The government’s ministry of efficiency exceeds $ 1.6 billion of social security payments – files that include the name of a person, the date of birth and how much they earn – in an anti -fraud effort that has defenders concerned by the Trump administration could begin to deny payments to vulnerable older Americans.
The details on the effort were confirmed in a recent letter to the congress by acting the social security administrator Lee Dudek and by several sources familiar with the project.
In addition to combing sensitive data, DOGE employees also investigated the Social Security Administration telephone service, sources have told ABC News, that a large part of the beneficiaries used to file initial complaints. DOGE Information requests on the telephone service have been feared that it was planning to replace the telephone service with private call centers or to eliminate it as an option to deposit complaints, sources said.
“Any American receiving social security benefits will continue to receive them. The only DOGE mission is to identify waste, fraud and abuse,” the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Friday in a statement provided to ABC News on Friday.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk both referred to the anti-fraud project in recent public statements, saying that he has already found examples of creeping abuse.
“We also identify shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the social security program for our elders,” Trump said in his speech at Congress on Tuesday.
Trump has promised not to reduce the program unless evidence of fraud is found.
However, the details on the anti-fraud project have been troubled, in particular how Doge’s staff members, who are mainly musk allies without any experience of complex government law programs, would define what would be equivalent to fraud, which is generally the subject of an investigation by the agency’s general inspectors.
The SSA did not respond to requests for comments.
In this October 14, 2021, a file photo, a social security card is located alongside checks of the American Treasury, in Washington, DC
Images Kevin Dietsch / Getty, file
“DOGE has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding of what the data to which they access really mean and if it in fact represents fraud,” said Lynn Overmann, principal advisor to the US digital service during the Biden administration.
Overmann, the executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, said that she was worried about the accusations of unjustified fraud will eliminate a crucial financial rescue for the elderly, the disabled and the children who have lost a parent.
“The public deserves strong privacy protections, not the experiences of reckless data with their most sensitive data,” said Overmann.
According to the agency, around 69 million people receive a social security service, totaling approximately $ 1.6 billion of services expected this year, according to the agency.
Dudek, the acting administrator of Social Security, defended the effort in private communications as well as legal and necessary, several sources said in ABC News. He said measures are taken to protect privacy.
During a private meeting with external groups last Tuesday, Dudek described the employees of Doge as “the children Doge” and said that they “would make mistakes” but that “we must let them see what is happening at the SSA”, according to three people who attended the meeting.
Dudek said they had access to people’s names, birth dates and profits on profits, but not information on disabled people. He also noted that the staff members had obtained checks from the antecedents accelerated by the FBI and had been integrated as the agency employees.
“I saw what happened when Doge had access to the Treasury data,” said Dudek, according to the detailed notes of a person examined by ABC News. “This does not happen in SSA on my watch. It would be catastrophic.”
Doge’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system is linked to the courts, as external groups insisted that the staff had not been properly checked first and had no authorization.
Dudek’s decision to grant access to DOGE to his agency is now the subject of a A separate trial Tabled by unions and retirees.
The White House’s main advisor to the President and Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, left the American Capitol on March 5, 2025, in Washington.
Kent Nishimura / Reuters
In a letter of February 25, Dudek sent Senator Ron Wyden, D-ear., The Acting Commissioner of the SSA said that the six people giving access to the Master system of the Social Security Administration, called the Data Warehouse company, underwent background checks.
He said one of them was a “special government employee” while the others were “details” from other federal agencies now assigned to his agency. Dudek did not appoint the employees granted to access, citing security problems.
DOGE was created by Trump shortly after taking office as a means of reducing government waste, and he set up Musk in charge of delegating staff to agency.
Musk has put some of his best lieutenants of the agency, according to sources, including Ethan Shaotran, 22, who is listed internally as “information chief” at SSA and is a software engineer specializing in artificial intelligence. He founded Spark, an assistant IA planning startup which received a subsidy of $ 100,000 from Openai in 2024.
The other representatives of DOGE listed such as the main information officials at SSA are Gautier “Cole” Killian, 24, and Nikhil Rajpal, 30, said sources at ABC News.
Marko Elez, is also listed as working at the SSA, sources said. Elez temporarily resigned from DOGE this year following reports on the former publications of racist social media, but was reinstated by Musk after having received the support of Vice-President JD VANCE, among others. According to court documents, Elez was one of the persons granted to information sensitive to taxpayers in the Treasury Department at the beginning of this year.
It was not immediately clear if Shaotran, Killian, Rajpal and Elez were among those who have access to the SSA system.
Dudek said that as regards the SSA system, DOGE staff had granted “reading alone” access to the vast social security system.
“Access to these people does not allow download, copy, transfer or deletion of the agency data,” he wrote in the letter to Wyden.
Representative Kweisi MFUME holds a sign against DOGE alongside colleagues Democrats in the House during a press conference against the budget bill of the House Republican at the Capitole in Washington on February 25, 2025.
Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images
The concerns that Doge could confuse legitimate because fraudulent payments were obvious earlier this week when Trump declared in his speech at the Congress that there were millions of deaths that still collect social security checks.
But that is not correct.
According to a 2023 report By the Inspector General of the SSA, millions of people over 100 are included in a distinct “Master Death File”, but “almost none” still do not receive them. The agency said that repairing the file would cost between $ 5 million and $ 10 million.
