Social Security administrator backs out of ‘shutting down’ agency

The head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) said Friday that he wouldn’t be “shutting down the agency” after a federal judge backed up a temporary restraining order issued against Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting panel.

SSA chief Leland Dudek, an appointee of President Trump responsible for implementing cuts from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said Friday that the court had clarified its position on its restraining order and that the agency would continue working.

“I am not shutting down the agency,” Dudek said in a statement. “SSA employees and their work will continue under the [temporary restraining order].”

Dudek has indicated he’s not the one running the show at the SSA, but is rather following orders.

“I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions,” Dudek said in notes on a meeting he took with legal aide attorneys, as reported by The Washington Post earlier in March.

Dudek described the DOGE team that’s calling the shots at Social Security as “outsiders who are unfamiliar with nuances of SSA programs” but said he and his colleagues “have to let them see what is going on at SSA," according to the meeting notes that were obtained by the Post.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander issued an opinion that said the DOGE team was engaged in a “fishing expedition” at the SSA and that it hasn't provided “even a single reason” it would need access to the trove of personal taxpayer data it is seeking.

“Defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government,” the judge wrote.

She said the restraining order against DOGE “serves the public interest.”

DOGE has been running roughshod through the federal government, making huge cuts at agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and accessing programs as diverse as the Treasury Department’s international payments system and the IRS.

The SSA is slated to close dozens of offices this year as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal government, according to multiple media reports.

Tens of millions of Americans receive retirement and disability benefits from the SSA, according to agency figures. In 2023, 72 million people were on some form of Social Security.

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