Former Head of Social Security Says Elon Musk and DOGE Are Wrong About the Agency

Lambert here: Interview with Michael Astrue.

But Michael Astrue, a former commissioner of the Social Security Administration, warns that the Trump administration’s efforts are ill informed. Elon Musk, a close adviser to President Trump and his largest donor, has been combing through the administration’s records through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Lambert here: “combing through…. through the Department” in the same sentence? Odd.

“If you want to go in and put in efficiencies to bring down the size of the agency, you can do that. But there’s a smart way to do it, and there’s a stupid way to do it,” Astrue said. “And we’re doing it the way that 22-year-old frat boys that have never seen the system think is a good idea, and that’s a mistake.”

Astrue warns that DOGE workers aren’t familiar with Social Security’s functionalities or Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), a 60-year-old code used by the Social Security Administration that some of the DOGE workers may not have worked with before. Astrue says he doesn’t condemn Musk and his team for not knowing the code, but he does fault Musk for not admitting to error.

Lambert here: COBOL is not “a code.” It is “code.” Makes you think that the reporter threw “functionalities” in there because they heard Astrue use it and thought it sounded good. And from the interview:

[MARTIN] Where would you look for efficiencies and cost reductions if you were still in charge?

[ASTRUE] Well, the back-office operations, a lot of the more arcane things are very labor-intensive. It’s very slow and it’s fairly error prone. So, a lot of that could be done with artificial intelligence. The agency also runs the largest system of justice in the world. And under agency rules now, most people are submitting medical records of 500 to 1,000 pages. For the judges in the staff to get through those is hard. We tried to automate that on my watch, and the technology wasn’t ready. I think the technology is ready now, and I think if they could do that well, it would be efficient and it would be a better service for the public.