The acting head of the Social Security Administration stepped down from the agency this past weekend, following an effort by the Trump administration’s DOGE project to access sensitive government records.
The White House said Acting Commissioner Michelle King, who has worked at Social Security for more than 30 years, has been replaced by Leland Dudek, another agency employee. Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to run the agency, is awaiting Senate confirmation.
Although details about exactly what happened at the Social Security Administration are still unclear, sources told multiple news agencies that DOGE officials wanted to gain access to Social Security internal systems that contain personal information about millions of Americans, and King objected. It is not known if DOGE has now been granted access to the data.
Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a liberal-leaning think tank that advocates for the retirement program, said the data DOGE wants to see is highly detailed and sensitive. “SSA has data on everyone who has a Social Security number, which is virtually all Americans, everyone who has Medicare, and every low-income American who has applied for Social Security’s means-tested companion program, Supplemental Security Income,” she said in a statement. “It has our bank information, our earnings records, the names and ages of our children, and much more.”
Altman warned that in the wrong hands, the data could be used to steal from beneficiaries, or even exact political revenge. “Older people are disproportionately susceptible to scams. The data at SSA leaking would make the numbers of scams skyrocket,” she said. “And, if there is an intent to punish perceived enemies, someone could erase your earnings record, making it impossible to collect the Social Security and Medicare benefits you have earned.”
Musk raises fears of fraud: The moves come amid claims by the Trump administration and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who appears to be leading the DOGE effort, that they are discovering enormous fraud in the Social Security system. On Sunday, Musk published data from “the Social Security database” suggesting that it contains millions of people over the age of 100, and implied that they are fraudulently receiving benefits.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he said on X, the social media platform he owns. He added that “there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
The White House echoed these claims and defended Musk’s work. “President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News. “They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.”
The data says something else: People who have studied and worked within the Social Security system for years say that the data Musk has highlighted represent well-known issues at the agency – and they are relatively minor problems that are not related to significant fraud. There are indeed Social Security records that show extreme age, but virtually no individuals associated with those records receive payments.
“There are maybe hundreds of deceased people receiving fraudulent benefits, not tens of millions,” Marc Goldwein of the fiscally conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said on social media in response to Musk’s claims. “There are about 70 million people TOTAL receiving Social Security — does anyone really think one third+ of them are dead???”
James Surowiecki, who covered the business world for New Yorker magazine, dug into the issue and concluded that Musk and DOGE were playing with data they didn’t understand – a conclusion others have reached as well. “This is absurd, corrosive nonsense,” Surowiecki wrote on X. “There are not tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security checks, and the only reason Leavitt is out here making these hysterical claims is because Elon Musk misunderstood a table of numbers.”
NBC’s Sahil Kapur highlighted a 2024 inspector’s general report that concluded that the error rate in Social Security payments is actually quite low. The IG found that from 2015 to 2022, the Social Security Administration paid out nearly $8.6 trillion in benefits, including roughly $71 billion in improper payments – an error rate of 0.84%.