Social Security Administration

A contractor at the Social Security Administration arranges an introduction for Leland Dudek to meet Steve Davis. (fuzz: Date is just given as “mid-December”)

Leland Dudek reaches out to Tiffany Flick, the Associate Director of Budget, Facilities and Security to inform her that Mike Russo and Scott Coulter would be onboarding for DOGE. He was a mid-level employee at the time who would not normally be coordinating inter-agency details like this.

Unidentified employee SSA-01 (Akash Bobba) starts working at the SSA with the title of Expert and an annual salary of $90,025.

Mike Russo officially joins the agency as its new CIO. He then immediately requests that Akash Bobba should be rapidly onboarded into the agency (but there are issues with Bobba’s background check)

After gaining access to the PAM DB system for payments, DOGE members at the Treasury department discover what appear to be payments flowing to recipients without Social Security numbers. Other recipients appear to be dead. These discrepancies lead to Musk accusing SSA of massive fraud on his Twitter feed, but later analysis by SSA staff reveal these were cases of DOGE not understanding how the data was structured. (fuzz: article just reports this as early Feb; but Musk tweets said he was informed on 2/7)

Elon Musk posts more tweets claiming to have discovered sources of “massive fraud” within the SSA. These appear to be a misunderstanding of how erroneous records that exist in the SSA database are already filtered out from receiving benefits. Instead, he assumed that all erroneous records had received benefits and thus this was the massive fraud.

Mike Russo summons his new ally Leland Dudek to his office and asks him to explain data discrepancies identified by Elon Musk. Leland convenes a team of dozens of SSA engineers who review the data from the Treasury department and document fallacies of DOGE’s reasoning in a memo. Mike Russo rejects the memo’s conclusions by declaring that DOGE would not trust career civil servants and demanding that Akash Bobba must do his own analysis.

Mike Russo and the DOGE chief of staff Steve Davis both demand that Akash Bobba be onboarded at Social Security Administration before midnight, bypassing the usual background security checks.

According to the testimony of a whistleblower, the nominatee for agency director, Frank Bisignano, orders through back channels that agency leadership must onboard Mark Steffensen as an attorney at the SSA. He reportedly had coerced senior SSA leadership to not hire anybody into roles without his explicit approval.

CIO Mike Russo convenes his own internal informational group in SSA where he has conversations with DOGE staff at other agencies about novel ideas for sharing sensitive SSA data. He does not inform Acting SSA Director, Michelle King.

Leland Dudek is placed on administrative leave and is placed under investigation that he committed inappropriate actions to assist DOGE’s activities at the agency.

Frustrated with the questions and concerns raised by Akash Bobba about technical issues with the sandbox NUMIDENT data, Mike Russo complains directly to the Chief CIO in the office of the OMB.

SSA IT staff express concern to Acting Commissioner Michelle King that Akash Bobba is accessing highly sensitive data provided by SSA remotely from an insecure location (the DOGE enclave within OPM). This is in violation of the terms of his signed access agreement.

The acting director of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, receives an email from the White House that she has been fired and Leland Dudek is now the Acting Commissioner.

Multiple unidentified DOGE staffers start working at SSA on the same day. SSA-02 (Scott Coulter) is detailed from NASA. SSA-07 (Marko Elez) is detailed from the DOL. SSA-10 (Ethan Shaotran) arrives from the GSA, and SSA-05 (Cole Killian) is detailed from DOGE itself.

SSA CIO Mike Russo emails Leland Dudek request access to SSA’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for several “members of [his] team.” This includes access to the NUMIDENT list of all social security records, Master Beneficiary Record (MBR) and Supplemental Security Record (SSR) master records, as well as copies of SSA payment files which SSA transmits to the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) for payment.

Several DOGE staffers working at the agency are identified by Social Security Works (a nonprofit advocacy group).

Unidentfied alias SSA-03 (Aram Moghaddassi) is detailed over from the Department of Labor

Social Security Administration onboards 3 more unidentified DOGE staffers – SSA-06 (Jon Koval), SSA-04 (Antonio Gracias), and SSA-09 (Payton Rehling) – as volunteers with the title of Expert.

One more unidentified DOGE staffer, SSA-08 (Nikhil Rajpal), is detailed to SSA from OPM.

