Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.
Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.
That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”
Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. 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.
Their work has led to the departures of thousands of employees, thinning an already overstretched work force and setting off a wave of public anxiety over the state of an agency administering politically sacrosanct retirement benefits that Mr. Trump has vowed to protect.
Mr. Musk has left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, and some of his top aides at DOGE have also departed, leaving federal workers and the public to assess what Mr. Musk’s tornadolike path through Washington yielded. At Social Security, Mr. 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.
The Times’s investigation found that Mr. 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.
In response, 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.
DOGE leaders pressured agency executives to hire 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.
Mr. 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.
The Times also reviewed previously unreported emails that showed how DOGE members used the agency for political aims, directing Mr. Dudek to cancel important contracts in Maine after the state’s governor, a Democrat, clashed with Mr. Trump.
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 Mr. 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.
So far the agency’s core functions — like sending monthly checks to 74 million Americans — have remained largely intact.
But under pressure from Mr. 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 percent 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 shows, 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 spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, said that under Mr. Trump the agency “will continue to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse while protecting benefits for eligible Americans.”
Mr. 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 Ms. Miller, who left the White House alongside him, responded to requests for comment.
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.
Mr. 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, Mr. Bisignano rejected the idea that DOGE was to blame for problems at Social Security.
But Mr. Bisignano acknowledged that the 40 percent figure cited by Mr. Musk was incorrect. “We’re going to be a fact-based, rule-based organization that can count,” Mr. Bisignano said.
In a statement later provided by the agency, Mr. Bisignano said: “The work that DOGE did was 100 percent accurate.”
The Social Security agency did not respond to a request to interview Mr. 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 Mr. Trump’s mandate to “be bold, not bureaucratic.”
Still, Mr. 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.
During his tenure, Mr. Dudek described his role in grandiose terms, suggesting to others that he saw himself in the mold of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi industrialist whose secret efforts to save the lives of Jews during World War II were portrayed in a critically acclaimed film.
“Haven’t they seen ‘Schindler’s List?’” Mr. Dudek asked about his colleagues, according to another employee who heard his remarks. “Don’t they know what’s going on?”
An opportunity for influence
Mr. Dudek was still a midlevel employee late last year when he first made contact with the DOGE team.
He was, in some ways, an unlikely ally — a registered Democrat who once boasted on social media about receiving a personal letter from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He had never managed more than about a dozen people at the agency.
But as an anti-fraud adviser who had focused on problems like scammers stealing money intended for retirees, Mr. Dudek saw an opportunity to influence Mr. Musk’s initiative, according to three people familiar with his thinking. He had long been fascinated by the idea of shaping bureaucracies from within, reading books with titles like “Public Entrepreneurship” and “The Elements of Influence,” one of those people said. Growing up, his family had relied on Social Security benefits for his mother’s disability, and his wife, 72, currently receives Social Security payments, he has told colleagues.
Veteran employees like Mr. Dudek knew there was plenty the agency could do better. Its customer service was sometimes slow and inefficient. Identity thieves were a problem. Many of its internal software systems were arcane and outdated.
But Social Security had dedicated significant resources to fighting waste and fraud, and there was evidence that the effort had been effective. Less than 1 percent of the more than $1 trillion the agency pays out in benefits each year are considered “improper payments,” according to an inspector general’s report — significantly less than the rates for other large entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Shortly after Mr. Trump won the election, Mr. Dudek reached out to his contacts in private industry, hoping to find a connection to Mr. Musk’s team, according to a person with knowledge of his outreach. One contractor introduced Mr. Dudek in mid-December to Steve Davis, an executive at several of Mr. Musk’s companies who was his right-hand man at DOGE, this person said.
Initially, Mr. 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. Mr. Musk’s team simply did not understand the data. But on X, Mr. 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.”
At Social Security’s sprawling, Baltimore-area headquarters on Feb. 10, Mr. Musk’s team demanded action.
