Big NYT Article On DOGE, Dudek And Social Security

      From the New York Times:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.” 

Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found. …

Mr. Dudek was recently placed on administrative leave … 

Mr. Dudek, 48, has told associates that while he did his best to fend off deeper cuts, he harbors deep misgivings about the effect of DOGE’s oversight, according to several people familiar with the conversations. … 

On Feb. 27, a DOGE engineer told Mr. Dudek in an email that the administration had identified roughly three dozen federal contracts in Maine as “nonessential,” including the two from Social Security. 

“We should cancel them,” wrote the engineer, Ethan Shaotran, 23, who declined to comment when reached by The Times. … 

Mr. Dudek faced another crisis on March 20, when a federal judge issued an order prohibiting Mr. Musk’s team from entering Social Security databases that contained personally identifying information. … 

On the night of the ruling, two DOGE leaders told Mr. Dudek that the agency should continue allowing access to the data despite the judge’s order, with one arguing that the order was so ambiguous that it could block all Social Security employees, not just members of DOGE, from gaining access, according to a person familiar with events. …

     One question I have after reading this is whether Dudek talked with the Times. I’ll guess he did.

Can The DOGE Kiddie Korps Survive Outside The Tech Hothouse?

     Over the decades it’s been my experience that people new to the Social Security world dramatically underestimate the complexity and sensitivity of the work that the Social Security Administration does. I wonder how long it will take for DOGE employees to figure this out. I doubt that their arrogance can long coexist with knowledge of just how complex Social Security is. 

     As an example of the complexity let’s imagine a recent widow calling in to ask about benefits she might be able to receive. Sounds like that would be a common sort of transaction and it is. Here’s some of the questions that should come up and there are plenty more that may come up:

• How old are you?
• Do you have any minor children?
• Do you have any disabled adult children?
• Are you working and, if so, how much are you earning?
• How much income of any kind do you have now?
• How much do you have in the way of resources, such as money in the bank?
• Are you disabled?

     Depending on the answers to those questions and potentially more, the widow and members of her family may be entitled to these sorts of benefits and she and others in her family may easily be entitled to two or three of these at the same time:

• Aged widows benefits
• Disabled widows benefits
• Child benefits
• Disabled adult child benefits
• Mothers benefits
• SSI
• Retirement benefits
• Disability Insurance Benefits

      If you think that there are online systems available now or in the near future able to seamlessly help a grieving woman whose only online device is a cell phone deal with all this online you just don’t understand people, much less grieving people and you must not have dealt with what passes for AI service now.

     The DOGE people aren’t used to working in an environment including multiple legacy systems. They’re never had to cope with computer illiterates. Those benighted souls weren’t the customers they were aiming at or cared about. They’ve never had to deal with anything like Social Security’s complexity. It will take them at least a couple of years to begin to learn it and I do mean “begin.” They really need to know it in depth and that can take a decade or more. They’re not going to be around the agency anywhere near that long.

Tracking DOGE

      DOGE Track is an online service tracking DOGE activities across the government, including Social Security. It tells you what has happened in great detail but gives no predictions for the future. It’s a great resource. There’s been so much going on that it’s been hard to keep track of it all. I’ll warn you that DOGE Track is a bit buggy. I can open it on my iPad but not my desktop. It’s labeled as a beta version, meaning they know it’s buggy and are working on it. 

Does It Even Matter Now?

     From SCOTUSblog:

BREAKING: The Supreme Court grants DOGE affiliates access to Social Security Administration records. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson would deny the request.

    The question now is whether the Trump Administration wants to give them that access. I hope not.

Got A Little Carried Away

      From a Washington Post article titled Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people:

… At the Social Security Administration’s call center in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, IT workers were told by managers in mid-April that they needed to request a transfer or face possible firing, said Barri Sue Bryant, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2809. Nearly all of the 40-plus workers in that office did so, sending their laptops and spare equipment to the agency’s Baltimore headquarters and awaiting a new assignment while the union attempted to explain to leadership how essential these employees were, Bryant said.

 “We are critically understaffed in all of our departments,” Bryant wrote in an email to leadership. “Having systems and employees down is not contributing to the goals of this agency.”
But management would soon find out on their own.


A specialized scanner that can quickly input forms and scan barcodes broke down and was unusable for a day. A customer service representative who was supposed to answer the 800 number couldn’t take calls for three days while her computer was in disrepair.
“It really sent everyone for a loop,” Bryant said.


After three days, the agency told the union the decision had been reversed. The employees got back their equipment and resumed their normal jobs in Wilkes-Barre.
 

Asked about the IT workers, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement did not address the reassignments but criticized “the fake news media, specifically the Washington Post” for “pushing a false narrative about Social Security. The truth is that President Trump is protecting and strengthening Social Security just like he promised.” …

Whither Musk's People At Social Security?