Ethan Shaotran contacts Leland Dudek to inform him that DOGE had identified roughly 3 dozen federal contracts in Maine as “nonessential” and that “we should cancel them” as retribution for the Maine governor publicly countering abuse from the President over transgender athletes. Two of those contracts are for Social Security services in the State.

Via email, SSA-05 (Cole Killian) at the DOGE team at SSA requests and receives approval from Leland Dudek to run a program to identify unrealistically old people in the SSA database. Scott Coulter is cc’ed on the approval.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) starts an audit of how DOGE has handled data at several agencies.

In a meeting, Dudek stresses again that DOGE will make mistakes and also admits “I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions,” suggesting DOGE is in charge at the agency.

After political blowback causes SSA to reverse its decision to cancel some contracts for the state of Maine, Leland Dudek posts an offical apology claiming it was his decision to cancel the contracts. This is a deliberate misdirection from DOGE’s role in the action.

In a sworn declaration, Florence Felix-Lawson notes “the SSA DOGE Team currently consists of ten SSA employees: four SSA special government employees (Employees 1, 4, 6, and 9) and six detailees to SSA from other government agencies and offices (Employees 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10)”

Multiple SSA employees told ProPublica, their tech systems now seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries.

Wired reports that 10 DOGE staffers are currently visible in the Microsoft Teams directory of all employees at SSA

Leland Dudek grants approval for SSA-05 (Cole Killian) to run the proposed tool for modifying the death data records to eliminate implausibly old people. DOGE was convinced these data errors were a massive source of fraud, despite evidence to the contrary from SSA staff and concerns that correcting the data would be a waste of time.

The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) team at Social Security discovers that DOGE’s access to the EDW was not authorized through the standard process.

Leland Dudek approves access for “Employee 9” of the DOGE team at SSA to view some additional schemas in the PSSNAP database of Social Security Applications conducted over the phone.

Leland Dudek threatens to shut down the entire Social Security Administration instead of complying with the order to block access for DOGE. He reportedly reaches this conclusion based on the advice of two unnamed senior DOGE leaders.

In a ruling for AFL-CIO vs. SSA, Judge Hollander grants a temporary restraining order enjoining DOGE from having any access to SSA systems or installing any software as well as ordering them to delete any data in their possession.

Less than 24 hours after DOGE’s access was revoked by the temporary restraining order, senior members of the EDW team receive emails ordering them to restore access for two members of the DOGE team. Furthermore, they were ordered to grant them additional expanded privileges.

The Social Security Administration’s Office of Information Security (OIS) revokes access for DOGE members again, restoring enforcement of the temporary restraining order.

Mike Russo is abruptly removed from his CIO position by the Trump administration. This is rumored to be retribution for complying quickly with the judicial ruling to remove DOGE access.

During his confirmation hearing, Frank Bisignano, the nominee to run the agency, confirms that he had coordinated with Michael Russo but denied a whistleblower report that he had ordered the appointment of other DOGE staff there.

In a sworn declaration, Leland Dudek justifies access to PII in SSA records for SSA-01 (Akash Bobba), SSA-05 (Cole Killian), SSA-08 (Nikhil Rajpal) and SSA-09 (Payton Rehling) on the DOGE team. This access is granted through the SSA’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) system. He asserts that DOGE staff are being granted only the minimum levels of schema access required.

The Social Security Administration ends a Biden-era rule that limited clawbacks for overpayments to 10% per check (to prior policy of taking entire checks).

As part of an interview on Fox News, Aram Moghaddassi spreads an incorrect statistic that states 40% of all phones calls to SSA are from people committing fraud.

The Deputy CIO for Infrastructure/IT at SSA acknowledges an increased number of network crashes due to a newly-introduced fraud checking system created and rushed into production by DOGE.

Reports emerge that DOGE is planning to rewrite the entire COBOL codebase for Social Security to Java in months using generative AI

At a town hall event in Wisconsin, Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias claim to have found fraud in the number of immigrants being granted social security numbers.

Social Security introduces a new AI-based agent for handling phone calls to 350 field offices in the Southeast and Northeast regions. It frustrates many users attempting to reach an actual person for assistance.

