Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Social Security and the DOGE kids

At packed town halls held recently by New Mexico’s three U.S. House members, the defining feature of attendees was grey hair, and one of their most urgent worries was Social Security.

In New Mexico, 468,000 people get a Social Security check. Another 55,000 receive Supplemental Security Income. For a great many of them, missing even one check wouldn’t just be inconvenient, it would be disastrous – the difference between housed and unhoused, fed and hungry, as U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez learned when he surveyed constituents.

No recipient, myself included, considers Social Security an entitlement. “I paid in,” they will tell you.

Elders’ alarm over Social Security has festered for months. The president promised he wouldn’t touch Social Security except for “waste, fraud and abuse” and then turned Elon Musk and his DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, loose on the Social Security Administration (SSA).

In February Musk claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 were receiving a

Social Security check, when he had, in fact, misunderstood the agency’s aged record keeping system. DOGE staff, without training or security clearances, embarked on a “major cleanup” of SSA records. Since March DOGE moved 10 million records to SSA’s Death Master File over the objections of SSA staff, according to the Washington Post. But DOGE itself was so unsure about its actions, according to Newsweek, that it advised SSA offices to reinstate people who came in with identification. That can take months.

The Washington Post reported last week on one man who learned he was added to the Death Master File when he couldn’t use his credit card to buy lunch. The government told financial institutions he was dead, clawed back his last Social Security check, and ended his pension checks and Medicare. Months later, he’s still trying to recover pension checks.

The undead have been showing up at Social Security offices, where they may or may not find somebody to help them. The Trump administration fired 7,000 people from SSA’s 57,000-person workforce, despite staffing at a 50-year low, and plans to lay off thousands more and close offices. At the same time, DOGE began requiring people without internet access to prove their identity with an in-person office visit.

The result was website crashes, hours’ long wait times by phone, and few actual humans still working in field offices.

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury told a town hall this month that she was denied entry to the Albuquerque Social Security office, even though she had an appointment. She said the office, a regional call center normally staffed by 600, had around 250 to 300 employees.

She joined more than 100 members of Congress in asking SSA’s Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to keep local field offices open.

Dudek, previously a mid-level data analyst, welcomed and enabled DOGE as other agency professionals resisted or resigned in protest. At DOGE’s direction, he has “pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems,” the Washington Post reported. In a recording obtained by ProPublica, Dudek urged co-workers to be patient with “the DOGE kids,” as he called them.

“They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Former Deputy Commissioner Jason Fichtner has compared DOGE’s Social Security cuts to a drunk operating a wrecking ball. His boss, former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, has warned Social Security recipients to save their money to prepare for future missed checks. He has explained that SSA’s overhead is far below commercial insurers. In his view the administration is trying to dismember the agency by breaking its ability to serve. Once broken, it can be privatized.

Which is what Stansbury said in her town hall. “They are trying to dismantle Social Security. The GOP has dreamed of privatizing it for years. A lot of major financial institutions can make a lot of money,” she said.

Project 2025, the administration’s 900-page blueprint, doesn’t address Social Security, but one of its authors, economist Stephen Moore, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme long before Elon Musk did, and Moore has long proposed deep cuts and privatization.

The debate over privatizing Social Security is long standing. Two thoughts: First, with a private account the broker gets paid whether the market is up or down, whether you make money or not. Second, we all deserve to make our own decisions about what happens to Social Security and not be forced into an outcome because the powers that be drove it into the ground.

As a Vasquez constituent told Source New Mexico, “It’s my money.”

Sherry Robinson is a long-time New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.

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