We spent a lot of time last year calling out how dangerous it was that Elon Musk and his inexperienced 4chan-loving DOGE boys were gaining access to some of the most secure government systems. We also highlighted how it seemed likely that they were violating many laws in the process. One specific point of concern was DOGE’s desire to take control over Social Security data, something that many people warned would be abused for political reasons, in particular to make misleading or false claims about voting records.
For all the people who insisted that this was hyperbolic nonsense, and DOGE was just there to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” well… the DOJ last week quietly admitted that the DOGE boys almost certainly violated the Hatch Act and had given social security data to conspiracy theorists claiming Trump won the 2020 election (he did not).
Oh, and this only came out because the DOJ realized it had lied to a court (they claim it was because the Social Security Administration officials had given them bad info, but the net effect is the same) and had to correct the record.
Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.
Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.
Also in his March 12 declaration, Mr. Russo attested that, “[t]he overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs and to provide recommendations for action to the Acting Commissioner of SSA, the SSA Office of the Inspector General, and the Executive Office of the President.”….
However, SSA determined in its recent review that in March 2025,a political advocacy group contacted two members of SSA’s DOGE Team with a request to analyze state voter rollsthat the advocacy group had acquired.The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election resultsin certain States. In connection with these communications,one of the DOGE team members signed a “Voter Data Agreement,” in his capacity as an SSA employee, with the advocacy group. He sent the executed agreement to the advocacy group on March 24, 2025.
The filing goes on to admit that the declaration from a Social Security administration employee that there were safeguards in place against sharing data, and that everyone had received training in not sharing data, was apparently wrong.
However, SSA has learned that, beginning March 7, 2025, and continuing until March 17 (approximately one week before the TRO was entered), members of SSA’s DOGE Team were using links to share data through the third-party server “Cloudflare.” Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols. SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.
Cool cool. No big deal. DOGE boys just put incredibly private data on a third party server and no one knows what data was there or even if it’s still there.
Have I got some waste, fraud, and abuse for you to check out!
Separately, the filing reveals that Elon Musk’s right hand man, Steve Davis—the “fixer” Musk deploys across all his organizations—was copied on an email containing an encrypted file of SSA data. The filing is careful to note that DOGE itself “never had access to SSA systems of record,” but that’s a distinction without much difference when your guy is getting emailed password-protected files derived from those systems. Oh and: SSA still can’t open the file to figure out exactly what was in it.
However, SSA has determined that on March 3, 2025—three weeks prior to entry of the TRO—an SSA DOGE Team member copied Mr. Steve Davis, who was then a senior advisor to Defendant U.S. DOGE Temporary Organization, as well as a DOGE-affiliated employee at the Department of Labor (“DOL”), on an email to Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). The email attached an encrypted and password-protected file that SSA believes contained SSA data. Despite ongoing efforts by SSA’s Chief Information Office, SSA has been unable to access the file to determine exactly what it contained. From the explanation of the attached file in the email body and based on what SSA had approved to be released to DHS, SSA believes that the encrypted attachment contained PII derived from SSA systems of record, including names and addresses of approximately 1,000 people.
Looks like some more waste, fraud, and abuse right there.
So to recap: the team that stormed in to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” committed what looks an awful lot like actual fraud and abuse—sharing data on unauthorized servers, misleading courts, cutting deals with election conspiracy groups, and emailing around encrypted files of PII that the agency itself can’t even open anymore. All of it now documented in federal court filings—not that anyone will do anything about it. Accountability is for people who don’t have Elon Musk on speed dial.
This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement.
DHS had recently incorporated confidential data from the Social Security Administration on hundreds of millions of additional people into the tool, known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. The added information allowed the system to perform bulk searches using Social Security numbers for the first time.
The initial results, however, didn’t exactly back up President Donald Trump’s contention that noncitizen voting is widespread. Texas identified 2,724 “potential noncitizens” on its rolls, about 0.015% of the state’s 18 million registered voters. Louisiana found 390 among 2.8 million registered voters, a rate of about 0.014%.
Instead, experts say, the sweeping data-sharing agreement authorizing DHS to merge Social Security data into SAVE could threaten Americans’ privacy and lead to errors that disenfranchise legitimate voters.
