DOGE’S WORK INSIDE the Social Security Administration is being led by three men with no apparent experience with the agency’s work. A three man team who is loyal to Elon Musk, not the American government.
DOGE’S work inside the Social Security Administration
Akash Bobba, a 22-year-old engineer who previously interned for Meta as well as Musk ally Peter Thiel’s Palantir; Steve Davis, a Musk deputy who has spent 20 years finding ways to cut costs at Musk’s companies; and Citrix executive Tom Krause, who also led DOGE’s efforts to access sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.
DOGE has also eliminated the Office of Transformation, whose work focused on a government-wide initiative to modernize agency technologies and services to the public, according to O’Malley.
Then, DOGE announced the closure of the agency’s Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity — where SSA employees, 30 percent of whom are African-American, file discrimination and other complaints.
The cuts being carried out by DOGE
The cuts being carried out by DOGE and Dudek are being done with little apparent consideration for their impact on the millions of Americans who receive benefits, employees say. First, DOGE closed at least 10 field offices in as many states, and is now listing lease terminations for four dozen more locations, CNN reported.
DOGE is also restructuring the Office of Analytics, Review, and Oversight, which has been pivotal in discovering and reducing improper payments to beneficiaries — the exact type of inefficiencies DOGE supposedly aims to eliminate — according to O’Malley, a Democrat who sought the party’s nomination for president in 2016.
Musk plans to replace employees with AI agents
All of this is being done to an agency that is at a 50-year low in staffing, and at a time when the number of new applicants for benefits are skyrocketing as baby boomers reach retirement age. Now, Dudek and DOGE are aiming to reduce the agency’s workforce even more, looking to eliminate about 7,000 workers.
Taxpayers will be on the hook for some of those workers being removed as buyouts and settlements are offered to scores of SSA employees who are at or nearing retirement age. To make matters worse, O’Malley says, not only will this cost taxpayers money that could be used to pay benefits and operational costs, but will drain the agency of skilled and knowledgeable veterans at a time when staffing within the SSA is at its lowest level in 50 years — and baby boomers surge into retirement.
Going digital
“That’s the biggest operational waste in the entire history of Social Security,” O’Malley says. “Worse, they don’t receive the knowledge transfer that you would receive in any technology company. If you were in Silicon Valley and offered these buyouts without a plan to retain that institutional knowledge, the board of directors of that company would fire you.”
“Dudek’s plan will affect services,” says one of the SSA employees, who has worked for the federal government at several agencies for the last five years.
Why DOGE’s cost cutting is so dangerous
O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor who oversaw the agency under President Joe Biden, remembers Dudek as a lower-level technology staffer. Now, O’Malley is surprised not just to see Dudek in such a powerful role, but to be wielding that authority in such forceful service to DOGE and Trump.
Dudek was “by no stretch part of the Senior Executive Service; he was a four-steps down data guy,” O’Malley says. “I was shocked, even appalled, when they used someone of his level of inexperience to replace Michelle King. And I was even more surprised to see what a cruel-hearted tool he has become for hurting people and destroying the agency. “
King resigned from the agency in mid-February after refusing to allow DOGE unfettered access to Social Security data and systems, including the personal information of millions of Americans that could allow those with access to the information to prohibit citizens from receiving benefits. Around the same time, Dudek was offering that access, detailing his actions in a since-deleted LinkedIn post.
“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,” Dudek wrote in mid-February.
Not long after Dudek’s confession, and with King out of the way, DOGE went to work. The first step was gaining access to SSA’s data and technology systems, including what a whistleblower has called the “protected information” of millions of Americans.
lawsuit against the SSA
In an affidavit filed Friday night as part of a lawsuit against the SSA, the whistleblower, Tiffany Flick, described the chaotic first few weeks of the Trump administration as DOGE sought access to a variety of SSA systems. DOGE wanted access to “everything, including source code,” according to Flick’s affidavit.
Flick said she was concerned that DOGE’s access to — and meddling in — SSA systems “could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.”
The cryptic emails
On March 1, Dudek sent an email last week titled “our road ahead.” The two Social Security employees describe the email as cryptic, with one saying it clearly alluded to the privatization of some agency services
“We need to revitalize SSA operations by streamlining activities, outsource non-essential functions to industry experts, and reinstating human judgment and common sense into every decision at every level,” Dudek wrote in the email.
“Industry experts” was taken to mean privatization of some services and agency tasks, says the employee with five years experience in the federal government.