Alarmed at the viral spread of DOGE’s false claim that 40% of all calls to Social Security are fraud, agency staff at SSA draft a public statement to correct the errors in the claim. They are specifically ordered by Katie Miller not to release it. She asserts “the number is 40 percent.”

In an interview on Fox, Antonio Gracias makes misleading claims that DOGE had discovered widespread voting fraud through joining social security data and state voter rolls.

Social Security employees received an offer from the human resources department for voluntary reassignments to “mission-critical” front-line roles in call services and hearing offices to replace staff that were eliminated.

DOGE staffers at SSA declare the need for widespread Reductions-in-Force (RIFs) at the agency, despite a previous reduction in staffing of 7000 people and notable degradations in service. Among other cuts, they suggest removing 800 people from the IT department of 4000.

After some qualms about its legality, Leland Dudek signs two memos authorizing sharing data from the Social Security Administration that would allow DHS and ICE to locate immigrants who had been paying taxes to Social Security (despite not being able to collect it).

The Post confirms with multiple source that Social Security’s website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages ranging from 20 minutes to an entire day. They speculate this is due to the introduction of an expanded fraud check system created by DOGE that wasn’t tested for scalability before being deployed.

Aram Moghaddassi adds 6300 names of suspected immigrants to the “death master file” as a way of forcing them to “self-deport” by making it impossible to use financial products. This list included the names of 7 minors.

102 more names of living people are added to the Master Death File at SSA to destroy their ability to participate in society and to “self-deport” as a result.

Greg Pearre, a senior career executive overseeing technologists at the SSA, is forced out of his office by security guards after clashing with CIO Scott Coulter and calling his plan to forcibly declare immigrants dead both illegal and cruel

The Social Security Agency is reportedly shifting all its official communications exclusively to X.

The Trump Administration files a formal motion to protect the identities of DOGE staff at the agency in filings. This explains the redactions of DOGE names in filings.

Social Security introduces a new AI chatbot to help with general agency tasks but built from general OpenAI models and not trained on SSA data or content.

Some immigrants have been forced to prove they aren’t dead after being added to the Master Death File in an attempt to force them to “self-deport.” The White House had falsely claimed nobody was really declared dead.

DOGE has reportedly added 10 million records into the Death Master File since March, both as part of addressing errors in the NUMIDENT files as well as deliberate effort to harm immigrants from being able to interact with the financial industry. As a reuslt, some very alive Americans have been declared dead by DOGE.

Frank Bisignano is confirmed by the Senate to be the new Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, replacing Leland Dudek who was serving as the acting commissioner.

Due to DOGE imposing a government-wide restriction on expense cards, many of the Social Security offices are in disarray, unable to do common office tasks like buying paper for printers or shredding documents. There are a few shared purchase cards for the agency, but fewer than a dozen staff in SSA are able to authorize office expenses for all 1300 field offices.

An internal report at Social Security analyzes new fraud detection mechanisms that were mandated by DOGE for all phone claims. According to analysis, only 2 out of 110,000 claims made were possibly but not certainly fraudultent, and adding the system has slowed claims processing by 25% and degraded service overall.

Frank Bisignano is granted permission to remove any DOGE staff at his agency. According to the report, “Bisignano parted ways with one DOGE staffer from SSA, who in June moved to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” The date and person isn’t named, but the CIO replacement at SSA and NASA connection suggest it’s Scott Coulter who was removed in early June.

A report in the New York Times suggests that Mike Russo and Aram Moghaddassi have essentially been acting as joint CIOs at the agency.

The SSA website takes down for maintenance a page that provided service metrics. When it is restored after serveral weeks, certain metrics that would have shown the impact of DOGE like average phone wait times are no longer provided.

In a 6-3 ruling on an emergency application, the Supreme Court rejected an injunction that prevented DOGE from accessing Social Security data. In a setback for privacy advocates, this will allow for SSA to share data with DOGE and other agencies, while the case about the legality of that proceeds.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, the new head of SSA, Frank Bisignano, states that “DOGE personnel, including eight engineers, are integral to getting the job done”

John Solly asks staff in the Social Security Administration’s CIO office (then possibly under the leadership of Scott Coulter or Aram Moghaddassi) to create a cloud environment to upload the NUMIDENT data to. The stated reason was purported reason for the project was to improve the way that SSA exchanges data.

