The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration stepped down after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency requested access to Social Security recipient information.
Acting Commissioner Michelle King, who spent several decades at the agency, resigned over the weekend, according to a Washington Post report. The agency has grown as a target of Musk, who claimed over the weekend that there’s fraud from improper payments to dead people.
The SSA manages pension payments for more than 70 million seniors in the United States. It hosts significant amounts of personal data, including all Social Security numbers, comprehensive medical records for those who have applied for disability benefits, bank information, income records, and more. At the time of King’s departure, it was not clear which data the Musk associates wanted or exactly what led her to leave.
Musk and his associates’ wish to access highly personal data has already been met with pushback in other federal government sectors. The Treasury Department’s highest-ranking civil servant recently resigned after refusing to grant DOGE access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which manages more than $5 trillion in annual payments.
President Donald Trump replaced her as acting commissioner with Leland Dudek, who works at the SSA, while Frank Bisignano awaits a Senate confirmation vote. Dudek has posted positive statements on social media about DOGE’s efforts to search for fraud in federal agencies.
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“President Trump has nominated the highly qualified and talented Frank Bisignano to lead the Social Security Administration, and we expect him to be swiftly confirmed in the coming weeks,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement on the matter. “In the meantime, the agency will be led by a career Social Security anti-fraud expert as the acting commissioner.”
Reforms to the agency are typically met with swift political backlash. When Republicans held a trifecta in the government in 2005, as they do now, they tried to reform Social Security, but their efforts were met with pushback and a blue wave in the 2006 midterm elections, with GOP actions on Social Security, among other issues, growing unpopular.