The head of the Social Security Administration has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn after he threatened to shut down the agency.
Interim SSA Commissioner Lee Dudek had threatened to shutter the agency over a judge’s ruling that barred Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing their data.
He had said that the order may require him to cut off access to all the agency’s employees to the information on Thursday.
On Friday, he reversed course after the White House directly intervened and the judge in the class gave him further clarification on the ruling.
Dudek said: ‘Today, the Court issued clarifying guidance about the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) related to DOGE employees and DOGE activities at the Social Security Administration (SSA).
‘Therefore, I am not shutting down the agency. President Trump supports keeping Social Security offices open and getting the right check to the right person at the right time. SSA employees and their work will continue under the TRO.’
He told The Washington Post that the White House had called him to ‘remind me that I was out of line’ on Friday.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander with the District of Maryland, who issued the order, also said that Dudek’s assertions ‘were inaccurate’.
She said in the order on Friday: ‘Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the Order.’
Hollander had issued a two-week temporary restraining order that blocked ‘DOGE team members and DOGE affiliates’ from accessing any ‘personally identifiable information’.
She added that DOGE had ‘essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.’
The judge added that DOGE ‘never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems’.
If Dudek had moved ahead with effectively closing the agency, millions of Americans would have had their benefit payments halted.
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement: ‘For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink.
‘Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.’
Musk has said that Social Security databases had millions of impossibly aged Americans still on file.
His DOGE team say they discovered millions of people above the age of 120, and even some over 200.
Musk jokingly called the efforts to delete these records a clearing of the ‘dead people database.’
The DOGE X account posted this week that the team has over the last two weeks marked as deceased 3.2 million people who were listed over the age of 120.
There are still millions, however, listed as living in that age bracket that the team is working to delete.
The 150-159 age range within the database on March 8 had 1,357,967 people marked as living.
By March 17, the count in that category decreased by 186,415 to a total of 1,171,552.
In that two week time span in March, DOGE was able to mark 3,261,057 people as dead who were previously in the Social Security system records as part of the ‘living count’ between the ages of 120 and 159.
‘More work still to be done,’ the cost-cutting group noted.
While the millions of clearly dead people are still in the system as eligible for benefits, that doesn’t necessarily mean that money is being distributed to those individuals.
Since President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, his newly created DOGE has cut billions in government contracts to private industry, thousands of federal jobs and even obliterated whole agencies – like USAID.
Musk has promised to make even more cuts and to reduce government waste, fraud and abuse.