Acting head threatens to shut down Social Security Administration after court ruling
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek said Friday that he is consulting with agency lawyers and the Justice Department as he threatens to shut down the agency in response to a court ruling blocking Elon Musk’s team from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a two-week temporary restraining order Thursday that prohibits Social Security officials from sharing personally identifiable information with Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which has been empowered to carry out cost-cutting across the government.
Hollander wrote that DOGE “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” and “never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems.”
But in an interview Friday with The Washington Post, Dudek argued that the judge’s ruling was overly broad and that a reference to “DOGE affiliates” could apply to all employees who access personally identifiable information, or PII, because they are obligated to cooperate with DOGE.
Dudek said the agency plans to file an affidavit as soon as Friday asking Hollander to clarify language in her ruling that he criticized as “ambiguous,” “overly broad” and “weirdly written.”
“Everything in this agency is PII,” Dudek said. “Unless I get clarification, I’ll just start to shut it down. I don’t have much of a choice here.”
Dudek first made his threat to close down the agency during a Bloomberg News interview Thursday night.
Such a dramatic move would be unprecedented in the agency’s history and would immediately begin halting benefit payments for millions of Americans.
One plaintiff in the lawsuit at the heart of the ruling said Friday that the judge’s intention was clear — and accused Dudek of acting “like a child who didn’t get his way.”
“For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. “Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”
Hollander’s 137-page order was the latest court ruling preventing DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, from sifting through databases of federal agencies because of privacy concerns. Other federal judges have ruled that the Treasury and Education Departments cannot share sensitive data with Musk’s team. [Continue reading…]