The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security

[Nevilledog]

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-doge-social-security-takeover-leland-dudek


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.

*snip*

[RobinA]

1. I Can't Get Past

the part about how SS people thought DOGE was going to help increase efficiency. I mean, who with two working brain cells thought that ever?

[newdeal2]

5. He sounded both naive and desperate

If you’re dealing with super old technology I can understand the latter. It must make work miserable.

[moniss]

2. I would never be for elimination of

hard copy (paper) records for people to prove ID. If everything was electronic you could be disappeared with a few keystrokes and how would you "prove" who you are? I always want a paper birth certificate, drivers license (yes I know they're technically plastic), Social Security card and eventually a death certificate. Hard proof signed and issued that I can hold in my personal possession and not be dependent on a database, poor computer security or be at the mercy of bad actors whether government or non-government.

[UTUSN]

3. K&R

[Solly Mack]

4. ...