Good day all. While working on another post, I saw this story about a fraud expert toiling away in obscurity at the Social Security Administration. When DOGE came knocking, he was quick to offer them whatever assistance he could. His job was, after all, trying to track down fraud and waste.
However, the acting head of the SSA had been dead set opposed to Elon Musk and DOGE coming in and doing their usual work of identifying all the fraud and waste in the agency. When she found out about one Leland Dudek working with DOGE, she had him suspended pending termination. It didn’t quite work out the way she intended. Here are the details from the Daily Wire:
Leland Dudek was an obscure bureaucrat at the Social Security Administration who dedicated his career to stopping fraud. But when he worked with the Department of Government Efficiency to do just that, he came close to being fired.
“At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation,” Dudek wrote on LinkedIn. “They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE,” he wrote in a now-deleted post obtained by The Daily Wire.
Talk about managers not getting the message. President Trump issued an Executive Order regarding DOGE, Elon Musk and access to the various bureaucracies. After the initial attempt by USAID to block DOGE teams from entering and accessing the systems, it took a threat of arrest to make them get out of the way. Now USAID has been reduced to a smoking crater due to all the fraud, waste and corruption they found.
Then, a stunning reversal occurred. It was Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King who was out of a job. And Dudek was reinstated with a big promotion — taking her job leading the massive agency on an interim basis.
The Washington Post reported that King exited the agency after refusing to let DOGE access agency data and was replaced by Dudek. But it has not been reported that managers at the agency had moved to punish Dudek as he cooperated with the efficiency czars.
I’m not surprised that the Washington ComPost has left a few rather important details out. However, the major news is that a bureaucratic roadblock was summarily terminated and escorted out and the person she, or her minions, tried to fire for following Presidential directives was given her job. I have a sneaking suspicion that a number those minions will be on the unemployment line in the next few weeks.
As for the new acting director of the Social Security Administration? He is absolutely unapologetic about helping the Department of Government Efficiency fixing all the problems he and others have found.
“I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” it continued. “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”
A SSA employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Wire that the person who put Dudek on leave was Gina Clemons, Deputy Commissioner for Analytics, Review, and Oversight, and that she is still on the job.
If this is accurate, I am assuming she is in the process of packing up her office and updating her resume. She needs to be fired.
Dudek, a career civil servant, is an example of how there are a few fiscally conscious longtime government employees, and how the Trump administration and DOGE can maximize their impact by joining forces with people who know where the bodies are buried.
It’s people like Mr. Dudek that terrify upper management. Good managers, (Of which there doesn’t appear to be all that many of in Washington D.C.), know that people like Mr. Dudek are incredibly valuable and know how to put their knowledge to good use. The others, who should never have been put into positions of authority in the first place, see them as threats and move to get rid of them, to the detriment of the agency, or in the private sector, the company.
After publication of this story, a spokesman for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Billy Gribbin, said of it on X: “I hope we see more of this. There are many good civil servants who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically-motivated mismanagement who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”
Scalpels? How about nukes? The rot in most of the Washington Deep State bureaucracies is so deep that the only way to fix it is to basically nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Biden’s Social Security Commissioner, Martin O’Malley, seemed to view agency employees, perhaps even more than taxpayers and beneficiaries, as his constituency. He signed a last-minute deal with the employee union in November 2024 granting them telework through 2029, then resigned days later to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee, leading King to assume the top role on an acting basis. Now, Dudek will serve in that role until Trump’s nominee, Frank Bisignano, is confirmed by the Senate.
And here we have a classic example of the utter corruption of the Biden Maladministration and the Democrat Party. The good news is that government workers are being told to report back to their offices. I fully expect that union to try and fight this, but I don’t think it will work. The worst they can do is threaten to go on strike. That would be a classic “Please don’t throw me in that Briar Patch.” threat. I have no doubt that the Trump Administration is itching to PATCO a union that tries this.
The Social Security Administration is a prime opportunity to use data to find government waste and fraud, from illegal immigrants using other people’s Social Security numbers to people pretending to be disabled to get benefits.
They’ve already found a huge number of issues. They’ve identified a large number of payouts to people with no Social Security numbers or Taxpayer ID numbers. They’ve also found that there are over 20 million people over 100 years old on the roles with some being older then the United States. Elon Musk jokingly referred to them as “Vampires.”
While doing a little research, I saw all the “Fact Checking” sites popping up in my searches trying to dispute what Musk and DOGE have found so far. I didn’t bother actually visiting the sites since they have a long history of very inaccurate claims. (A nice way of saying they’ve been caught out being paid shills of the Progressive Liberal Democrats and flat out lying)
As for the picture above, any fan of the old TV show “The Vampire Diaries” will know who the character is and that her “Age” is about 40. (23 years a vampire) I thought it was a nice insiders joke on Musk’s joke about vampires collecting Social Security. Obviously, this one would not be old enough to be eligible. (Yes, I am being silly. What a pity that there are morons and moonbats out there who can’t understand a joke) I look forward to Mr. Dudek working with DOGE to clean out the SSA. It will be very interesting to see where all the unaccounted for billions have been going.
Thatisall
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