Reporting Highlights

• Missed Opportunity: Some Social Security officials said they welcomed DOGE — the agency needs a technological overhaul — only to see DOGE ignore them and prioritize quick (often empty) wins.
• Internal Revolt: Leland Dudek, the agency’s then acting chief, helped DOGE at first, then tried to resist when he saw what it was doing, Dudek said in 15 hours of candid interviews.
• DOGE Lives On: Multiple former DOGErs have taken permanent roles at the Social Security Administration, and Senate-confirmed Commissioner Frank Bisignano has embraced its approach.

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 a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many 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 Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government 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, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security 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 Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-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 asked: “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. Quickly.

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, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 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 said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

(To access the full ProPublica article by Eli Hager, copy and paste the URL below)

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-doge-social-security-takeover-leland-dudek?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature&fbclid=IwY2xjawM0OjRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHgLMcF37qqmAomhcJFEoJNUIegsVqKz5XH0fGw7Hnex0CT0H6cmZ_OIKyiAK_aem_y_Kq8ZM7FRxx3mWSZW-jYw)