Mr. Dudek was summoned to the office of Michael Russo, a former payments processing executive who had been installed as the new chief information officer and described himself as a member of DOGE, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Mr. Russo had written some of the supposed discrepancies Mr. Musk cited on a white board, one of the people said. Mr. Dudek, expressing skepticism, suggested that agency employees could analyze the data. Dozens of Social Security employees were then given instructions to scrutinize the Treasury data and investigate DOGE’s suspicions, according to four people with knowledge of the process.
In the extensive analysis that followed, agency experts carefully documented fallacies in DOGE’s work, according to documents reviewed by The Times and those people.
“These payments are valid,” Sean Brune, an acting deputy commissioner, wrote in a memo examining one of the issues. (A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment.)
But Mr. Russo, who did not respond to a request for comment, said that DOGE would not trust career civil servants, according to people familiar with his statements. Instead, he insisted that Akash Bobba — a 21-year-old who had interned at Palantir and become one of DOGE’s lead coders — conduct his own analysis.
To do that, Mr. Bobba would need to gain access to the personal data Social Security kept on Americans. That could include the identifying nine-digit numbers, names, addresses, dates and places of birth, citizenship and benefit amounts, as well as other sensitive information.
But there was an obstacle: The then-acting commissioner, Michelle King, and her top deputies were resisting giving Mr. Bobba access to the agency’s full data set until he went through the normal process of computer systems training.
“I do not believe Mr. Bobba had a sufficient understanding of the sensitive nature of S.S.A. data or the ways to ensure such data’s confidentiality,” Tiffany Flick, who at the time was the agency’s chief of staff, said in a sworn declaration in federal court. She added: “It simply is not possible to become proficient within a matter of a few days.”
Mr. Dudek argued in text chains with colleagues that they should grant access, according to people familiar with the exchange. He had watched as the Trump administration, with DOGE’s assistance, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development in a matter of weeks after employees there tried to block the cost-cutters. Social Security was far bigger, with a much more potent political hold on the millions of Americans who see it as an earned benefit fundamental to their economic security, but Mr. Dudek warned that not complying with DOGE could nonetheless put the agency in jeopardy.
The career officials running the agency did not approve of his meddling. On Feb. 14, they suspended him from his job in the anti-fraud office.
“I confess,” Mr. Dudek wrote in a public post on LinkedIn. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”
“Everything I have ever done,” he added, “is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”
Two days later, the White House forced out Ms. King, who subsequently retired. Ms. Flick also left. Neither she nor Ms. King responded to requests for comment.
A White House official emailed Mr. Dudek with the news that he would become the new acting commissioner.
“It is an honor to serve,” Mr. Dudek responded, according to a copy of the message. “We will find and stop fraud!”
On X, Mr. Musk crowed: “There ARE good people in the government who want to eliminate fraud & waste.”
‘A lot of vampires’
The night Mr. Dudek returned from his suspension — now as head of the agency — Mr. Musk posted another seemingly shocking allegation: Millions of people older than 120 were not listed as dead in Social Security’s database. And he suggested they were being paid.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he wrote on Feb. 16, apparently referring to the book series. He punctuated his post with two laughing emojis and shared a chart with the data.
The numbers were accurate: Millions of people who had died before modern-day record keeping made it easy to verify deaths were listed as still being alive, experts said. But the agency automatically stops payments going to people listed as older than 115, except in rare circumstances.
One audit from 2015 found only 13 people older than 112 still receiving benefits. Other audits found payments being sent to an estimated 24,000 people who generally died more recently — a sign of Social Security needing tighter controls and monitoring — but not the millions Mr. Musk claimed.
Even Mr. Bobba, who had compiled the chart, told others at the agency that he was aware Mr. Musk’s interpretation was wrong and had tried to deliver the accurate context to him, according to people with knowledge of his comments. Mr. Bobba did not respond to a request for comment.
Nonetheless, false notions about dead people in Social Security’s database suddenly became a Trump administration priority. In total, a dozen DOGE members descended on the agency.
DOGE leaders directed Social Security staff to set about marking people older than 120 as dead, court records show.
