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“THE PRESIDENT WANTED IT AND I DID IT”: RECORDING REVEALS HEAD OF
SOCIAL SECURITY’S THOUGHTS ON DOGE AND TRUMP  
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Eli Hager
March 12, 2025
ProPublica
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_ In a recording obtained by ProPublica, acting Social Security
Commissioner Leland Dudek portrayed his agency as facing peril, while
also encouraging patience with “the DOGE kids.” _

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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 understood, according to Leland Dudek, the
acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I
don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door
meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He
also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our
country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as
sweeping as those at USAID
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the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social
Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an
extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the
volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The
Washington Post first reported
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acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and
quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that
he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the
agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but
also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When
a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more
forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims
about widespread Social Security fraud
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“BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was
actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with —
have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the
perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly
informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as
to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social
program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to
break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE
has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know."

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning.
Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Leland Dudek Credit:via Social Security Administration

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.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent
posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during
last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the
choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the
president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of
at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement
offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work
in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled
people navigate the program
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cuts to disability determination services
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a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the
ssa.gov website [[link removed]] and application process; a
reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10
regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including
those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to
outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me
to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to
make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the
president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name
specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire
anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve
seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the
White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I
don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an
agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social
Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after
Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress
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that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are
receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and
older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE
team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in
pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These
are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at
the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s
misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of
a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely
contradicted
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the false claims. 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.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the
White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees
are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it
all means for the future of the Social Security Administration,
according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen
agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency
have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t
seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program,
which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more
employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even
less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly
people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as
ProPublica has reported
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Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of
techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of
Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many
employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have
been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica,
their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to
more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they
said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,”
two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies
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front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their
government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a
significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers
need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents
— birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process
some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to
the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these
organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the
closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to
the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is
already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the
administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I
think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of
that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according
to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking
about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d
depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy”
that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing
advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and
sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that
although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social
Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful.
“They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to
Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he
claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that
information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted.
He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer
service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like
other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and
open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security
Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his
shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he
said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

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.”

_Eli Hager is a ProPublica reporter who writes about issues affecting
poor and working-class people across the country._

_ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important
issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public
trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold
power to account._

_With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers
a range of topics including government and politics, business,
criminal justice, the environment, education, health care,
immigration, and technology. We focus on stories with the potential
to spur real-world impact [[link removed]]. Among
other positive changes, our reporting has contributed to the passage
of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and
accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels._

* Social Security
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* DOGE
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* Donald Trump
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