by Eli Hager

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On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.

It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”

In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.

They did none of these things.

Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.

Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.

By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.

Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely made front-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.

Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such........

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