Enrollment reveals the head of Social Security and Trump’s Social Security and Trump

After the arrival of a team from the Ministry of Government of Elon Musk, the social security is in a far more unprovable place than it is widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, an active commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dyek said in a closed -door meeting last week, according to a record derived from Propublica. He also said that “would be catastrophic to the people in our country” if Dog made changes to his agency, which were as soft as those in USAIDThe Ministry of Finance and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior officials and social security defenders who are present in person and in practice, offer an exceptional window in the thinking of a senior agency employee in the variable early days of the Second Trump Administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudec’s confession that Dodge is calling for social security shots and citing several of his statements. But the full record reveals that he went much further, referring not only to the actions taken by the agency by the people he repeatedly calls “The Doge Kids”, but also an extensive contribution he received from the White House himself. When a participant in the meeting asked why he would not call President Donald Trump more strongly Continuing false statements about widespread social security fraud As “BS”, Dudek replied: “So we posted, about the record of what the numbers there were on our website. Have you ever worked with someone who is manic-depressive? “

During the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the dangers facing the social security system, but he made it in a strange informal, discursive way. He left several participants confused about the final fate of the largest and most popular social program in the country, which serves 73 million Americans. “Will we break something?” Dudek asked at one point, citing what Dodge was doing with social security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said in a more calm tone: “They teach. Let people learn. They will make mistakes. “

Dudek embodies the dramatic waving of life as a civil servant under Dodge. For 25 years, he was the best impersonal bureaucrat: a middle -level analyst, which bounced between federal agencies, eventually landed in the Social Security Administration and focused on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly became the eyes of society when he was released on a secret sharing of information with Dodge. He seems to be able to lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration of the post, acting commissioner. At that time, he seemed unreservedly engaged in Doge’s agenda, he wrote – then he wiped out – a harmless LinkedIn Post, in which he expressed pride in the fact that “bullied agencies, they shared the executive contact information and bypass the command chain to connect with the people I get.”

Now, just weeks after his term, he occupied a far more ambitious posture to not only Doge but also Trump. Several times during the meeting last week, according to the record, Dudek has made the choice he has made in recent weeks as the President’s agenda. These elections include planned abbreviations of at least 7,000 social security staff; buying and early retirement offered to all staff of 57,000, including those working in Field offices and centers for Teleservice, helping the elderly and people with disabilities are oriented in the program; cut Disability SERVICES; termination of a team that works to improve the user experience of SSA.gov website and the application process; reducing the agency’s print across the country from 10 regional offices to four; termination of 64 leasing contracts, including those for some field offices and auditory offices; Proposals for assigning social security customers; And more.

“I work for the president. I have to do what the president tells me to do, “Dyek said, according to the record. “I had to make a difficult choice, a choice I disagree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He did not indicate specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At one time, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone”, but that “many of the structural changes you saw me make at the plant, I had long conversations with the White House and the Doge team. … And that doesn’t mean I don’t have even more difficult choices. The president has an agenda. I am politically appointed. I have to follow this agenda. “

Dudek also more than once rejected Trump’s claims about social security fraud that the president has intensified only hours after Dudek’s meeting in Speech In which he assumed that millions were probably dead over 100 years of age receive social security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and elderly people in one of the social security databases that Doge’s team is watching, Dyek said, but these people are not “in pay status” they don’t really be paid benefits. “These are records we never worry with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his MPs, who also spoke periodically at the meeting, seemed hesitant to oppose Trump’s mistakes. The speaker cut to say that they are proud of recent a press release in which in a light language they would contradict obliquely some of the false statements. The other employee said that Doge’s story of dead people who receive benefits “received before us”, but “this is a victory that you no longer see (misinformation) because they are trained.”

Dudec spokesman 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 staff feel confused by Dudek, his role against Dog, and what all means to the future of the Social Security Administration, according to Propublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staff. Many said that since the latest cuts in the agency were partially carried out, the public does not seem to understand the totality of what is happening with the program that has its 90th anniversary this year.

The dismissals-the coming ghost of potentially thousands of more employees who take the buying up to the deadline on Friday-they landed even less attention to the complex work with the work of the elderly and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, As Propublica reportedS

Meanwhile, Dodge, which Musk has portrayed as a team of technological efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the effectiveness of providing social security services in many ways, many employees said. According to Doge, several social security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now five employees have told Propublica that their technological systems seem to collapse almost every day, leading to more delays in beneficiary service. That was already a problem, they said, but it became “much bigger” and “not the norm”, two employees said.

And under A policy that Dog has applied to many agenciesThe first -line social security staff are limited by the use of their governmental purchase cards for each amount over $ 1. This has become an important problem in some field offices, especially when workers have to receive or make copies of vital records or original birth certificates and the like-which are necessary to process some claims for social security, said a guide level.

“The elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in an email from March 1 to the agency’s staff.

At the meeting last week, Dudek was asked for many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. As for the closure and consolidation of regional services, as well as the cuts of the part of the agency, which helps evaluate the demands of disability, which is already highly abandoned, he said: “This is certainly done at the administration level. This would not be my first preference. I think we need to see what will happen in terms of falling out. “

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president.” Dog is part of it. “

Dudek, who had to talk in just 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead talk for about an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a mother with disabilities, which depends on the social security to a 1989 book entitled “Bureaucracy”, which is mentioned by Trump. He continued to hesitate between lawyers’ fears about vulnerable social security recipients and adherence to some of what Dog was trying to do in his agency.

“In fact, I like to have the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were not familiar with the “nuances” of social security, he was trying to make them be more thoughtful. “They think about working differently.”

He confirmed that the members of the Doge team have wide access to the social security number of Americans and other personal data, but he claims that if they do something illegal with this information, he will investigate them and potentially pursue them. He said he wanted to accumulate resources for field offices and customer service, even when first -line workers received offers for buying and other employees.

All the time, Dudek emphasized that he wanted structural feedback and an open conversation because she takes care of the social security administration and the people he serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I am in a role I did not expect to participate in,” he said. “I am an IT person and a deceit person.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long -term choice for the management of the Social Security Administration. Sometimes Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the record. “I won’t have a job after that. I understand it. “