     I’m laying in supplies of popcorn. There is open acrimony between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Who could have predicted?

    Can we now get Musk's kiddie corps of DOGE computer "experts" out of Social Security? Like being escorted out by security today?  With a subsequent investigation to see whether they did anything illegal?

"Chaos Has Ensued"

     From the Washington Post:

...  The administration’s ongoing shake-ups of the workforce, from buyout offers to firings to sweeping reorganizations, are also undermining efficiency.

At the Social Security Administration, for example, Trump officials and DOGE pushed thousands of central-office workers to take lower-level positions answering phones in field offices, threatening to fire whoever did not make the jump, according to emails reviewed by The Post and interviews with a half dozen agency employees.

Chaos has ensued across field offices in the weeks since the reassignments took effect, staffers said. Claims processing has bogged down as regular field office staff — already overburdened because of widespread resignations and retirements — are pulled off their normal duties to train incoming administrators and analysts.

But the backlog means the trainings are being shortened and rushed through, employees said, so inexperienced, reassigned staffers start work unprepared. That leads to more mistakes, more requests for help and more backed-up claims — and more time wasted all around.

To sum it up, “you now have half the staff with very little knowledge of how to do the work,” one relocated staffer said. “And the other half of staff overwhelmed with work and unable to really train or mentor these new folks.”

Asked about the reassignments, Social Security provided an emailed statement from an unnamed official, whom it declined to identify. The statement said DOGE’s work at Social Security had charted a new, better course for the agency.

“The voluntary reassignment of approximately 2,000 employees to direct service positions has not caused disruptions at the agency,” the statement read. “As these employees complete their training and become fully proficient in their new positions, they will further accelerate the progress the agency is making.” ...

Bisignano Doesn't Like Leaks But They're Sure Happening

     ABC News has obtained an audio recording of the meeting that Frank Bisignano had with Social Security staff yesterday. They have posted excerpts. It sounds like it was a rambling performance. I'll offer a few quotes here but if you weren't part of that meeting you probably want to look at the whole ABC piece.

... "So, I get a phone call and it's about Social Security. And I'm really, I'm really not, I swear I'm not looking for a job," Bisignano said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by ABC News. "And I'm like, 'Well, what am I going to do?' So, I'm Googling Social Security. You know, one of my great skills, I'm one of the great Googlers on the East Coast."

"I'm like, 'What the heck's the commissioner of Social Security?'" said Bisignano, who now oversees one of the largest federal agencies that's responsible for distributing retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to more than 70 million Americans.

"Put that as the headline for the Post: 'Great Googler in Chief. Chief in Googler' or whatever," said Bisignano, who throughout the meeting repeatedly bemoaned media leaks from within the agency. ...

 "Are we having fun yet? Are we OK?" he asked those on the call. ...

Bisignano told the managers that they needed to believe that DOGE was "helping to make things better" even if "it may not feel that way." ...

"Did you guys know there was a protest against me? Who knows there was a protest against me?" he said. "I like that protest -- I want to prove them so wrong, man, this is going to be most fun I ever had." ...

     By the way, does anyone know whether Bisignano had any briefings from career people at Social Security between the time he was nominated and confirmed? I don't have any experience with these things. I would like to think that would be standard but Bisignano sounds like he came into the job cold.

LOL: “Bisignano Coming To Dislike DOGE.” AI Not Ready For Prime Time. Who Could Have Predicted?

       From the Washington Post:

The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending — a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months. …

Social Security is poorly positioned to handle the influx [of new retirement claims], according to several staffers, as well as records obtained by The Post. Thousands of employees have taken the Trump administration’s early resignation offer or its early retirement offer, depleting the workforce and leaving some offices wholly bereft of staff, emails show. A DOGE-led move to slash staffing levels spurred many senior administrators scared of getting fired to accept reassignment to lower-level field office positions, slowing claims processing further as those employees are trained, according to employees and records. …

Bisignano is coming to dislike DOGE and hopes to minimize the team’s influence, the officials said. Another official, however, said Bisignano wants to “partner” with DOGE. …

DOGE staffers came to Social Security vowing to end fraudulent claims filed by scammers and grifters, and convinced that much of that activity was perpetrated over the phone, The Post previously reported. Career staff attempted to explain that wasn’t true, but to no avail, according to three current and former employees familiar with the matter. DOGE proposed ending phone service for retirement and disability claims, then narrowed its proposal after backlash from older claims recipients, advocates and lawmakers — then abandoned the idea.
Staff on the IT side developed a solution they hoped would pacify DOGE: A three-day hold on phone calls to allow extra checking for fraud, the employees said. Everyone, from rank-and-file career staff up to Dudek, knew the phone fraud check was not needed, the employees said. But they did it anyway.
“People lacked the fortitude to tell DOGE there was no fraud because they were afraid to lose their jobs,” one former high-ranking official said, referring specifically to claims filed by telephone. “They knew there was no fraud.” …

When a Post reporter called the [agency]phone line Friday afternoon, it took eight attempts to get transferred to an agent. The AI bot asked the reporter several times to end the call and gave unrelated information about a cost-of-living adjustment, Medicare Part B’s premium and benefits available to people after the retirement age.