Dudek argued in the email that when Biden fired a previous SSA commissioner, Andrew Saul, a Trump appointee who refused to resign, he effectively eliminated the agency’s independence.
“President Biden dismissed Andrew Saul, fundamentally altering the independence” of the agency, Dudek wrote. “With that decision, the autonomy our employees once enjoyed changed. Now, under President Trump, we follow established precedent: We serve at the pleasure and direction of the president. Only the courts or Congress can intervene.”
Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the Social Security Subcommittee, says Dudek’s email was “bizarre, to say the least.” Larson tells Rolling Stone and American Doom that the closure of field offices and firing of customer service staff “will do nothing to improve ‘efficiency’ — it will result in the delay, disruption, and denial of Americans’ earned benefits.”
Closure of field offices
Amid the closure of field offices and internal components, firings and buyout offers, Musk and Trump have attacked the agency on social media and in public statements. First, Musk took to X to share false claims that tens of millions Americans over the age of 100 were improperly receiving payments, including 1.3 million over 150 years of age. Then, Trump repeated the claims — even going so far as to claim, during his address to Congress last week, that people who were listed as being 300-years-old in Social Security systems, were receiving checks.
In the address, Trump claimed that more than 18 million Americans who are over the age of 100 were receiving Social Security benefits. According to the agency itself, there are just 89,000 Americans aged 99 and older who receive payments.
On Feb. 19, Dudek himself said Trump and Musk’s claims were incorrect.
“When Elon Musk and the kids from DOGE who didn’t understand what they were looking at brought up the laughable assertion that there were tens of millions of dead people receiving benefits, I thought we had laughed them into the silly corner on that,” O’Malley says. “But then Trump doubled down on it. Instead of people who are 150 years old receiving checks, now it’s 300 years old. At first I thought Musk failed to tell him they were wrong about that, but now I wonder if it’s just part of a big lie.”
With congressional Republicans either dodging the issue or silently backing DOGE’s work — even as it intrudes on their own authority — some Democrats have introduced legislation to try to save the SSA. But unless they can convince Republicans to buck their party, and possibly anger Musk and Trump, those bills face a difficult future.
Last week, O’Malley joined congressional Democrats at a press conference in introducing a suite of bills aimed at protecting the agency and the benefits it provides. The bills would halt the closure of field offices and block DOGE from accessing data about Americans who receive Social Security benefits. Larson also introduced a resolution giving the Trump administration 14 days to respond to questions about DOGE’s activities within the agency.
Larson has also demanded a hearing on DOGE’s work at the SSA. He says Social Security Subcommittee chair Ron Estes (R-Kan.) has not responded to this request. Estes did not answer questions for this story.
DOGE’s ravaging of the SSA
“Republicans have attempted to cut benefits and privatize Social Security in the past, and rather than improve ‘efficiency,’ that seems to be the direction they are headed in once again,” Larson tells Rolling Stone and American Doom. “Republicans need to stand up with us to conduct meaningful oversight and get real answers for their constituents, rather than ceding the power of the legislative branch to Musk, Trump, and their ‘DOGE’ cronies.
Throughout DOGE’s ravaging of the SSA, a culture of fear has permeated the agency, employees say. One of the employees, a veteran of the agency with more than a dozen years experience there, said they chose to speak out because they felt the SSA and its employees were being unfairly maligned by Trump and Musk.
“I feel like if no one speaks out then the public can’t know about it, talk to their congressional representatives, and put pressure on them.”
The shuttering of offices, firings of probationary workers, and offers of buyouts to those at retirement age and even below it are not just causing a feeling of fear to spread throughout the SSA, the two current employees say, but bringing the agency perilously close to widespread failures. O’Malley agrees, and says that DOGE, Dudek, and the Trump administration “are intentionally driving the agency into collapse so they can claim it’s broken.”
O’Malley is distressed to watch the agency’s destruction after his time at the agency, which he says is responsible for one of the most efficient and popular government programs in history. Faced with a rising number of new beneficiary applications and a historic low in its number of employees, O’Malley compared the SSA to an aging battleship in his year tenure at its head.
“Last year, we turned that battleship on a dime, but the deck was only three inches above the water line,” he said. “These guys seem determined to sink it.”
The biggest security concern for Americans is that ELON MUSK will have access to all the DOGE data, through his virtual agents and thus could use them scrupulously in the future.