Originally published at: The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This story first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was…
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I do not remember ever reading an article on the TPM site that was posted over 5 hours earlier and being the first to comment. That is because it is a very long and tedious article and does not get to the real message until the very end, the harm done and Dudek’s reward. Spoiler alert, the best part of this story is the justice in Dudek not being able to find another job after being discarded by Trump.
In my opinion, this sums up the entire article:
Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)
Noting that I don’t believe the last sentence but even if you do, it shows that the person Trump had pulled from the bowels of the bureaucracy to run the agency responsible for providing the hard earned social security payments 72,000,000 Americans had paid, earned and were now depending on for their lives had no clue how to run the agency.
And Dudek defense is so similar to what Repugs from the highest to the lowest, IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE, or as Dudek puts it:
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
As for Dudek himself, he speaks for himself and the harm he did and what an absolute idiot he was to go along and get along only to be discarded to make room for a bigger Trump crony.
With the exception of the two exserts taken from the article above, below is really all that is worth reading.
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.
Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.
Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”
Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”
Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”
As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”
The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”
Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”
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Those that are in the SSA office have no clue what they are doing. I was one of those who benefited by the WEP elimination bill. What should have been settled in March didn’t get done until July. I got my back pay, but then the next month they said, oops - we gave you too much and I must pay them back. I couldn’t figure out their fuzzy math but relented and sent them a check. It took them a month to cash that check and credit my account.
Now I’m getting letters that say I’m getting more than previously stated per month, but the month of September I’m getting $0. Then the month of October I’m getting more than double - in what looks like the amount I had to pay back plus two months of normal payment.
Hence these guys have no clue and I’m not going to call just to wait 2 hours for someone to answer the phone and hear my question.