The details of the agreement, which haven’t previously been reported, show it contains alarmingly few guardrails to ensure accuracy and scant specifics on how the data will be kept secure, election and privacy lawyers who have reviewed it say. Further, it explicitly does not bar DHS from deploying the SSA data for other purposes, including immigration enforcement.
Until this year, SAVE contained information only on immigrants who’d had contact with DHS, such as those with permanent resident status, and had been assigned immigrant identification numbers. State and local officials typically used the system to verify immigrants’ status when they applied for benefits such as SNAP or to check, one by one, whether individuals who were registering to vote were citizens.
Under the May 15 data-sharing agreement, which was posted recently on the Social Security Administration’s website, the system added information, including full Social Security numbers, on millions of Americans not in DHS databases. The combined dataset joins together this information with addresses, birth dates and criminal records, along with immigration histories.
The agreement allows the SSA’s data to be used for searches to check voters’ citizenship, along with “other authorized inquiries from Federal, State, territorial, tribal and local government agencies seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of individuals within their jurisdiction.”
In doing these searches, SAVE stores not only the voter data that election officials upload but also the outcome of their queries, according to the data-sharing agreement and other documents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the branch of DHS that oversees SAVE. The documents do not explain who can access this information or how it can be used.
Experts say adding Social Security data to SAVE could help election officials verify, en masse, if voters are U.S. citizens, but it shouldn’t be used to make final determinations that people aren’t citizens.
That’s because multiple audits and analyses have shown that SSA’s citizenship information is often outdated or incomplete, especially for people who became naturalized citizens. With the 2026 midterms about a year away, Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters of the United States, said she fears the expanded use of SAVE will lead to errors.
“The Trump administration is hunting people to try to purge people from the rolls who are lawfully registered, and they are doing it by looking at unreliable, outdated data,” Short said.
Several privacy lawyers said they believe it’s illegal for DHS to expand the use of SAVE without taking steps required in federal law, such as issuing a system of records notice to inform the public how the additional data will be collected, stored and used. Last month, advocacy groups sued the federal government, alleging that its expansion of SAVE and other data consolidation efforts violate the Privacy Act, a federal law that prohibits public agencies from misusing private information.
Officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declined to answer questions from ProPublica.
In a filing responding to the advocacy groups’ lawsuit, federal officials said that another statute, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, explicitly allows information sharing to verify citizenship status and that agencies would exercise caution in determining whether voters are noncitizens.
“There is zero basis to assume that State officials have any interest in haphazardly and unlawfully removing large numbers of U.S. citizens from their voter rolls, and no credible evidence that any such thing has happened or is going to happen any time soon” the filing says.
Still, Leland Dudek, acting SSA commissioner until early May, told ProPublica he doesn’t trust that DHS will accurately flag noncitizens as officials try to cross-match data and files from multiple systems.
“They are probably going to make some massive mistakes,” he said.
This summer, the Justice Department started demanding access to state voter registration lists, saying this was necessary to ensure compliance with federal voter roll maintenance laws. The agency has filed lawsuits against a number of states that have refused to comply.
Some of the states that have refused to provide voters’ private information directly to the Justice Department have entered into agreements with DHS under which they upload that same information into the SAVE system.
According to a document obtained by the ACLU, which sued the administration for SAVE-related records, a growing number of states are signing agreements with DHS to use SAVE to vet voter rolls. Ten states had signed such agreements coming into 2025; as of July, another 10 had signed on, the document shows.
As counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit voting rights group, Naomi Gilens specializes in issues related to privacy and technology. Gilens said it’s important for Americans to consider if they want the government — including future administrations, not just this one — to have so much consolidated information on them.
“That is a very invasive picture that starts to be painted, in one place, for every individual who lives here’s private lives,” she said.
As of last month, Homeland Security officials had run more than 33 million voters through SAVE, USCIS told NPR. So far, the agency has declined to say publicly what the outcome of these queries have been.
But the initial results are tucked into another document obtained by the ACLU.
As of late August, about 96.3% of the voters checked in the SAVE system were identified by the system as U.S. citizens. For an additional 3.1% of voters, the system either couldn’t find them or needed more information to determine their citizenship status. About 0.5% of voters checked had died, the system found. And 0.04% showed up as noncitizens.
According to copies of 12 state agreements with DHS obtained by the ACLU and reviewed by ProPublica, election officials are required to take additional steps to verify SAVE results for voters the system identifies as other than U.S. Citizens. Then, if SAVE still can’t verify citizenship, the election officials “must contact the registrant or registered voter to obtain proof of citizenship.”
