The untold saga of what happened when DOGE stormed Social Security

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox On Feb on the third floor of the Social Prevention Administration s Baltimore-area headquarters Leland Dudek unfurled a -foot-wide roll of paper that extended to feet in length It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Assurance s multiple technological systems and processes The paper was covered in flow charts arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it Dudek called it Social Safeguard s Dead Sea Scroll Dudek and a fellow Social Defense Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office This was where a band from the new Department of Regime Efficiency was going to set up shop DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases Still Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful If any agency needed a dose of efficiency it was theirs There was kind of an excitement veritably a longtime top agency official mentioned I d spent years trying to use innovation and content in avenues that the agency would never get around to The Social Measure Administration is years old Even at present thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania Its core system dates back to the early s and only a insufficient programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than million lines of code The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Protection cards to electronic ones for two decades without making it happen DOGE billed as a squad of crack technologists seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Measure worked and what the majority needed fixing Several times over those first minimal days Akash Bobba a -year-old coder who d been the first of them to arrive held his face close to Dudek s scroll tracing connections between the agency s venerable IT systems with his index finger Bobba appealed Who would know about this part of the architecture Before long though he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard At the top Find fraud Briskly Dudek s scroll was forgotten The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall and it eventually sagged to the floor It only got worse from there declared Dudek who would improbably be named acting commissioner of the Social Guard Administration a position he held through May In hours of interviews with ProPublica Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate and then to protect the agency resulting in turns that were at various times alarming confounding and tragicomic DOGE he commented began acting like a bunch of people who didn t know what they were doing with ideas of how executive should run thinking it should work like a McDonald s or a bank screaming all the time The shock troops of DOGE at the Social Safeguard Administration and myriad other federal agencies were the advance guard in perhaps the majority dramatic transformation of the U S executive since the New Deal And despite the highly citizens departure of DOGE s leader Elon Musk that campaign continues the present day Key DOGE association members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA including as the agency s top tool officers The -year-old whose self-anointed moniker Big Balls has made him one of the most of memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA s commissioner Frank Bisignano who was authenticated by the Senate in May Your bias has to be because mine is that DOGE is helping make things better Bisignano recounted senior representatives weeks after replacing Dudek according to a recording obtained by ProPublica It may not feel that way but don t believe everything you read In a message a Social Safeguard Administration spokesperson explained that Bisignano has made notable initial progress and that the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen amenity delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems The message asserted that under President Trump s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Measure Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Safeguard and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future For all the argument DOGE has generated its time at the Social Defense Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon as particular Democrats warn What it s been as much as anything is a missed opportunity according to interviews with more than current or in recent days departed Social Protection officers and staff who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents emails and court records The DOGE association and Bisignano have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases especially in the early months about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely requirements it They could have worked to modernize Social Precaution s legacy system the current and former staffers say They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that numerous Social Safety beneficiaries have to provide They could have built search tools to help staff deal with the agency s pages of policies New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of matter They could have done something about wait times for disability alleges and appeals which often take over a year They did none of these things Ultimately no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek A -year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump an unlikely holder of a key post elevated after little or no vetting who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration Dudek a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small club within the SSA leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn t oversee others Despite that Trump made him the boss of people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring Dudek got the job wittingly or not through an end-run around his bosses After Trump won the voting and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT group began to swirl Dudek demanded people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to possible DOGE members In December a contact set him up with Musk s right-hand man Steve Davis which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could hack Social Prevention s bureaucracy to get to yes Dudek commented By February Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA alerting top agency authorities that DOGE needed to work at headquarters And unlike Michelle King the acting agency chief at the time Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA s databases This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the inhabitants eye for the first time I confess he posted I helped DOGE understand SSA I confess I circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done The same weekend King resigned and Dudek who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner Between February and May when Dudek s tenure ended his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy perhaps even a fool But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure a disappointed believer in DOGE s possible who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Safety s mission under duress Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an pivotal position under Trump He narrated ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that those who govern would have more frank and honest conversations with the general To the million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Precaution those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor Inside the agency Dudek ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE s murky agenda was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating specific of his own Dudek knows what it s like to depend on Social Protection When he was a kid in Saginaw Michigan his mother turned to Social Safeguard disability benefits to sponsorship him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory she also had a mental-health breakdown Dudek s now-deceased father who worked for General Motors was alternately abusive and absent according to the family At school Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor his sister informed ProPublica and he s had an underdog s quick temper ever since But he was invariably an advanced aspirant and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics As a teenager he often watched C-Span He was fascinated he disclosed by how executive worked and how it could change people s lives Dudek arrived in Washington in to attend Catholic University of America He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton s campaign at the time to reinvent leadership by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency much as Trump and DOGE later declared they would In college he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career He had a night job running the university s computer labs if there were problems he was supposed to call his boss He wasn t supposed to install new utility on all the computers but that s what he did It worked although he got a talking-to about knowing his role After graduating Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal authorities on modernization projects before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves In he arrived at the Social Prevention Administration as an IT safeguard official The agency was just like the Saginaw he d run from Dudek stated an insular hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs But the SSA wasn t the only institution at fault Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Shield Income benefits forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs At the same time lawmakers had capped the agency s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement exploding Social Prevention s rolls The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century even as it has taken on million more beneficiaries Because of the SSA s stultifying practices Dudek commented he leaned into his insubordinate streak He had the sense that he could do it better and when he felt like his proposals weren t receiving money or attention he went around his superiors In one instance he approached probable partners at credit card companies hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Safeguard commissioner at the time Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA certainly from a congressional perspective I was violating rules Dudek stated In part because of moves like this Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times Over the years he was given multiple roles as a senior adviser a title he commented is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills Dudek was stubborn He could come off as a know-it-all and he tended to ramble when speaking But he is also thoughtful and well read In our interviews he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Protection among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire He repeatedly cited James Q Wilson s seminal book Bureaucracy which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Assurance Administration and on a businessman named Donald J Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done No such law constrained Trump Wilson wrote Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris But like chosen other liberals he was becoming exasperated with the administrative state and special-interest groups including corporations unions and social-justice organizations that capture establishment and stifle improvement If it took Trump to cut through that Dudek was open-minded The world has changed he scribbled in a note to himself We must change with it Forthwith after Dudek became commissioner in February he got a call from Scott Coulter a hedge fund manager with a million Manhattan apartment who d been picked to lead DOGE s squad at Social Safety We re coming Coulter noted Be prepared DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen facts suggesting that the Social Guard Administration wasn t keeping its death records up to date They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments Musk was very very interested Dudek wasn t initially concerned about this focus which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided To him the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he d once been albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds They reminded me of myself when I first got into computers he revealed He thought he could mold them In particular Dudek liked Bobba who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead Dudek had spent hours with Bobba trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries records were stored often as cumbersome PDF and image files Instead Bobba who did not respond to a request for comment prioritized Musk s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Assurance benefits Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier As a class speaker at his graduation he d encouraged his classmates not to ignore nuance and complexity He d lamented the increasing willingness to simplify even the greater part complex narratives into sensational tidbits like -character tweets which perpetuates misinformation Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about vampires over the age of allegedly collecting Social Prevention checks Bobba had sorted people with a Social Prevention number by age and unveiled more than million over years old still listed in the agency s statistics Bobba reported he knew these people weren t genuinely receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so to no avail according to SSA officers Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience claiming the numbers proved shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Assurance plan for our seniors The White House declined to comment on this episode Bisignano the new SSA commissioner has repeatedlysaid that the work that DOGE did was accurate Inside the SSA the DOGE association tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed but it didn t seem to know how to go about it jumping from tactic to tactic It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q disclosed a senior SSA official who was in the room Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff the official disclosed It really wasn t clear by that point Dudek began to realize that the difficulty wasn t primarily the people he called the DOGE kids It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning Dudek was perhaps the largest part favorably disposed to the outsiders Plenty of agency authorities were already put off by the DOGErs who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions Michelle Kowalski an analyst who has since departed the agency was instructed to take one of the DOGE people Cole Killian through earnings content and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Guard content She detected herself having to explain to him again and again that a large number of of these people were born before states disclosed births and deaths to the federal establishment and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping In the early days of the agency chosen people didn t even know their birthdays Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged since he was issuing instructions to her association But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings When he certainly turned it on for one call the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager Killian was in fact just six years removed from performing Hotel California at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston Killian whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience even as so countless of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration She was not alone Various of us had veritably deduced in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better one senior SSA official noted But DOGE ended up being more interested the official disclosed in trying to prove that the Social Guard Administration was entirely incompetent than in suggesting improvements Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies On a blog popular among SSA staffers the mood in the comments section turned dark with particular anonymous posters identifying where in the building the incel DOGE boys were located and saying that they are just warming up just think what will come next Dudek sensed the growing tension He felt it too He d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed defense detail to protect them During his first month as commissioner Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion as if he were Trump on The Apprentice And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire Several have left with more expected to follow Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head amazed by who he was suddenly answering to When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff he reported you get caught up But he also declares he was just performing a role Early on I put on a persona of a yeller Dudek disclosed Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change they notified ProPublica As one put it There s Lee and then there s Leland-performingly-Dudek This he hoped would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Guard But the Trump administration kept having other plans Its demands usually came through Coulter the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background who early on dropped by Dudek s office unannounced multiple times a week Dudek disclosed I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this the subsequent day Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff according to Dudek To him these suggestions felt like orders If he responded I don t know let me think about it Coulter would call a scant hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask You really aren t catching on are you and Do you know how multiple times I ve defended you I was supposed to get the message and it would be my own decision so I d be stuck with it Dudek declared He can say he never stated me to do anything Coulter who has been working for DOGE at NASA in modern months did not respond to a request for comment One of Coulter s suggestions involved the SSA s Office of Transformation which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of evolving an online application to replace various of the agency s paper-based forms and in-person interviews The office had been working with elderly low-income and disabled people to see what preponderance confused them about SSA processes and what would largest part help them if these were redesigned But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency Coulter narrated Dudek to close the office according to Dudek claiming it was wasteful Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with