SSA did not respond to requests about Wired, a Doge operator working inside the agency.
At a meeting Tuesday, U.S. Juniper Service Administrator Amy Gleason told staff that Musk affiliate engineers and some traditional USDS workers will head to SSA to improve “proof of identity.” The US Doge Service is a permanent rename of US digital services. Proof of identity is the process used by SSA to determine that the user is what they say to get benefits. The process includes registering an identity application, such as a government’s own login or a third-party service, such as ID.Me.
Dudek, acting commissioner of SSA, told staff at a meeting last week that the “Taoist people” are effectively responsible for the day-to-day operations of the agency and “will make mistakes.” He also made it clear that he had direct contact with the White House.
“I work for the president,” Dudek said, according to a longer recording of the conference obtained by ProPublica. “I need to do what the president told me to do. I have to make some tough choices, choices I disagree with, but the president wants it, and I did.”
In February, Dudek outlined plans to fire 7,000 employees to the SSA and closed more than half of the agency’s regional offices, while confirming that many of the top SSA employees were leaving. This week, the agency reportedly abandoned the idea of giving up telephone service entirely for clients after reporting the program in The Washington Post.
SSA has a highly complex system built on decades of technology and contains some of the most sensitive personal information available anywhere within the U.S. government. Experts say the threat posed by the Jogg engineers who make mistakes in these systems is huge.
Former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley warned last week that the SSA system could “crash” within a few months after the Doge invasion and that the recipients would see “breaking of benefits.” The warning was repeated by Flick, who wrote in her affidavit that has been lacking in understanding of the SSA system, “It is a significant loss for my agency, it is a more important thing for me, it is a more friendly loss for me to operate and operate without interruption.”
“The effective concern is that without the necessary control and strictness, personally identifiable information will be phased out or source code is messed up,” John McGing, a former SSA employee, has worked at the agency for nearly four decades, told Wired.
Additionally, according to a SSA employee’s DIRED, Doge imposed a $1 spending limit on federal credit cards, which led to some regional SSA offices that experienced issues with buying basic supplies, including paper and toner.
“We have started rationing paper,” the source said. People like to ask for four copies of the welfare verification letter. We kept giving them one and told them to make their own copy. ”
Due to the $1 expenditure limit, appointments offered by sign language interpreters appointed by SSA have also been interrupted. “We have to go back to that client and tell them we can’t provide an interpreter, even if everything on our website says we will provide that.”
SSA staff are also unable to order a death certificate now, which is used to verify that someone in the system is dead.
The source added that the office was unable to pay for the documents that were printed out every day, which raised concerns that a pile of paper with highly sensitive personal identification information would soon be piled up into paper.
Timothy Marchman contributed the report.