Pointless Delays Because Republicans Just KNOW There's Massive Fraud At Social Security

     From Nextgov/FCW:

After installing anti-fraud checks for benefit claims made over the phone early last month, the Social Security Administration is considering walking back the policy after finding only two cases that had a high probability of being fraudulent.

The anti-fraud tool set up last month after weeks of changes to the agency’s telephone policies has slowed retirement claim processing by 25% and led to a "degradation of public service,” according to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW that examined potentially cutting the anti-fraud tool for phone claims. 

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all. 

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said. 

The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.  ...

    Republicans know to a moral certainty that there is massive fraud at Social Security and they will stop at nothing to find it even though all their efforts keep producing nothing of consequence. Pointless delays to others are a small price to pay for one's ideological beliefs. Accepting the truth that fraud is relatively rare at Social Security and that there are well-tested systems in place to detect the fraud that does exist is unacceptable to them.

The Undead Problem

From CNN Politics: 

Spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the Social Security Administration is combing through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead. It has already added dates of death to millions of people’s records, focusing on those who are implausibly old. The problem: Some people who have recently been declared dead are actually alive, forcing them to go to Social Security offices to be “resurrected” and stop the financial havoc that such a mistake can have on their lives. …   

Some managers received an email to remind their staff that “death correction cases” should be addressed that same day and don’t need to have appointments, unlike most people who need help. The agency also sent an email about dates of death being posted to 3.5 million records, with guidance on whom to report erroneous death listings. … 

Also showing up at Social Security offices are immigrants who are correcting their records after having been declared dead by the Department of Homeland Security, several employees told CNN. DHS requested that Social Security enter more than 6,000 names of immigrants into its database used to track dead people in hopes that they’ll leave the US, CNN reported last month. ....

Gotta Eliminate That Waste, Fraud And Abuse

     From the Washington Post:

... The $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards has also caused chaos at several other agencies since February, when DOGE began enforcing it. A Feb. 26 executive order imposing a “freeze” on these cards, with exceptions for “critical services,” cast the measure as an effort to ensure that “employees are accountable to the American public.”

Within parts of the Social Security Administration, the spending limit has for months left staffers unable to pay for phone bills, foreign-language interpreters and basic office supplies, according to several employees and records reviewed by The Post. That’s because less than a dozen people are responsible for approving most new purchases made by 1,300 offices.

One employee in an Indiana field office said that basic office supplies are running low, and managers have instructed staffers to ration paper and to avoid printing unless necessary. Some staffers have begun buying their own pens, but toner cartridges, at $200, are too expensive, the employee said.

In an email, a Social Security spokesperson said that the agency “is committed to operating with the highest level of financial control and efficiency.”

“We have a process in place to review all spending and eliminate wasteful or duplicative expenditures,” the spokesperson added. “It is critical that we protect taxpayer dollars so that we can effectively serve all those who depend on us.” ...

Who Needs A Guy Like This?

     From the Washington Post:

Edwin Jackson’s government work was finding jobs for military veterans and then making sure those vets succeeded. Like this:

Representing the Social Security Administration at a job fair in Maryland, Jackson meets a paralegal and steers her toward a position at his agency. Then she asks, “Can you help my husband, who’s active-duty military?”

Sure, Jackson says. The woman brings over her husband, whose body language reads, “This is pointless.”

“I can’t work for Social Security,” the man says. “You can’t give me work in my field.”

“What’s your field?”

“I’m a sniper.”

Jackson replies immediately: “Okay, I got a job for you.”

“You didn’t hear me; I’m a sniper.”

Jackson tells the man about his own Army service during the Vietnam War, when Jackson met sniper school graduates and saw how effective they were at designing and planning missions in intricate detail.

“You’re a project manager,” he tells the sniper. “You know the mission and lay it out in every detail needed to succeed.”

Jackson got the man a project manager position at a federal agency. And the government got itself an efficient worker even as it repaid its debt to the sniper for risking his life.

“He was going to count himself out,” Jackson told me. “Sometimes vets need an extra layer of help. You have to help them look at life through a different lens. We owe them that.” ...