Dudek and Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who now works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, worry even those steps won’t be enough to prevent mismatches from happening.
People’s names can be misspelled or listed differently in the various datasets. Many states collect partial, not full, Social Security numbers from voters and matches using partial numbers will be even less accurate, since many people share the same names, Dudek and Romig said.
“If there’s Jane Smith that is a citizen, and a Jane Smith that isn’t, you don’t want to disenfranchise the citizen Jane Smith by accident,” Romig said.
Federal officials aren’t done adding data to SAVE. Next up, according to a recent USCIS presentation to election officials shared with ProPublica: passport information from the State Department. (The State Department referred ProPublica’s request for comment to DHS, which did not respond.)
This isn’t normal. Federal judges don’t usually air their grievances about the Supreme Court in open court. The fact that an entire appeals court panel—including respected conservative judges—turned their oral argument into what Politico called “a remarkable, 80-minute venting session” tells you everything about how broken the system has become.
The immediate catalyst was trying to figure out what to do with a case about DOGE’s access to Social Security data after the Supreme Court issued one of its trademark unexplained emergency orders. But the real issue was much bigger: how are lower courts supposed to function when the highest court in the land operates like it’s playing Calvinball?
“They’re leaving the circuit courts, the district courts out in limbo,” said Judge James Wynn… “We’re out here flailing. … I’m not criticizing the justices. They’re using a vehicle that’s there, but they are telling us nothing.They could easily just give us direction and we would follow it.”
Judge Wynn didn’t stop there:
“They cannot get amnesia in the future because they didn’t write an opinion on it. Write an opinion,” Wynn said. “We need to understand why you did it. We judges would just love to hear your reasoning as to why you rule that way. It makes our job easier. We will follow the law. We will follow the Supreme Court, but we’d like to know what it is we are following.”
I’ve been writing about the law for almost three decades. I’ve never seen anything like this. Ever. Not even in the same zip code as this. These are judges crying out for help under a completely lawless Supreme Court.
And, no, this wasn’t just liberal judges complaining. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III—a Reagan appointee and one of the most respected conservative jurists in the country—was right there with them:
“The Supreme Court’s action must mean something,” said Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee. “It doesn’t do these things just for the kicks of it.”
Even Wilkinson can’t figure out what the hell the Supreme Court is doing. When you’ve lost Harvie Wilkinson—a judge so conservative and institutionally minded that he’s basically judicial royalty—you’ve completely broken the system.
The specific case that triggered this judicial revolt involves the Supreme Court’s typical shadow docket bullshit. In June, the Court overruled the Fourth Circuit’s decision and lifted an injunction against DOGE’s use of Social Security data. But they did so in the most bizarre and troubling way. After sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit for more review, it said that even if the Fourth Circuit rules that DOGE is breaking the law, the stay will remain in place.
By an apparent 6-3 vote, the justices went further, saying that no matter what the appeals court decided, the injunction would remain on hold until the case returned to the Supreme Court. Yet, the high court’s majority offered no substantive rationale for the lower court to parse.
So the Supreme Court basically said: “We’re overturning you, and also whatever you decide doesn’t matter anyway, but we’re not going to tell you why.” This left the entire Fourth Circuit panel wondering what the fuck they’re even supposed to do.
That left many of the 15 4th Circuit judges on hand for Thursday’s unusual en banc arguments puzzling at their role. One even suggested the appeals court should simply issue a one-line opinion saying the injunction is lifted and kick the case back to the Supreme Court to resolve.
Some judges thought they should just give up entirely and punt the case back to SCOTUS since SCOTUS has already said whatever they decide here doesn’t actually matter. Others insisted they had a constitutional duty to actually do their jobs:
“It sounds like some of my colleagues think that there’s no work to be done, that we’re done because the Supreme Court has told us what the answer is,” said Judge Albert Diaz, an Obama appointee.
Judge Robert King said punting on the case would be a mistake.
“We each have a commission and we have a robe and we have an oath to abide by,” said King, a Clinton appointee.
This perfectly captures the impossible position the Supreme Court has created. Lower court judges literally don’t know if they’re supposed to do their jobs or just rubber-stamp whatever vibes they think they’re getting from the shadow docket.
