Social Security Chief’s ‘Turn It Off’ Comment Is Latest Insane Turn For Beleaguered Agency

WASHINGTON — The temporary director of the Social Security Administration suggested agency operations would be so impaired by a court banishing Elon Musk’s DOGE team from sensitive databases that he would just turn out the lights.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Social Security to revoke the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s access to various databases containing Americans’ personal information, and for DOGE employees or affiliates to delete any data they’ve taken and remove any software they’ve installed.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday evening, Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, said his own staff would count as DOGE affiliates and seemingly joked about shutting down the entire agency.

“As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” Dudek said. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”

On Friday, Dudek indicated he was actually talking to the Justice Department about shutting down Social Security ― and potentially halting benefits for 70 million people ― if the court didn’t clarify its order.

“Unless I get clarification, I’ll just start to shut it down. I don’t have much of a choice here,” Dudek told The Washington Post.

Later on Friday, Dudek stood down, saying the court had clarified its order.

“Therefore, I am not shutting down the agency,” Dudek said in a press release. “President Trump supports keeping Social Security offices open and getting the right check to the right person at the right time.”

How had U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander clarified her restraining order against DOGE at Social Security? By simply stating in a letter it was “inaccurate” for Dudek to claim everyone at Social Security counted as a DOGE affiliate. That’s all it took.

(In an apparent coincidence, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday talked about halting all Social Security payments as a way of rooting out fraud.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month,” Lutnick said on the “All-In” podcast. “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”)

Asked for clarification of Dudek’s “turn it off” remarks earlier on Friday, the Social Security Administration told HuffPost simply that it would comply with the court order.

Rich Couture, spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees subchapter that represents more than 40,000 Social Security workers, told HuffPost that as of early Friday afternoon, he hadn’t heard of anyone being shut out of IT systems.

Dudek’s remarks come as Social Security prepares to shed staff while also making major changes to agency operations, with plans to reduce phone service in favor of in-person visits to field offices across the country. Employees have told HuffPost it’s a difficult time to work for the agency, with increased calls from the public compounding anxiety about remaining employed.

“It’s almost as if we’ve turned into a call center with how busy we’ve gotten with calls,” one field office worker told HuffPost. “I mean it went from a point in time where we’d have maybe 100 calls a day, and then on a really big day, it would be about 150, and just on Monday, we had 350 calls.”

The worker said that even though the agency announced on Tuesday that more claimants would be told to do business at field offices starting March 31, in less than two weeks, the agency had not yet briefed staff on new procedures, which employees learned about from the press release. (A spokesperson for Social Security said training would start next week.)

The field office staff said Social Security employees take pride in their work and resent disparaging statements about government workers from Musk, President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

“We are still the ones out there trying our best to help people and take care of their claims, because we do understand that this is an important time of their life, and most people aren’t prepared for it, and we are there to help them,” the staffer said.

Dudek, formerly a mid-level anti-fraud staffer, became the acting commissioner of Social Security after going around his superiors to work with DOGE. He has since been a wrecking ball, consolidating offices, firing senior staff and even canceling contracts with the state of Maine in an apparent act of political retaliation against the state’s Democratic governor for standing up to Trump.

Dudek’s schemes represent the fulfillment of Musk and Trump’s anti-fraud agenda, with the pair falsely claiming Social Security makes bogus payments to millions of nonexistent beneficiaries.

“He’s untethered and Musk wants it to be shut down,” Martin O’Malley, who served as commissioner of Social Security under President Joe Biden, said of Dudek. O’Malley has previously warned that Dudek’s layoffs and other changes could cause the agency to miss benefit payments.

The group Democracy Forward and AFGE filed suit against DOGE earlier this month. A former Social Security official said in an affidavit as part of the suit that DOGE’s disregard for privacy protections “now threatens the security of the data SSA houses about millions of Americans” and that benefits could be at risk.

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a liberal group that opposes benefit cuts, called Dudek’s short tenure the darkest time in Social Security’s history, saying he’d been promoted ahead of more than 100 better-qualified SSA employees.

“He has sown chaos and destruction. Now, he is threatening to shut down Social Security completely,” Altman said. “Dudek is willing to deny over 70 million Americans the benefits that most of them rely on to survive, rather than stop DOGE from mucking around with our data.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated Howard Lutnick’s position.