The bureaucrat and the billionaire: Inside DOGE's chaotic takeover of Social Security

Boston Globe

7 hours ago

'The number is 40%,' insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Donald Trump believed Musk, she said. 'Do not contradict the president.'
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Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found.
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Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched workforce and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Trump has vowed to protect.
Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Musk's tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Musk's efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts.
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The Times' investigation found that Musk became fixated on the program in early February after members of his team misread government spending data — a pivotal and previously unreported moment that DOGE believed had exposed massive fraud inside the agency.
DOGE leaders pressured agency executives to hire Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old former intern at Palantir, a data analysis and technology firm, and grant him access to the personal data of every Social Security cardholder despite the executives' concerns that he lacked sufficient training to handle such sensitive information.
Musk's deputies became so intent on their work at Social Security that they pushed employees to continue giving them access to sensitive agency data even after a federal judge demanded that DOGE's access be cut off, according to two people familiar with the events. The Supreme Court ruled this month that DOGE's access can resume.
This account of DOGE's Social Security takeover is based on interviews with more than 70 current and former employees, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents and court records.
Thrust into the center of the DOGE drama was Dudek, the acting Social Security commissioner for nearly three months. He told others that he aimed to comply with orders from DOGE and the White House while keeping Social Security from suffering what he saw as potentially disastrous consequences if the DOGE plans for slashing staff and changing policies were fully realized.
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So far the agency's core functions — like sending monthly checks to 74 million Americans — have remained largely intact.
But under pressure from Musk's team, nearly half of the Social Security Administration's 140 senior executives, and thousands of employees overall, have taken buyouts or retired. As many as 12% of staff members, out of a bureaucracy that numbered around 57,000 people, are expected to depart their jobs as part of DOGE's cost-cutting plan.
To try to make up for the staffing shortfall, the agency has encouraged specialized professionals like lawyers, human resources staff and technologists to take reassignments in customer service jobs — often at higher pay than what the people they're replacing had made. Workers have said they felt pressured to volunteer for reassignments, or else risk being fired later.
At the same time, concern over DOGE-induced policy changes has caused members of the public to clog the agency's phone lines and crowd into field offices. More Americans have claimed their Social Security benefits earlier, agency data show, sacrificing higher payments down the road for financial certainty now. And with a record number of retirement claims filed this year, the agency has been battling a growing backlog, internal emails show.
Administration officials, in response to questions from the Times, vowed to protect and bolster Social Security. A White House spokesperson, Elizabeth Huston, said that under Trump the agency 'will continue to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse while protecting benefits for eligible Americans.'
Musk has cast his efforts to root out waste and fraud as a way to save Social Security, which he has called a 'Ponzi scheme.' Because of DOGE, he told Fox News, 'legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money.' Neither he nor Miller, who left the White House alongside him, responded to requests for comment.
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The administration credits DOGE with identifying $1 billion in savings for this year, out of Social Security's operating budget of $14 billion, citing canceled contracts, payroll cuts and other measures. The White House did not provide a detailed accounting of that figure and the Times could not verify it.
Dudek was recently placed on administrative leave, and Social Security is now run by Frank Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive who was confirmed as commissioner on May 6. In an interview with the Times this month, Bisignano rejected the idea that DOGE was to blame for problems at Social Security.
But Bisignano acknowledged that the 40% figure cited by Musk was incorrect. 'We're going to be a fact-based, rule-based organization that can count,' Bisignano said.
In a statement later provided by the agency, Bisignano said: 'The work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.'
The Social Security agency did not respond to a request to interview Dudek for this article. On his last day as acting commissioner, he wrote in a New York Post opinion piece that he was proud of the work he and his colleagues had done in service of Trump's mandate to 'be bold, not bureaucratic.'
Still, Dudek, 48, has told associates that while he did his best to fend off deeper cuts, he harbors deep misgivings about the effect of DOGE's oversight, according to several people familiar with the conversations.
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Initially, Musk's deputies showed little public interest in Social Security as they looked into other corners of the federal bureaucracy.
But in early February, a DOGE team stationed at the Treasury Department gained access to crucial federal data: the payments the Treasury processed on behalf of government agencies.
Inside that system, DOGE members saw taxpayer funds flowing to people who appeared not to have Social Security numbers, according to an internal memo viewed by the Times and people briefed on DOGE's analysis of the Treasury data. Other recipients seemed to be dead.
None of it was evidence of wrongdoing, Social Security employees would later explain to DOGE. Musk's team simply did not understand the data. But on the social platform X, Musk suddenly began accusing the agency of enabling 'massive fraud,' saying in a flurry of posts starting Feb. 9 that Social Security payments had been going to scammers and 'illegals.'
Musk's false claim about scammers making 40% of calls to Social Security's customer service line appeared to be a distortion of a statistic.
The DOGE leader was apparently referring to claims his deputies had been making about a far narrower subset of calls in which fraudsters were trying to steal money by changing bank account information. Agency analysts had estimated there were 66,000 such fraud cases a year, according to documents viewed by the Times. The customer service number receives roughly 80 million calls per year.
A recent agency memo found only 'minimal instances' of phone fraud.
Nonetheless, the Musk claim had been used to justify a policy change greenlit by Dudek: The public would no longer be allowed to file for benefits or change their bank account information over the phone, instead having to do so online or in person.
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The proposed change, which was supposed to take effect on March 31, was met with resistance given the difficulties it was expected to impose on retirees and people with disabilities. Agency officials estimated it would have sent some 4 million customers to field offices that were already short-staffed, and confusion soon spread.
Lines at some locations snaked out the door. Among other concerns, many beneficiaries mistakenly believed they needed to prove their identity in person or risk losing their benefits.
Within weeks, the proposal was significantly scaled back.
But the number of people visiting field offices to change their banking information still rose sharply compared with the previous year, according to internal agency statistics reviewed by the Times.
The higher traffic was poorly timed. At least three dozen field offices were estimated to be losing more than a quarter of their staff, agency data show.
During one of his last weeks in charge, Dudek drove around the Midwest by himself visiting offices that had been hit especially hard by cuts.
At a Milwaukee field office, Dudek stopped a woman driving out of the parking lot, a moment witnessed by the Times.
'Were we able to take care of your needs today?' he asked.
'Not at all,' the woman replied.
Dudek apologized as she drove away.
This article originally appeared in
.