It started on Jan. 31, when someone named Mike Russo showed up at the Social Security Administration offices outside Baltimore and started introducing himself as a representative of DOGE, the federal budget-cutting service headed by Elon Musk.
Over subsequent days, he urged senior Social Security Administration officials to take the deferred resignation offer that had been sent out by DOGE under the heading “Fork in the Road.” The so-called Department of Government Efficiency set up its own internal team at the agency to ferret out information from its files. Social Security officials offered to brief the DOGE team about how the agency operates to ensure that payments are made accurately; they didn’t seem interested.
These details and others are drawn from an extraordinary declaration made in Maryland federal court by Tiffany Flick, who rose during her 30 years with the agency to become acting chief of staff to acting Commissioner Michelle King. Flick retired shortly after King was replaced as acting commissioner by Leland Dudek, formerly a midlevel agency employee, on Feb. 16.
Flick’s declaration includes an explicit warning that DOGE’s rampage through the Social Security Administration “could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.”
Make no mistake: This would be catastrophic to millions of Americans and a politically toxic development.
The undermining of Social Security by the Trump administration has already begun. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”; that demonstrated that he knows nothing about Social Security and nothing about Ponzi schemes.
President Donald Trump has stated that he’s “not touching” Social Security, but in his March 4 address to Congress he claimed that Musk had uncovered vast fraud at the agency, though he didn’t back up that claim.
Trump officials have taken steps to cut Social Security employees by more than 10 percent, which would undermine the agency’s already overstretched ability to provide customer service to claimants and beneficiaries.
Social Security has made payments earned by American workers, their survivors and dependents for 85 years, without a break. That record is fundamental to the program’s overwhelming popularity, the confidence it enjoys among its roughly 70 million current beneficiaries and its stature as the greatest safety net program in American history.
Flick’s declaration was filed as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and other plaintiffs seeking to block DOGE’s access to the Social Security Administration and its data. Master files that DOGE demanded and may have received access to include “information about anyone with a Social Security number, including names, names of spouses and dependents, work history, financial and banking information, immigration or citizenship status, and marital status,” Flick states.
Over the next week or two, King’s office was peppered with demands from DOGE that a software engineer, Akash Bobba, be given access to SSA data.
“That request was unprecedented,” Flick says, not only in its nature but its haste. Ultimately, Bobba was given “read-only” access to limited SSA data. Flick soon determined that Bobba was not working in a secure location, as was required under agency rules, but off-site at the Office of Personnel Management, a separate executive branch agency.
She says it appeared that other, non-SSA people were working with him and may have had access to the protected personal information. Of greater concern, although Bobba had “read-only” access to the data, meaning that he couldn’t change it, he had the ability to “copy and paste, export, and screenshot that data.”
In any case, Russo demanded that Bobba have access to “everything, including source code,” Flick declares. “Generally, we would not provide full access (to) all data systems even to our most skilled and highly trained experts.” The request to give Bobba unfettered access to the data “without justifying the ‘need to know’ this information was contrary to SSA’s long-standing privacy protection policies and regulations,” but no one would explain why its access was needed.
Dudek was placed on administrative leave on Feb. 14 and an investigation was opened into whether he had inappropriate contact with DOGE.
Two days later, Trump named Dudek acting commissioner.
Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
