The Government’s efficiency department is examining the social security payments of $ 1.6 billion, records that include the name of a person, the date of birth and how much they win, in an anti -fraud effort that has worried the defenders that the Trump administration can begin to deny payments to vulnerable major Americans.
The details about the effort were confirmed in a recent letter to Congress by the Interim Social Security Administrator Lee Dudek and by several sources familiar with the project.
In addition to combing through confidential data, Doge employees have also been asking about the Social Security Administration telephone service, sources told ABC News, that a significant part of the beneficiaries uses to present initial claims. Doge’s consultations about the telephone service have expressed concern that they may be planning to replace the telephone service with private call centers or eliminate it as an option to present claims, sources said.
“Any American who receives Social Security benefits will continue to receive them. Doge’s only mission is to identify only waste, fraud and abuse,” said White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in a statement provided to ABC News on Friday.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk alluded to the Anti -Arude Project in recent public statements, claiming to have found examples of unbridled abuse.
“We are also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our elders,” Trump said in his speech against Congress on Tuesday.
Trump has promised not to cut the program unless there is evidence of fraud.
However, the details about the anti-fraud project have been murky, including how Dege’s employees, which are mostly musk allies without experience in complex government rights programs, would define what is equivalent to fraud, which is generally investigated by the agency’s general inspectors.
The SSA did not respond to requests for comments.
In this archive photo of October 14, 2021, a Social Security card is found together with the United States Treasury checks, in Washington, DC
Kevin Dietsch/Getty images, file
“Doge has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding of the data to which they are really accessing and if, in fact, it represents fraud,” said Lynn Overmann, the main advisor of the United States digital service during the Biden administration.
Overmann, executive director of the Beeck for Social Impact + Innovation Center at Georgetown University, said she is worried about the accusations of unfair fraud will eliminate a crucial financial life line for the elderly, people with disabilities and children who have lost a father.
“The public deserves strong privacy protections, not reckless data experiments with their most confidential data,” said Overmann.
According to the agency, around 69 million people receive a benefit of social security each month, totaling around $ 1.6 billion for expected benefits this year.
Doubek, the Interim Social Security administrator, has defended the effort of private communications and necessary, several sources told ABC News. He said that measures are being taken to protect privacy.
In a private meeting with external groups last Tuesday, Dudek referred to Doge employees as “Doge’s children” and said “would make mistakes”, but “we have to let them see what is happening in the SSA”, according to three people who attended the meeting.
Dudek said that they were giving access to the names of people, birth dates and information information, but not information about disability. He also pointed out that the FBI granted accelerated background verifications and had been incorporated as agency employees.
“I saw what happened when Doge had access to treasure data,” said Dudek, according to the detailed notes of a person reviewed by ABC News. “That is not happening in SSA on my clock. It would be catastrophic.”
Doge’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system is tied in court, since external groups insisted that the staff had not been properly examined first and had no authorization.
Dudek’s decision to give Doge access to your agency is now the subject of a separate demand Filed by unions and retirees.
The main advisor of the president’s White and the CEO of Tesla and Spacex, Elon Musk, leaves the United States Capitol, on March 5, 2025, in Washington.
Kent Nishimura/Reuters
In a letter on February 25, Dudek sent Senator Ron Wyden, D-OR, the SSA interim commissioner said that the six people who received access to the Social Security Administration Master System, called Business Data Warehouse, were in background verification.
He said that one of them was a “special government employee”, while the other was “detailed” from other federal agencies now assigned to his agency. Dudek did not appoint employees with access, citing security concerns.
Doge was created by Trump shortly after assuming office as a way to reduce government waste, and put Musk in charge of delegating staff to the agencies.
Musk has put some of his main Doge lieutenants in the agency, according to Fuentes, including Ethan Shaotran, 22, who appears internally as an “information director” in the SSA and is a software engineer who specializes in artificial intelligence. He founded Spark, an A -programming assistant startup that received a subsidy of $ 100,000 from Operai in 2024.
Other Doge representatives that appear as the main information officers of the SSA include Gautier “Cole” Killian, 24, and Nikhil Rajpal, 30, told ABC News.
Marko Elez, also appears as working in the SSA, the sources said. Elez temporarily resigned from Doge this year after publications reports on previous racist social networks, but was reinstalled by Musk after receiving support from vice president JD Vance, among others. According to judicial documents, ELEZ was one of those who were granted access to confidential information of taxpayers in the Treasury Department earlier this year.
It was not clear immediately if Shaotran, Killian, Rajpal and Elez were among those with access to the SSA system.
Dudek said that when it comes to the SSA system, Doge employees were given “reading” to the vast social security system.
“Access for these people does not allow the download, transfer or elimination of data from the agency,” he wrote in the letter to Wyden.
The representative Kweisi Mfume has a sign against Doge together with the democrats of the cameramates during a press conference against the Budget bill of the Republican Chamber in the Capitol in Washington, on February 25, 2025.
Saul Loeb/AFP through Getty Images
The concerns that Dege could confuse legitimate payments as a fraudulent was evident earlier this week when Trump declared in his speech to Congress that there were millions of dead people who still collected social security checks.
But that is not accurate.
According to a Report 2023 By the Inspector General of the SSA, there are millions of people over 100 included in a “separate master death archive”, but “almost none” of them still receive benefits. The agency said that fixing the file would cost between $ 5 million and $ 10 million.