John Solly modifies his request to instead ask to transfer NUMIDENT data to a test environment. This is not entirely unheard of, but it’s considered a very insecure practice to move production data into a testing environment that might not be authorized for that. DOGE then amends their request again to ask for full admin access to SSA’s cloud environment.

A career official writes up a Risk Acceptance Request Form to share with Aram Moghaddassi and another unnamed career official in the office of the CIO at Social Security about DOGE’s request to have administrative access to a separate Virtual Private Cloud within the Amazon Web Services infrastructure at SSA. The official classifies this as high-risk due a proposal to copy NUMIDENT data to a developer environment with looser access controls and security measures. DOGE developers would also be able to make this data publicly accessible without following the Authority to Operate (ATO) requirements for any new public services and install software not approved for operation in SSA infrastructure.

Edward Coristine is reportedly sighted at the Woodlawn, MD location of the Social Security Administration alongside Aram Moghaddassi. It is later confirmed that he is now working as a Special Government Employee (SGE) for the agency after he had resigned his position at GSA.

Career staff in the Office of the CIO at Social Security approved DOGE’s request to setup their own separate cloud environment apart from the usual oversight and processes of cloud services at SSA. They deny a request by DOGE to transfer highly-sensitive NUMIDENT data to the cloud.

Reportedly acting as a joint CIO at Social Security, Mike Russo overrides the concerns of junior staff in the Office of the CIO at the Social Security Administration and approves a request by John Solly to transfer NUMIDENT data into the new DOGE-controlled cloud environment.

According to a page update on the Federal CIO site, Aram Moghaddassi is named the new CIO of the Social Security Administration, making him the third DOGE-affiliated CIO in a row at the agency. This follows on reports that he had been acting in a co-CIO role with former CIO Mike Russo. He replaces Scott Coulter who was the CIO as recently as late May.

Due to staffing cuts, there is now an average of 1 SSA worker per 1480 benficiaries, or almost triple the ratio in 1967. This is a direct result of DOGE-driven cuts reducing agency staffing by 7000 since January

In response to a letter from the American Federation of Teachers union to nine public pension funds who are investors, Valor Equity Partners confirms that Antonio Gracias was working for Valor the entire time he was in DOGE and also reports that he left DOGE on July 1st. It’s unclear what the status of other Valor employees embedded in DOGE, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling, are.

An analysis by a news organization finds that wait times on calls to Social Security routinely exceed 3 hours, with the system also frequently hanging up on people after 2 hours and promising a callback that never arrives. The Social Security website misleadingly reports the average wait time as 18 minutes.

The Social Security Administration begins to warn approximately half a million Americans who still receive their benefits by paper check that they will need to call the Treasury Department themselves and request a waiver. Those who have not had their waivers processed by the end of September may experience a delay in receiving benefits even if their waiver application is pending. This action is being taken to comply with EO 14247.

Acting in his role as the CIO for Social Security Administration, Aram Moghaddassi authorizes a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) for the project of moving the NUMIDENT data from Social Security’s controlled environment into the special cloud soley operated by DOGE. As the CIO, he is allowed to assume the risk of bypassing mandatory security requirements, but not if it violates federal law or puts sensitive data at risk of being stolen.

Expressing concerns that the lax security of DOGE’s cloud could lead to the leak of every American’s social security number (and the requirement ro reissue new ones), the Chief Data Officer of the Social Security Administration contacts Edward Coristine and John Solly to request information about the security of DOGE’s cloud. He is never granted a reply and learns that the SSA Office of General Counsel (headed by DOGE member Mark Steffensen) has advised employees not to respond to his inquiries.

The Chief Data Officer of the Social Security Administration, Charles Borges, submits a public whistleblower complaint alleging that DOGE cut corners and skirted mandatory IT oversight in order to copy sensitive NUMIDENT data of the social security numbers of all Americans into a private cloud environment that only they controlled. He cites several specific events here in the timeline.

Reporting that retaliation and abuse have made it impossible for him to do his job, whistleblower Charles Borges resigns from his position at the Social Security Administration. Retaliation against whistleblowers is a prohibited personnel practice for federal staff, but it can be difficult to prove and enforce.