Originally published at: ‘The President Wanted It And I Did It’: Recording Reveals Head Of Social Security’s Thoughts On DOGE And Trump - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely…
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Those who have Social Security checks directly deposited need to make certain of the status of those bank accounts. Many people have their payments for Medicare and supplementals taken out of that check as payment. Make sure your accounts get paid. This could be real coup of a disaster with no one left to take care of things. Please advise and look over your parents accounts, especially of they are in nursing homes, etc.
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“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,”
No asshole, you work for the American people. You need to do what’s best for us.
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A good relatively short (by ProPublica standards) snapshot of the airhead running Social Security, not for the people, but for Mr Trump exclusively. The stated 15 min lecture actually lasted an hour and was all over the place, cementing Dudek’s place in history as Trump’s Mini-Me. He even looks the part.
Hold on to any SSA statements you may have, as Dudek admits the wheels are falling off thanks to DOGE.
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I do not even know what this means:
The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”
I mean Trump and his ilk continue to LIE about dead people receiving benefits so the only education they are getting is how to LIE in the face of facts. It reminds me of a scene from the old movie “A Guide for the Married Man” where Joey Bishop is caught by his wife in bed with another woman and he denies it while the other woman puts on her cloths and leaves and in the end his wife cooks him dinner.
But to as to Leland Dudek himself, this says it all:
Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”
He is a mediocre career bureaucrat who is only concerned with where HIS next paycheck is coming from and is too chicken to talk back. In short he is an enabler who Trump can’t discard fast enough, or as the article says:
Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.
“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”
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Sounds like ambulatory diazepam.
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Well, I will agree with him that he is the villain - and I can only hope he is also correct about never having a decent job again.
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This comes up a lot - the SSA website shuts down every night. We’ve speculated about what process first developed when all business was done in offices relys on the assumption no one touches the database when the office is closed, and none of us know for sure, but the shut down happens every night.
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I have had that happen periodically over the past week and not at nightly shut down time. The SSA website also keeps pushing me to use LOGIN.GOV however that was one of the sites temporarily shut down and then breached by the DOGE-lings.
There’s no way I’m doing anything with a password that applies to ALL government accounts - SSA, Medicare, IRS.
And don’t forget, SSA has the ability to take back your payments you have received. Someone mentioned to me that they had set up a separate savings account for Social Security and has an automatic transfer set up so that as soon as the payment hits the bank, it is transferred out so there’s nothing there to take back.
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someone needs to tell this asshole that he’s a public employee, not a Trump employee
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Thanks. Registered many years ago and recently changed to the new login. I do have two additional connected bank accounts in order to move funds when necessary.
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silly me//for some strange reason.i got the impression that the potus and all the emplyees worked for the tax- payer and the citizens…what did i get so wrong!
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