Key Points
- The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a tech-focused team backed by the Trump administration, arrived at the Social Security Administration (SSA) with a promise of modernization.
- The team quickly abandoned systemic reform, instead focusing on a misguided and aggressive hunt for non-existent voter fraud, causing chaos within the agency.
- Leland Dudek, a mid-level bureaucrat unexpectedly promoted to Acting Commissioner, initially tried to help DOGE but eventually worked to undermine their efforts from the inside.
- DOGE’s intervention is described as a major missed opportunity to update the SSA’s antiquated systems, resulting in the loss of thousands of experienced staff and diminished public trust.
- The new SSA commissioner, Frank Bisignano, is reportedly continuing DOGE’s focus on superficial metrics over deep, meaningful reform.
The arrival of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) headquarters was met with a fragile sense of hope. For an agency creaking under the weight of 90-year-old processes and software from the 1980s, the promise of a crack team of technologists felt like a lifeline. However, what unfolded was not a story of sleek modernization but a saga of chaos, misplaced priorities, and internal rebellion, as detailed in over a dozen hours of interviews with the man at the center of the storm, former Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek.
A Mission Derailed
Initially, there was excitement. Dudek, a longtime tech-oriented official at the SSA, and his colleagues saw DOGE as a force that could finally push the agency into the 21st century. They desperately needed help to digitize records stored in limestone mines and to navigate the 60 million lines of legacy code that form the agency’s backbone.
This optimism quickly evaporated. The young coders from DOGE, after a brief period of inquiry, turned their full attention to a single directive from their senior leaders: find fraud, and find it fast. A massive, hand-drawn map of the SSA’s complex IT architecture, which Dudek had unfurled to guide them, was ignored and eventually sagged to the floor—a potent symbol of a squandered opportunity.
“They began acting like a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run—thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank—screaming all the time,” Dudek told ProPublica.
The “Vampire” Fraud Fiasco
The obsession with fraud culminated in a national firestorm. A table created by a 21-year-old coder, Akash Bobba, showing millions of Social Security numbers assigned to people over 120 years old, was seized upon by DOGE leader Elon Musk. Despite Bobba’s attempts to explain that these individuals were not receiving benefits, Musk tweeted about “vampires” collecting checks, a grossly misleading claim that President Trump then repeated to Congress.
The DOGE team scrambled to find evidence to back up the sensational claims but, according to senior SSA officials, their efforts were erratic and directionless. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” one official recalled. The focus on a non-existent problem consumed valuable time and resources that could have been dedicated to genuine reforms.
A Commissioner’s Double Game
Thrust into the role of acting commissioner, Leland Dudek found himself in an impossible position. He described being caught between the unreasonable demands of the White House and DOGE’s leaders and the fundamental mission of the agency he was supposed to protect. His solution was to play a dangerous double game.
Publicly, he adopted a bombastic, “Apprentice”-like persona, sending out insulting emails to pressure staff into retirement to appease his superiors. Privately, he began to sabotage DOGE’s initiatives. He became an anonymous source for major news outlets, leaking information about “stupid stuff from the DOGE team” to generate public and congressional blowback.
In one of the most striking examples, Dudek was ordered to cancel contracts with the state of Maine that allowed for the efficient reporting of births and deaths—a move seemingly motivated by a political feud between President Trump and Maine’s governor. Knowing this would increase the very “improper payments” DOGE claimed to be fighting, Dudek wrote a deliberately inflammatory email canceling the contracts, referring to the governor as a “petulant child.” As he predicted, the ensuing media firestorm forced him to publicly reverse course, claiming, “I screwed up. I’m new at this job.”
The Lasting Damage
While Dudek’s tenure ended, the repercussions of DOGE’s intervention linger. The agency lost over 5,500 employees, many of them experienced staff who took decades of institutional knowledge with them. The chaos also eroded public trust, prompting hundreds of thousands of Americans to file for retirement early, a financially unwise decision that ironically increased the SSA’s payout obligations.
Dudek himself was dismissed in June and is now struggling to find work, a figure he calls a “disposable pawn” in the administration’s larger game. Meanwhile, the new commissioner, Frank Bisignano, appears to be continuing the DOGE philosophy. He has prioritized superficial wins, such as reducing phone wait times by reassigning staff from complex cases and using misleading metrics, while avoiding the deep, systemic changes the SSA desperately needs. The era of DOGE may be officially over, but for the 73 million Americans who depend on Social Security, its legacy of chaos and missed opportunities continues.
Image Referance: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/9/2342424/-The-untold-saga-of-what-happened-when-DOGE-stormed-Social-Security
