DOGE effort set about making cuts to a wide range of federal agencies this year, the New York Times reported.
'The number is 40 percent,' Katie Miller reportedly told the acting SSA Administrator Leland Dudek in an April 1 call, the Times reported. 'Do not contradict the president.'
'Mr. Musk's team mobilized dozens of Social Security employees to affirm their views about fraud and began a project to ensure dead people were properly classified so they weren't mistakenly paid — even though DOGE officials acknowledged in an internal memo that payments were not being made in those cases,' the Times wrote.
While Miller left the government in late May alongside Musk, the new head of the SSA refuted that figure directly in a statement to the Times.
'We're going to be a fact-based, rule-based organization that can count,' said Frank Bisignano, who joined the agency as commissioner in early May. Bisignano's predecessor, Dudek, did not back up Musk's claims either.
According to the Times, the DOGE cuts at SSA — driven by Musk's fixation on Social Security as a major source of waste and fraud — were badly mismanaged and resulted in many newly open basic customer service roles being replaced by 'specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists' who are paid higher rates than colleagues who exited those roles or retired after being offered buyouts earlier this year.
A staffing shortfall at the agency is now compounded by a growing backlog of Social Security claims.
Miller followed Musk out the door and now works with him on his various business ventures, despite a massive, public blowup between the Tesla chief and Trump earlier this month. In now-deleted posts, Musk alleged that Trump, for whom her husband retains fervent loyalty, was linked to the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and further claimed that Trump was responsible, through his own alleged inclusion in them, for the Epstein flight logs and other files being hidden from the public.
Katie's fence-sitting between the two was the subject of its own CNN profile earlier this month.
Dudek, who led the agency when Katie Miller ordered it to parrot the White House line, is apparently out of a job after his time as acting commissioner came to an end. In a statement, he fought back against criticism that he was unqualified — a claim stemming from the fact that he got the job after being placed on leave from his mid-level position at the SSA for going beyond the scope of his duties to help the fledgling DOGE effort make headway at the agency. That punishment prompted him to pen a LinkedIn post 'confessing' his efforts to help DOGE.
'I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publically accessible documents and explained them DOGE,' he wrote in a February LinkedIn post first reported by CNN. 'I confess. I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team to examine Direct Deposit Fraud.'
'I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,' he added at the time.
That post caught the eye of Musk, who at the time still enjoyed a close relationship with Trump. In a tweet, the former DOGE-er-in-chief said that Dudek 'was brought back right away [by Trump] and now HE is upper management.'
Upon his departure, Dudek thanked the president for his time at the agency. But privately, according to the Times, he has expressed 'deep misgivings about the effect of DOGE's oversight,' to his confidantes.
'Thank you President Trump for the opportunity to serve. Thank you DOGE team for your trust. Thank you SSA for all you do,' wrote Dudek in May.
Bisignano, after taking over the agency, assured agency staffers that he was not planning the same kind of large-scale layoff policies that DOGE was pledging earlier this year at many federal agencies, some of which had to rehire workes who were sent home.
'I have no intent to RIF people,' he said during a 90-minute address to agency managers last month, according to the Federal News Network.
But in his statement to the Times, Bisignano made clear that he knows how to play by the Trump White House's expectations, as he pushed back against the assertion that DOGE had messed up by claiming 40 percent of all Social Security help line callers to be linked to fraudulent claims.
'The work that DOGE did was 100 percent accurate,' he insisted.