The whole mess stems from a series of recent Supreme Court shadow docket rulings (without much explanation) basically telling lower courts they have to follow SCOTUS shadow docket rulings (also without much explanation) as binding precedent. But as we’ve written about extensively, these aren’t reasoned legal decisions—they’re often unexplained orders issued with minimal briefing, no oral arguments, and little to no explanation of any reasoning.
This has created a situation where experienced federal judges—people who’ve spent decades interpreting legal precedent (often longer than the Justices themselves)—literally can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants them to do.
What we’re witnessing is the breakdown of the federal judiciary as a functioning institution. When Reagan and Obama appointees are united in open revolt, and Harvie Wilkinson can’t figure out what the Supreme Court wants, the system has collapsed.
The three liberal Justices have been warning about this in dissent after dissent, while the conservative majority just keeps issuing more unexplained orders and then getting pissy when lower courts can’t read their minds. This isn’t jurisprudence. It’s government by judicial decree, where constitutional law operates on vibes and the only consistent principle is “give Trump whatever he wants.”
When federal judges with decades of experience are reduced to public pleading for basic guidance during oral arguments, we’ve crossed into judicial authoritarianism. The Supreme Court has effectively told the entire federal judiciary: “Follow our orders, but we won’t explain what they mean, and if you guess wrong, we’ll scold you for defying us.”
That’s not how precedent works. That’s not how courts work. That’s not the rule of law. It’s just nine people in robes demanding deference to their unexplained whims.
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.”
The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.
The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”
In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”
For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.
The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.
They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.
They did none of these things.
Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.
Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.
Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.
By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.
Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.
Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.
To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.
Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)
At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”
Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.
In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.
After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.
In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.
But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)
Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.
In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.
Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)
Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”
Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”
DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.
Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.
In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.
Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”
Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.
Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedlysaid that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)
Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”
Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.
Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.
Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.
Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.
Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)
Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.
“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.
Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”
Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.
During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)
Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”
But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)
This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.
But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.
“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”
“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)
One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.
But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”
Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.
Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.
In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.
DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.
When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.
Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)
Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.
Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.
As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.
“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”
“How dare you,” Miller said.
Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”
But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.
Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.
Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.
On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”
Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.
It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.
“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)
As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”
Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.
“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.
Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.
Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”
Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”
Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”
As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”
The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”
Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”
Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.
Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.
Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.
In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”
Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.
The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”
The injunction does several things, but most notably it keeps DOGE from accessing identifiable personal information held on Social Security Administration systems except if certain conditions are met. See, for example, this part which generally bars DOGE’s access:
[T]he United States Social Security Administration (“SSA”), Leland Dudek, and Michael Russo and/or his successor (collectively, “SSA Defendants”), and any and all of their agents and employees, and any person working in concert with them, directly or indirectly, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from granting access to any SSA system of record containing personally identifiable information (“PII”), as defined in paragraph 9 hereof, or PII obtained, derived, copied, or exposed from any SSA system of record, including, but not limited to, records known as the Enterprise Data Warehouse (“EDW”), Numident, Master Beneficiary Record (“MBR”), Supplemental Security Record (“SSR”), and Treasury Payment Files, to the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”); the United States DOGE Service; the United States DOGE Service Temporary Organization; members of the DOGE Team established at the Social Security Administration, as defined in ¶ 11(a); Elon Musk; Amy Gleason; and/or any DOGE Affiliate(s), as defined in ¶ 11(b)[.]
Then this part describes conditions that must be met before any exception can be made:
3. SSA may provide members of the DOGE Team with access to discrete, particularized, and non-anonymized data, in accordance with the Privacy Act, and in accordance with the conditions set forth herein: SSA must first comply with the provisions in ¶ 2 of this Order and, in addition, SSA must first obtain from the DOGE Team member, in writing, and subject to possible review by the Court, a detailed explanation as to the need for the record and why, for said particular and discrete record, an anonymized or redacted record is not suitable for the specified use. The general and conclusory explanation that the information is needed to search for fraud or waste is not sufficient to establish need.
While the Temporary Restraining Order was in effect, SSA had two occasions where systems access was inadvertently granted to systems containing PII. In one instance, controls were in place so the access permissions could not actually be used. In the other, the access was granted inadvertently and the agency confirmed that the systems were not actually accessed, and prompt action was taken to remove the access permissions.
But it is difficult to square this certification with news that DOGE has apparently altered the status of millions of people to make the living seem dead, or specifically move the 6000+ immigrants to the dead list. Furthermore, according to some reports, DOGE renamed the Death Master File to the “Ineligible Master File.”
