Doge is searching through social security payments looking for fraud

The efficiency of the government department is filtering $ 1.6 trillion of social-unconscious security payments that include the name of a person, date of birth and how much they produce in an anti-fraud effort that makes advocates worry that Trump’s administration can begin to reject payments to older Americans who are vulnerable.

The details about the effort were confirmed in this new letter to the congress by acting the Social Security Administrator Lee Dudek and by several sources who were familiar with the project.

In addition to combing sensitive data, Doge staff have also asked about social security administration telephone services, the source told ABC News, which most beneficiaries were used to submit initial claims. Doge questions about telephone services have caused concern that they might plan both to replace the telephone service with a personal call center or eliminate it as an option to submit a claim, the source said.

“Every American who receives a social security allowance will continue. The only mission of DOGE is to identify waste, fraud, and harassment,” Press Secretary of the White House Karoline Leavitt said in a statement given to ABC News on Friday.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk both offered an anti-fraudulent project in a recent public statement, claiming to have found examples of rampant harassment.

“We also identify a surprising level of inability and the possibility of fraud in the social security program for our seniors,” Trump said in his speech to the congress on Tuesday.

Trump has promised not to cut the program unless the evidence of fraud is found.

Details of the anti-fraudulent project despite gloomy, including how doge staff, most of whom are MUSK allies without experience in the complex government rights program, will determine the amount of fraud, which is usually investigated by the Inspector General at the agency.

SSA did not respond to requests for comments.

“Doge has repeatedly showed a lack of understanding of what the data they mean actual access and whether it is, in reality, representing fraud,” said Lynn Overmann, senior advisor on US digital services during the Biden government.

Overmann, Executive Director of the Center for Social Impacts Beeck + Innovation at Georgetown University, said he was worried that the wrong accusation of fraud would eliminate the financial lines that were important for parents, disabled people and children who lost their parents.

“The public deserves strong privacy protection, not a careless data experiment with their most sensitive data,” Overmann said.

Around 69 million people receive social security allowances every month, with a total of around $ 1.6 trillion in the expected benefits this year, according to the agency.

Dudek, the social security administrator who acted, has maintained efforts in personal communication as legal and necessary, several sources told ABC News. He said the steps were being taken to protect privacy.

In a private meeting with outside groups last Tuesday, Dudek called Doge staff as “Doge children” and said they would “make mistakes” but that “we must let them see what happened at SSA,” according to three people who attended the meeting.

Dudek said they were given access to the names of people, date of birth and income information but not disability information. He also noted that the staff were given a background check that was accelerated by the FBI and had been on the ship as an agency employee.

“I see what happens when Doge has access to Treasury data,” said Dudek, according to a detailed record of one person reviewed by ABC News. “That didn’t happen at SSA on my watch. It would be a disaster.”

Doge access to the Ministry of Finance’s payment system is bound in court because outside groups insist that staff are not well examined first and do not have authorization.

Dudek’s decision to provide Doge access to his agency is now a subject A Separate lawsuit submitted by trade unions and retirees.

In the February 25th letter, Dudek sent Senator Ron Wyden, D -ore., Acting SSA Commissioner said the six people who were given access to the Social Security Administration Master system, called the Company Data Company, were undergoing background checks.

He said one of them was “special government employee” while the other was “details” of other federal institutions that are now assigned to their agencies. Dudek did not mention the name of the employee who gave access, cited security issues.

Doge was created by Trump shortly after serving as a way to cut government waste, and he placed the Musk responsible for delegating staff to the institution.

Musk has placed several of his top lieutenants in the agency, according to sources, including Ethan Shaotran, 22, who internally registered as “Head of Information Officers” at SSA and is a software engineer that specializes in artificial intelligence. He founded Spark, AI Assistant Startup AI who received a $ 100,000 grant from OpenAI in 2024.

Other Doge representatives who were registered as the Head of Information Officials at SSA including Gautier “Cole” Killian, 24, and Nikhil Rajpal, 30, Sumber told ABC News.

Marko Elez, is also registered as working at SSA, said the source. Elez temporarily resigned from DOGE this year after a report on the Past Social Media Post Past but was restored by Musk after receiving support from Vice President JD Vance, among others. According to court documents, Elez was among those who were given access to sensitive taxpayers in the Ministry of Finance earlier this year.

It is not clear whether Shaotran, Killian, Rajpal and Elez are among those who have access to the SSA system.

Dudek said that when he came to the SSA system, DOGE staff were given “just reading” access to a broad social security system.

“Access for these people does not allow to download, copy, transfer, or delete data from the agency,” he wrote in a letter to Wyden.

The concern that Doge might have thought that legitimate payments as fraud were proven earlier this week when Trump stated in his speech to the congress that there were millions of dead people who were still collecting social security checks.

But that is inaccurate.

According to a Report 2023 By SSA Inspector General, there are millions of people who are older than 100 including in the “main death file” separate, but “almost non -existent” of them still receive benefits. The agency says that improving files will cost between $ 5 million and $ 10 million.