Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.
Read more
At least 10 people working with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are embedded within the Social Security Administration to bolster claims from Donald Trump and the world’s wealthiest man that millions of dead people are receiving benefits, according to court documents.
Seven DOGE employees “have been granted access” to Americans’ Social Security data or “personally identifiable information,” government lawyers said.
Their level of access “provides no avenues” to change beneficiary data or payments, but gives them the ability to “review records needed to detect fraud,” lawyers wrote in court filings March 12.
open image in gallery
The results of background checks for two of the 10 DOGE employees are still pending, they said.
Musk has baselessly labeled the nation’s retirement and disability agency a “Ponzi scheme” and claimed that as much as $700 billion in annual payments were fraudulent, raising concerns among DOGE opponents that he is laying the groundwork for dramatic cuts to the nation’s largest and most popular program.
“I don’t want the system to collapse,” Social Security Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica.
Allowing “the DOGE kids” to make sweeping changes like those at the U.S Agency for International Development and elsewhere across the federal government “would be catastrophic for the people in our country,” he said.
The Independent has requested comment from the agency.
The U.S. DOGE Service team at Social Security includes four “special government employees” and six people detailed to the agency from other offices. Officials at the agency declined to name the employees “to protect the privacy of these individuals, and to avoid exposing them to threats and harassment,” according to a sworn statement from deputy commissioner Florence Felix-Lawson.
A political appointee, a software engineer and “experts” are reviewing Social Security’s “death master file” to find payments to dead Americans, Felix-Lawson wrote.
DOGE staff have attended in-person meetings or meetings through Microsoft Teams about ethics and privacy laws and information security, according to government lawyers.
“The overall goal” of the DOGE team inside Social Security “is to detect fraud, waste and abuse,” according to a sworn statement from the agency’s chief technology officer Michael Russo. “This level of access ensures these employees can review records needed to detect fraud but does not allow them the ability to make any changes to beneficiary data or payment files.”
One of those DOGE staffers is reportedly Marko Elez, who resigned from the administration last month after The Wall Street Journal uncovered a history of now-deleted racist statements on X, including support for “eugenic immigration policy” and calls to “normalize Indian hate.”
Elez, an engineer who previously worked Musk’s SpaceX and X, recently had an office at the Treasury Department and an email address with the agency, where he was “mistakenly” given “read/write” permissions to write over payment systems that disburse trillions of dollars, according to court documents.
open image in gallery
He then moved to Social Security, after Vice President JD Vance encouraged Musk to “bring back” Elez. Trump, when asked about Vance’s support, said he didn’t know about “that particular thing” but agreed with the vice president.
“If the vice president said that — did you say that? I’m with the vice president,” Trump told reporters last month. Moments later, Musk wrote: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
The latest filings follow a lawsuit from federal workers’ unions calling on a judge to block what they have called DOGE’s “unprecedented data grab.”
Trump and administration officials have repeatedly suggested looming cuts to Social Security as well as federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid in an attempt to justify significant cuts to federal spending.
The president and Musk have amplified baseless claims that tens of millions of dead Americans are collecting Social Security checks, which, according to Trump, “if you take all of those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent, or, incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security,” he told supporters in Miami last month.
Any meaningful reduction of government spending to cut the budget by trillions of dollars would require some combination of severe cuts to expensive but critical government programs like Social Security — as well as the Department of Defense — and tax increases.
“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording obtained by ProPublica. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it … The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”
open image in gallery
DOGE staffers now have access to a massive database that contains a master list of Social Security holders and applications, though the list does not include all death dates, a point which Trump and Musk have used as the basis of their claims to argue millions of dead people are still receiving checks.
“Money is being paid to many of them,” Trump said in his remarks to Congress last week.
There was roughly $72 billion in improper Social Security payments over a seven-year period from 2015 through 2022, though not all of that was fraud, according to an inspector general’s report. That figure represents less than 1 per cent of all benefits paid, and all but $23 billion was recovered by the government.
The agency has also abandoned plans to stop millions of people filing retirement and disability claims by phone, following reporting in The Washington Post. Blocking people from calling Social Security for their claims would have forced elderly Americans and people with disabilities to rely only on the internet and in-person appointments.
“Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling [Social Security’ to change direct deposit bank information,” the agency’s press office said in a statement following the newspaper’s reporting. “Current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.”
A post from DOGE’s X account called the report “inaccurate and misleading” and that DOGE is “protecting our seniors by ensuring bank accounts aren’t changed with little to no authentication.” DOGE said people could make payment changes online using two-factor authentication or in-person at a Social Security office.
“This is identical to the fraud protections at almost all major banks, where deposit changes are made either online or in person,” the post said. “All other [Social Security] phone services remain unchanged.”