It is of course theoretically possible that the status changes for the millions of people was done via a script, and DOGE never saw the individual records it changed. It is also possible that the deliberate placing of the 6000+ people was done at the direction of SSA leadership and not DOGE, to the extent that it is believable that such decisions could be taken independently of DOGE’s influence – we’ve seen this issue before, where the Trump Administration has tried to get his appointed toadies to “ratify” terrible things DOGE demanded to give them a veneer of legitimacy, even though they still are things they never could have lawfully done themselves under the APA or other operable laws.
But the injunction (and the TRO, which, although it might have varied slightly from the more recent injunction, does not seem to be significantly different in general substance) also restrained DOGE from altering any code, which, if they ran a script or converted a database name, these actions would seem to violate:
All DOGE Defendants, as well as all SSA DOGE Team members and DOGE Affiliates, are ENJOINED and RESTRAINED from accessing, altering, or disclosing any SSA computer or software code.
And as for whether they forced SSA staff to do these things themselves, it’s the forcing that is the issue. The court was very careful to make sure that SSA staff could still conduct business as normal – it’s partly why the injunction was deemed proper and staying of it not, because the agency was in no way harmed since it could still do its regular work – it was only the DOGE misadventures that were being delayed.
To avoid confusion or doubt, this Order expressly applies only to SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or otherwise involved in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the Order. Therefore, this Order has no bearing on the ordinary operations of SSA.
Only it turns out they don’t seem to have been delayed at all.
What the news is reporting happened here is very wrong, in multiple ways. Not only does it seemingly violate the injunction (and presumably also the TRO, which was likely in force when much of what happened happened – and although the TRO might differ in small detail from the later formal injunction, it seems to be largely the same in substance), but it is also wrong on its face to do what DOGE has apparently done and cause people to wrongfully, and without due process, be deprived benefits and more.
As I understand [it], the Fraud Detection Project appears to amount to an attempt to uncover fraud, without particular, specific grounds that suggest fraud. With the Privacy Act in mind, as addressed in ECF 49, it is unclear to me why there is any need to disclose PII before there is a basis to believe that fraud has occurred. Therefore, the Supplemental Declaration should also clarify the work of the Fraud Detection Project, to include whether there are known, identifiable instances of fraud for which particular PII is sought. And, if there are no such specific, identifiable instances of fraud, then Mr. Dudek should address the need for the disclosure of non-anonymized data before there is a factual basis to support a belief that fraud has occurred or is occurring.
Although this language does not specifically raise the issue of the Fourth Amendment, it echoes it. Per the Constitution people are to be secure in their private matters (“papers and effects”) unless there is probable cause, which would entitle the government to invade their privacy and conduct a search and seizure with sufficient particularity. And here the court appears to be saying, “Where is your probable cause that would entitle you to invade people’s privacy in the information on these systems? Where is the particularity?” The Fourth Amendment says that the government doesn’t get to rummage through people’s private records to look for a crime; it has to already have probable cause to believe there was one and then it can get a warrant allowing it to go find the proof. Whereas here DOGE was saying they had a “need” to conduct a warrantless search, and the court reminded them that no, they don’t.
But the concerns that the court stood up for in ordering its injunction is why all this Privacy Act litigation is so important. One way the Fourth Amendment stops being a barrier to the government getting access to people’s private affairs is if they consent to it. Here, the government has an awful lot of private data people have consented for it to have because it made sense to give that consent in that context. For instance, if people want social security benefits, it makes sense to consent for the Social Security Administration to have enough information about them to provide that benefit.
The point of the Privacy Act is to make that limited consent possible by providing the statutory barriers to make sure it is limited. People don’t consent that “the government” has access to their private information; they consent that the relevant agency has it for the limited purpose that they need it. The rest of the government doesn’t get to say, “Hey, we don’t need a warrant because look! We already have all the data we need!” The Privacy Act essentially says the government only “has” the data insofar as the public has consented for it to have it for the limited purpose it was needed and makes it illegal for any agency to share it with other parts of the government, even though technically it could.
Here, DOGE (and also the corrupt leadership of the agency) is trying to shatter those statutory barriers preventing that sharing, and for exactly the reason that we have them: to cause harm to the public. Which is what courts are noticing and why injunctions are being granted in other DOGE Privacy Act cases. Because, as we see with people wrongfully placed on the “dead” list, when the public’s private information is not shielded from unfettered government access, injustice is what follows.
