The carnage inside the agency is being carried out in a haphazard manner, one employee tells Rolling Stone and American Doom, and is in line with Musk’s “zero-based budgeting concept,” in which sweeping cuts are made to an organization, with decisions on what should be reinstated coming only after failures begin to occur. The employee says that an agency executive was recently interviewed by DOGE’s lead within the SSA and was told that DOGE is “not there to solve problems or improve service — only to eliminate property, head count and find fraud,” the employee said. Unless the executive “had a $50 billion idea,” DOGE wasn’t interested.
DOGE’S WORK INSIDE the Social Security Administration is being led by three men with no apparent experience with the agency’s work, one employee tells Rolling Stone and American Doom: Akash Bobba, a 22-year-old engineer who previously interned for Meta as well as Musk ally Peter Thiel’s Palantir; Steve Davis, a Musk deputy who has spent 20 years finding ways to cut costs at Musk’s companies; and Citrix executive Tom Krause, who also led DOGE’s efforts to access sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.
Taxpayers will be on the hook for some of those workers being removed as buyouts and settlements are offered to scores of SSA employees who are at or nearing retirement age. To make matters worse, O’Malley says, not only will this cost taxpayers money that could be used to pay benefits and operational costs, but will drain the agency of skilled and knowledgeable veterans at a time when staffing within the SSA is at its lowest level in 50 years — and baby boomers surge into retirement.
“That’s the biggest operational waste in the entire history of Social Security,” O’Malley says. “Worse, they don’t receive the knowledge transfer that you would receive in any technology company. If you were in Silicon Valley and offered these buyouts without a plan to retain that institutional knowledge, the board of directors of that company would fire you.”
Not long after Dudek’s confession, and with King out of the way, DOGE went to work. The first step was gaining access to SSA’s data and technology systems, including what a whistleblower has called the “protected information” of millions of Americans. In an affidavit filed Friday night as part of a lawsuit against the SSA, the whistleblower, Tiffany Flick, described the chaotic first few weeks of the Trump administration as DOGE sought access to a variety of SSA systems. DOGE wanted access to “everything, including source code,” according to Flick’s affidavit.
Flick said she was concerned that DOGE’s access to — and meddling in — SSA systems “could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.”
Perhaps worse than the unfettered access that DOGE was seeking for Bobba, the 22-year-old engineer, was that Musk’s pseudo government office didn’t even understand what it was looking for, Flick said in her affidavit. DOGE was apparently looking for information related to fraud, including “untrue allegations” of payments going to people over the age of 100, Flick said. Flick, a 30-year veteran of SSA, said she considered DOGE’s hunt for fraud to be “based on an inaccurate understanding of SSA’s data and programs.”
The shuttering of offices, firings of probationary workers, and offers of buyouts to those at retirement age and even below it are not just causing a feeling of fear to spread throughout the SSA, the two current employees say, but bringing the agency perilously close to widespread failures. O’Malley agrees, and says that DOGE, Dudek, and the Trump administration “are intentionally driving the agency into collapse so they can claim it’s broken.”
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