trans Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine dilemma at the agency This strategy was not accomplished Such was the affair with the issue of phone fraud Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related Dudek and other functionaries made a point of explaining that they d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency The bots would impersonate beneficiaries using dates of birth and other information that can be uncovered on the internet to try to change the beneficiaries bank-routing information and steal their benefits In Dudek had been on a group that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling DOGE ignored the proposed solutions Instead the White House instructed Dudek to end all declares and direct-deposit transactions by phone Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person For millions of elderly or disabled people these were daunting or impossible options When this program was rolled out at the end of March beneficiaries panicked Various flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn t need to Back at headquarters in a weekly staff meeting Dudek sought 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 crew one official answered referring to the Office of Transformation Dudek reported he urged this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer Over the discipline of six weeks under Dudek the phone protocol zigged and zagged a half dozen times for example the SSA adopted then abandoned a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls before definitively ending up nearly where it began Transactions could be carried out by phone again Throughout this saga Dudek was still getting calls from White House personnel largest part often from Katie Miller DOGE s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller one of Trump s closest advisers Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast She did not respond to a request for comment Miller often called well into the evening Dudek mentioned to chastise him about anything the press had stated that day that had caught the administration off guard As Dudek restored the phone guidelines to its pre-Trump version Miller got angrier You changed the president s guidelines she noted according to Dudek I m like No I m still with the president s program Dudek recounted Miller But if Social Precaution administrators could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his association had previously been planning he commented they could achieve the same end In that scenario Dudek noted we will do so and ease the friction point on the populace How dare you Miller declared Increasingly dismayed Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions hubris and melodrama He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency The younger DOGE club members he stated were easier to work with when their masters weren t around But behind the scenes he began to undermine DOGE however he could Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do Have you ever worked with someone who s manic-depressive he disclosed of the Trump administration s leadership in one meeting Other times Dudek himself was the leaker As commissioner he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE company a lot of times I would go out to the press and instantly tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day Dudek stated adding that he did this in part to help Social Precaution advocates understand and bring attention to the growing situation at the agency Related As feud reignites Trump threatens Musk s billions BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED Rebecca Vallas CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance noted she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE representatives and the media The calls were about his latest community comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Protection Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Shield records He just let me sit there with the volume up high Vallas commented On one of the calls she stated someone advised Dudek Elon loved that but now it s time to walk it back Afterward Dudek communicated her I don t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people I m just trying to give advocates several ammunition Dudek s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur he notified ProPublica In the bulk striking example DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine according to Dudek and other SSA leaders The contracts which all states have long had versions of allowed Maine to automatically overview births and deaths to Social Measure Canceling them would impede ruling body efficiency Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they ve died exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being advised to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine s governor about transgender athletes The White House declined to comment on this episode So he decided to write the hell out of an email directing that the contracts be canceled He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would simultaneously be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters advocates and Congress Please cancel the contracts Dudek s email read While our improper payments will go up and fraudsters may compromise identities no money will go from the constituents trust to a petulant child That last phrase referred to Maine s governor Janet Mills the one Trump had been fighting with Do I care about Janet Mills No Dudek informed ProPublica As Dudek had hoped the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already longed to do reinstate the contracts In a written apology he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the expected harm of what he alone had done I screwed up he narrated reporters I m new at this job Once again Miller called Dudek and excoriated him What the hell is going on she explained This place leaks like a sieve he answered What can I tell you 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 certain of which were essentially vaporized Social Shield 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 contends 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 A large number of of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits defense 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 fresh 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 Guard 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 noted 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 declared 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 explained 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 report disparaging ProPublica and Dudek ProPublica s story White House spokesperson Davis Ingle reported 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 Safety Administration but now that he s bitter about being out of the top job he s crooning a different tune Dudek declared the administration requested him to write the op-ed and then vetted it Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump in recent times he explained you saw the cabinet meeting Bisignano the Social Defense commissioner comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek though like Dudek he has working-class roots in his matter in Brooklyn Until this job Bisignano spent his career in the private sector He was a top executive in operations and tool at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv Yet like DOGE he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself He has repeatedly informed staff that Social Safeguard should be run more like Amazon with AI handling more customer interactions But disability declares are more complicated than ordering toothpaste according to SSA executives and experts and Social Protection s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA s number In a July press release he claimed that the average was down to six minutes an reduction from He achieved this in part by reassigning field office employees to phone duty That means initial calls are getting answered faster but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex in-person cases And reaching an agent turns out to mean speaking to a human being or an AI bot Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as zero-minute waits skewing the average If you in fact stay on the line USA In the current era has unveiled it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative In its announcement the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that using equipment on our national number has enabled percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks Even the latest phone fraud program feels like a rerun from DOGE s earlier season In late July Bisignano s association quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone starting Aug Days later the SSA communicated that this was truly optional The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency but the approach it seems is the same As one SSA official put it Bisignano is doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things more efficiently Alex Mierjeski contributed research Read more about DOGE Elon Musk s new political party isn t happening Release the wrecking ball Supreme Court OKs Trump layoffs As the One Big Boondoggle passes the Senate Trump and Musk square off again The post The untold saga of what happened when DOGE stormed Social Protection appeared first on Salon com