The Federal Trade Commission is once again taking action against a data broker for illegally collecting and selling the sensitive data of Americans, including information on people’s trips to doctors offices, abortion clinics, and places of worship.
This time the FTC is taking aim at Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, which the FTC announcement and complaint says violated the FTC Act by illegally selling sensitive consumer location data without obtaining verifiable user consent for commercial and government uses.
“Surreptitious surveillance by data brokers undermines our civil liberties and puts servicemembers, union workers, religious minorities, and others at risk,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “This is the FTC’s fourth action taken this year challenging the sale of sensitive location data, and it’s past time for the industry to get serious about protecting Americans’ privacy.”
We’ve long noted how the data broker space is an unregulated mess, routinely over-collecting data, selling access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together (including foreign intelligence or criminals), and failing to generally secure it. Wired last month had a piece detailing how it was trivial to purchase U.S. troop and intelligence officer movement data as they visited sensitive U.S. locations in Germany.
An earlier scandal highlighted by Senator Ron Wyden involved the sale of abortion clinic visitor location data to right wing activists, who then targeted those vulnerable women with health care disinformation. More recently, a data broker was found to have leaked the social security numbers of 270 million Americans. This sector has been a hot mess.
This was all avoidable long ago. But U.S. officials repeatedly put greed ahead of public safety, consumer privacy, and even national intelligence for much of the last two decades. The targeted snoopvertising industry was simply too damn profitable to touch (it also helps the feds dodge warrants), resulting in scandal after scandal thanks to our refusal to pass a modern privacy law or regulate data brokers.
The CFPB also implemented new rules this week prohibiting the data broker collection and monetization of social security numbers. And while it’s great that some regulators are finally taking things seriously, why exactly we’re waiting until just months before Trump 2.0 dismantles federal governance, the CFPB, and likely the entirety of federal consumer protection is a question worth asking.
What is it with real life stories matching satirical online TV shows lately? We just had a story match one from The Office, and now we’ve got one (that’s much dumber) that is copied from a Futurama episode about how dating robots will lead to the downfall of civilization:
Recently, the Hill published a truly bizarre article that seems like it took that Futurama joke as real, claiming that “AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men” by someone named Liberty Vittert. The headline is terrible. The article is worse.
First of all, most of the article is just warmed over stale leftovers from previous moral panics about how porn was causing dudes to not want real girlfriends, or how video games were removing men’s interest in sex. None of that was ever true, and it’s not true now. I dare you to find anyone who says that they wouldn’t prefer a real human relationship to an AI girlfriend.
But Vittert, who apparently is a professor of data science, is sure it’s happening. There are four paragraphs that start out by saying that an AI girlfriend “seems so ridiculous,” followed by her explaining why it “might sound enticing,” because you can set your own preferences. But, um, that’s… not why people actually date. Or likely why they are interested in an AI companion.
It seems likely that the reason many are interested in AI companions is loneliness. But, there’s little evidence anyone is using it as a substitute for a human companion. It’s there for those who are lonely and need someone to talk to, and a virtual AI one is better than nothing.
Yet, Vittert (again, who apparently teaches data science) takes this to mean that men are going for AI girlfriends instead of real girlfriends, and therefore, they’re not making babies. And without babies, there will be no one to pay for Medicare or Social Security.
While the concept of an AI girlfriend may seem like a joke, it really isn’t that funny. It is enabling a generation of lonely men to stay lonely and childless, which will have devastating effects on the U.S. economy in less than a decade.
Really.
They are choosing AI girlfriends over real women, meaning they don’t have relationships with real women, don’t marry them and then don’t have and raise babies with them. America desperately needs people to have more babies, but all the signs are pointing toward fewer relationships, fewer marriages and fewer babies.
I know that there are some people (hi Elon!) who keep insisting we need more babies, but… there is basically nothing scientific that supports this argument. The population of the earth continues to grow. We are not at risk of running out of people.
And, if the argument is just that, say, the US needs more people, there’s an easy way to do that: lessen our ridiculous restrictions on immigration.
