It started on Jan. 31, when someone named Mike Russo showed up at the Social Security Administration offices outside Baltimore and started introducing himself as a representative of DOGE, the federal budget-cutting service headed by Elon Musk.
Over subsequent days, he urged seniorSocial Security Administration officials to take the deferred resignation offer that had been sent out by DOGE under the heading “Fork in the Road.” The so-called Department of Government Efficiency set up its own internal team at the agency to ferret out information from its files. Social Security officials offered to brief the DOGE team about how the agency operates to ensure that payments are made accurately; they didn’t seem interested.
These details and others are drawn from an extraordinary declaration made in Maryland federal court by Tiffany Flick, who rose during her 30 years with the agency to become acting chief of staff to acting Commissioner Michelle King. Flick retired shortly after King was replaced as acting commissioner by Leland Dudek, formerly a mid-level agency employee, on Feb. 16.
Flick’s declaration includes an explicit warning that DOGE’s rampage through the Social Security Administration “could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.”
Make no mistake: This would be catastrophic to millions of Americans and a politically toxic development.
The undermining of Social Security by the Trump administration has already begun. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”; as I wrote, that demonstrated that he knows nothing about Social Security, and nothing about Ponzi schemes.
Trump has stated that he’s “not touching” Social Security, but in his March 4 address to Congress he claimed that Musk had uncovered vast fraud at the agency, though he didn’t back up that claim.
Trump officials have taken steps to cut Social Security employees by more than 10%, which would undermine the agency’s already overstretched ability to provide customer service to claimants and beneficiaries.
Most recently, the administration briefly canceled the right of Maine residents to register their newborns for Social Security numbers remotely at birth, requiring them instead to bring their infants to a Social Security field office to complete the necessary paperwork.
Following an uproar, that action was reversed within a day, but it raised suspicions that it was undertaken to punish Mainers for their Democratic governor’s public upbraiding of Trump at a Washington meeting.
Social Security has made payments earned by American workers, their survivors and dependents for 85 years, without a break. That record is fundamental to the program’s overwhelming popularity, the confidence it enjoys among its roughly 70 million current beneficiaries and its stature as the greatest safety net program in American history, keeping more than 22 million Americans out of poverty.
Flick’s declaration was filed as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and other plaintiffs seeking to block DOGE’s access to the Social Security Administration and its data. I asked the Social Security Administration for comment on Flick’s assertions, but haven’t received a reply.
The declaration makes sickening reading. She describes how her agency was invaded by know-nothing DOGE employees who ran roughshod over agency rules and procedures designed to protect the confidentiality of private personal information about beneficiaries and their family members, as required by law.
Social Security master files that DOGE demanded and may have received access to include “information about anyone with a Social Security number, including names, names of spouses and dependents, work history, financial and banking information, immigration or citizenship status, and marital status,” Flick states.
The DOGE representatives were secretive about what they were doing at the agency, she writes. They appeared to be focused on “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts.” Their concerns fell into three categories: “untrue allegations regarding benefit payments to deceased people of advanced age;…single Social Security numbers receiving multiple benefits…; [and] payments made to people without a Social Security number.”
Each of those concerns, Flick writes, was “invalid” and “based on an inaccurate understanding of SSA’s data and programs.”
The assertion that payments are being made to people as old as 150 years, as I reported earlier, resulted from DOGE’s misunderstanding of the agency’s software; nevertheless it was bandied about by Musk at a White House press briefing and repeated in exaggerated form by Trump in his March 4 speech.
As for multiple benefits being paid on single Social Security numbers, that’s normal: “DOGE seemed to misunderstand the fact that benefits payments to spouses and dependents will be based on the Social Security number of a single worker,” Flick explains.
And she states that SSA officials have never seen evidence that benefits are inappropriately being paid to people without a Social Security number. DOGE didn’t give agency officials “enough information to understand the source of the concern.”
Officials who tried to block them were sidelined. As Flick describes the incursion, Dudek informed her on Jan. 30 that Russo and another DOGE representative would shortly be arriving at the agency.
Because Dudek was a mid-level employee, Flick asked why he was in contact with anyone at DOGE. She told him to cease any such contact, and informed him that all further contact with DOGE would be handled by the office of acting Commissioner King.
Over the next week or two, King’s office was peppered with demands from DOGE that a software engineer, Akash Bobba, be given access to SSA data.
“That request was unprecedented,” Flick says, not only in its nature but its haste. Ultimately, Bobba was given “read-only” access to limited SSA data. Flick soon determined that Bobba was not working in a secure location, as was required under agency rules, but off-site at the Office of Personnel Management, a separate executive branch agency.
She says it appeared that other, non-SSA people were working with him and may have had access to the protected personal information. Of greater concern, although Bobba had “read-only” access to the data, meaning that he couldn’t change it, he had the ability to “copy and paste, export, and screenshot that data.”
In any case, Russo demanded that Bobba have access to “everything, including source code,” Flick declares. “Generally, we would not provide full access [to] all data systems even to our most skilled and highly trained experts.” The request to give Bobba unfettered access to the data “without justifying the ‘need to know’ this information was contrary to SSA’s long-standing privacy protection policies and regulations,” but no one would explain why its access was needed.
Dudek was placed on administrative leave on Feb. 14 and an investigation was opened into whether he had inappropriate contact with DOGE. Two days later, President Trump named Dudek acting commissioner.
The post Commentary: A Social Security insider describes DOGE’s rampage at the agency and the threat to your benefits appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