 

It's About A Different Agency But You May Still Find It Interesting

     From Fast Company:

Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.

The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ...

“The reason I [Lavingia] did it is, I think, the impact I can have,” he explains. Lavingia says that in the private sector, technical employees can have between six and seven figures of financial impact over their lifetime. If they’re a successful startup founder like he is, maybe that number is larger. “But in the government, I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded.” ...

Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.

“In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.”

Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might.

 “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...

DOGE Requests SCOTUS Intervention

      From The Hill:

The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to let the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access millions of Americans’ personal data stored by the Social Security Administration (SSA) while it appeals an order that iced the advisory group out. 

The emergency application asks the justices to lift a Maryland federal judge’s injunction blocking DOGE from poking around the SSA’s systems that contain personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, bank data, and earnings history.  …

Next Stop SCOTUS?

      The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rules that DOGE may not have access to Social Security databases.

The Odd Couple

      From a piece in Business Insider on Leland Dudek and Frank Bisignano:

… Bisignano's confirmation is awaiting a full Senate vote, which is expected after the chamber votes on nominees for multiple diplomatic positions.  …

Some who spoke with BI expressed surprise that he would join the Trump administration. An archived biography from First Data, where he served as chair and CEO, said he's "a strong supporter of diversity" and helped create affinity groups for women and LGBTQ+ employees at the company. He's donated to candidates on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, and Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, records show. In May 2019, Bisignano gave $125,000 to the Trump Victory PAC and another $83,900 to the Republican National Committee. …

A person who has spoken with Dudek said they believed some of his bluster might be a smoke screen. They said Dudek, like previous commissioners, said he feared that the system was on the brink of collapse and worried about people not receiving their benefits — a similar sentiment to what Dudek expressed in a recording obtained by ProPublica. They feel that he thinks he's doing damage control and running interference between DOGE and everyone else.

"It felt like a bunch of 6-year-olds with too much sugar had been put in charge of the agency and were just kind of running all over the place, randomly disconnecting and reconnecting things in different ways," the former SSA manager said.

Some of the decisions at Fiserv that played out on Bisignano's watch appear to have rankled some of his employees. A former Fiserv client project manager said that return-to-office policies rolled out late last year under Bisignano contributed to his decision to leave. The former manager described the culture as "a bit of a sweatshop." …

Bisignano "loves his reputation for fixing things," said one person who worked closely with him, "not for burning things down." …

     I’m pretty sure that if he knew now what’s he’s going to learn in the next few months that Bisignano would not want to be Commissioner of Social Security. The impressive knowledge and skill which he has demonstrated in his previous career will be completely inadequate to the task because he’s faced with a truly impossible task. 

Less Is More?

      From the Washington Post:

Democrats, after weeks of struggling to find a message that resonates with ordinary Americans while President Donald Trump dominates the news, are beginning to settle on one: the allegation that Trump and his allies are crippling Social Security. …

“For much of the country, Washington might as well be Mars for all the connection it has to them,” Sen. Ron Wyden (Oregon), the top Democrat on the committee that oversees Social Security, said in an interview. “But Social Security is something where there is connective tissue between the government and the people.” …

Michael Astrue, who led the Social Security Administration under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and says he voted for Trump — sharply criticized cuts to the agency by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency.
“I think you have a group of very immature people coming out of Silicon Valley bro culture, and they have decided federal agencies are filled with bad people doing bad things, and if you go in and hack away, and you don’t have to know what you are doing, you can improve it because less is more,” Astrue said. …

The White House has shown uncharacteristic concern that the Democratic message on Social Security could resonate. The president has made clear to top aides that he does not like seeing the agency in the news so often and so negatively, one senior Social Security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about a sensitive issue. …

Lots Of Detail About What's Gone Down With DOGE at Social Security

     I'm not sure why but Social Security has posted in its Freedom of  Information Act (FOIA) Reading Room hundreds of pages of records it has filed with the U.S. District Court in the litigation over DOGE access to agency databases. If you want to delve into this in great detail, here you go.

What’s Going On With The Death Master File?

      SentiLink asks and to a large extent answers the question “What’s going on with SSA’s Death Master File?” The answer is that DOGE added millions of names of people who died a long time ago. These additions had no intended effect on benefit payments. Other systems already prevented benefit payments to those who would have been 120 years of age or older. The only effects were upon those who were included by mistake. We don’t know how many were added to the Death Master File by mistake but any number is too many since the whole exercise was pointless to begin with!

     An analysis by SentiLink suggests that those with the following surnames were most likely to have been added to the Death Master File even though they were alive:

• Rodriguez 
• Garcia 
• Perez 
• Perez Rodriguez 
• Harutunyan