Either way, there is no way that “AI girlfriends” are leading people to have fewer babies. I guarantee you that sex with an actual human being is way, way, way better than sexting with an imaginary companion. No one is “remaining childless” because they think they’d prefer a bot on a phone to a real human being.
Also, for a “data scientist” you’d think that this argument would be supported with actual data. Except, what data is put in there is the kind of data you use to obfuscate a point, rather than strengthen one.
She points to Pew’s regular study of how many young people say they’re single, noting that way more young men say they are than young women:
Let’s look at the hard numbers. More than 60 percent of young men (ages 18-30) are single, compared to only 30 percent of women the same age. One in five men report not having a single close friend, a number that has quadrupled in the last 30 years. The amount of social engagement with friends dropped by 20 hours per month over the pandemic and is still decreasing.
So, I hate that I have to explain this to a true data science professor, but, um, if the women aren’t single, then there’s less of a problem on the baby front, because they’re the ones who make the babies. But really, the number discrepancy (you can see the actual data) seems like there’s a much more logical explanation that is not “AI girlfriends” and it is… that men and women view relationships differently. It seems that a much more reasonable explanation of why 63% of 18 to 29 year old men and only 34% of 18 to 29 year old women say they are single… is that some of the women in that age group consider themselves in a relationship with men who think they’re actually casually dating around.
And, yes, that could be considered kinda sad. But, it has nothing to do with AI girlfriends, and it’s hard to see how that has any impact on likelihood of babies, let alone the impact on social security and medicare, as the article suggests. I mean, basic logic suggests the final sentence below has fuck all to do with everything that precedes it:
Put another way, we don’t have enough people to work, and therefore we won’t be able to pay our bills, not just to other countries, but to ourselves. We spent more than $1.6 trillion in 2021 on Medicare and Medicaid, with the number of Americans on Medicare expected to increase by 50 percent by 2030, to more than 80 million people. But over the same period, we will have only 10 million more Americans joining the workforce.
And that is just health care. In 1940, there were 42 workers per beneficiary of Social Security. Today, there are only 2.8 workers per beneficiary, and that number is getting smaller. We are going broke, and the young men who will play a huge role in determining our nation’s future are going there with AI girlfriends in their pockets.
Again, if our concern is not enough people to work, and not enough people contributing to social safety nets, immigration is right there. AI has nothing to do with it. Also, if this is such a concern now, why are you sharing trends from decades ago when AI companions really only became a thing in the past year?
And, must we even get into how wrong this article is about how AI works?
By definition, the AI learns from your reactions and is capable of giving you exactly what you want to hear or see, every single time.
AI might learn from you, but, um, it is not capable of “giving you exactly what you want to hear or see, every single time.” Especially not as an alternative to an actual live human being.
Look, I get it, there are all sorts of moral panics we’re hearing about AI these days, but can we at least keep them in the realm of possibility, and not in the form of “Futurama, but real”?
As the baby boomers start to retire en masse, one of the fears is that the US will struggle to continue to fund Social Security. Though originally projected to become cash flow negative by 2016, it looks like Social Security will reach that mark this year, hastened by the early retirement taken by many boomers as a result of the global recession. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, proposes a potential solution to the impending crisis: immigration. The way Reich puts it, the nation’s workers all put into the system to support the retirees — but the increasing number of retirees is outpacing the growth of the American workforce:
Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. Within a couple of decades, there will be only two workers per retiree. There’s no way just two workers will be able or willing to pay enough payroll taxes to keep benefits flowing to every retiree.
So, to correct this demographic imbalance, Reich proposes that the US opens itself up for more immigration:
Get it? One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States.
Easier said than done, perhaps. Faced with a global recession and high unemployment levels, it will be easy to find critics who will vehemently argue that there are not enough jobs here for American workers. Reich refutes this with a simple claim that “once the American economy recovers, there will be.” He may be right, but he could have done a more convincing job. Reich misses an opportunity to explain that bringing a fresh wave of skilled, smart immigrants into this country actually creates more jobs. Jobs are a not a zero-sum game — studies have shown that an increase of H-1B visas resulted in an increase in jobs. And as we’ve pointed out before, there are also suggestions like the startup visa that attempts to attract immigrants who would create jobs.
Immigration policy will almost certainly need to be included as a part of any solution to the impending Social Security shortfall. Without addressing immigration at all, the options are much more limited — focusing mainly on cutbacks or higher taxes. An option that could help grow the economy should not be left off the table.