On social media, Mr. Musk hailed the effort. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Fox News that DOGE suspected there were “tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.” And Mr. Trump turned the notion of payments to dead people into a signature moment in his nationally televised address to Congress on March 4.
“3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” Mr. Trump said. “And money is being paid to many of them.”
“It really hurts Social Security and hurts our country,” he added.
But an internal memo from DOGE officials to Mr. Dudek acknowledged the cleanup project would not help the agency eliminate the relatively small number of payments to dead people, although it could aid anti-fraud efforts at other government departments that relied on Social Security data.
“It will have no impact on benefits,” stated the DOGE memo, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times.
Dudek and DOGE
Over his first two weeks in charge of Social Security, Mr. Dudek began delivering for DOGE, releasing a plan to shrink the agency’s work force by 12 percent and agreeing to share sensitive Social Security data with immigration authorities.
In early March, he took sole responsibility when reports surfaced that Social Security had canceled two contracts with Maine after its governor, the Democrat Janet Mills, publicly tangled with Mr. Trump over the state’s policies on transgender athletes.
Mr. Dudek told reporters at the time that he had canceled the contracts because he was angry at Ms. Mills for challenging the president. In an internal email, he called her “a petulant child.” After public criticism, he reversed the cancellations of the contracts, which provided basic services like allowing newborns to receive Social Security numbers at hospitals.
But previously undisclosed documents reviewed by The Times show that the cancellation order had actually come from the Musk team.
On Feb. 27, a DOGE engineer told Mr. Dudek in an email that the administration had identified roughly three dozen federal contracts in Maine as “nonessential,” including the two from Social Security.
“We should cancel them,” wrote the engineer, Ethan Shaotran, 23, who declined to comment when reached by The Times.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dudek took explicit steps that highlighted potential management problems under DOGE.
He directed staff members to publish online a list of field offices that were losing 25 percent or more of their staff and to post YouTube videos of weekly operational meetings in which agency leaders discussed staff shortages, among other issues.
“We have a lot of customers right now — a lot of Americans — that are very uneasy,” Mr. Dudek said in a meeting in March.
White House officials ultimately demanded that he halt many of these transparency initiatives, according to people familiar with the matter. The field office data and meeting videos no longer appear online.
Mr. Dudek faced another crisis on March 20, when a federal judge issued an order prohibiting Mr. Musk’s team from entering Social Security databases that contained personally identifying information.
By this point, Mr. Dudek had granted such access to at least six DOGE members, including Mr. Bobba, court records show.
On the night of the ruling, two DOGE leaders told Mr. Dudek that the agency should continue allowing access to the data despite the judge’s order, with one arguing that the order was so ambiguous that it could block all Social Security employees, not just members of DOGE, from gaining access, according to a person familiar with events.
Mr. Dudek responded to DOGE’s arguments by going public with a stunning declaration seemingly designed to encourage the judge to more clearly reiterate her ruling. Given the order’s vagueness, he told reporters, he might have to shut down the systems used for the agency’s work.
“I believe that the two checks on the executive branch are the courts and the Constitution,” he told The Times on March 21, essentially endorsing the idea that the court act as a guardrail for decisions being made at the agency he ostensibly led.
The judge quickly sent two letters reiterating that her order applied only to members of DOGE. The agency’s work continued.
Anxiety and long lines
Mr. Musk’s false claim about scammers making 40 percent of calls to Social Security’s customer service line appeared to be a distortion of a completely different 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 Mr. 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.
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 four 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 shows.
During one of his last weeks in charge, Mr. Dudek drove around the Midwest by himself visiting offices that had been hit especially hard by cuts.
At a Milwaukee field office, Mr. 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.
Mr. Dudek apologized as she drove away.
Reporting was contributed by Eli Murray, Sara Stathas, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Jeremy Singer-Vine. Kirsten Noyes, Kitty Bennett and Emily Powell contributed research.
Alexandra Berzon is an investigative reporter covering American politics and elections for The Times.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.
Tara Siegel Bernard writes about personal finance for The Times, from saving for college to paying for retirement and everything in between.
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