Top Social Security Official Quits Amid Showdown With Elon Musk’s DOGE

A top official at the Social Security Administration decided she would rather quit than hand over the personal information of millions of people to Elon Musk and DOGE, according to The New York Times.

Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King resigned Sunday after Musk’s crew was looking to access a repository full of personal information, like financial information and employment history, on millions of Americans.

“S.S.A. has comprehensive medical records of people who have applied for disability benefits,” Social Security Works President Nancy Altman told the Times. “It has our bank information, our earnings records, the names and ages of our children, and much more.”

“If there is an evil intent to punish perceived enemies, someone could erase your earnings record, making it impossible to collect the Social Security and Medicare benefits you have earned,” she warned to the Associated Press.

It is unknown whether or not Musk and DOGE ended up accessing the information anyway.

King, one of many federal officials who’ve decided to call it quits as DOGE and Musk bulldoze their agencies, was replaced by pro-Musk official Leland Dudek, a career official who has been overseeing the agency’s anti-fraud office. Technology executive Frank Bisignano is Trump’s nominee to head the entire agency. He is not yet confirmed.

Border czar Tom Homan struggled to explain why New York City Mayor Eric Adams suddenly decided to comply with Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in his sanctuary city, if not to have the public corruption charges against him dismissed.

During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Homan was asked about Adams’s decision to allow ICE agents into Rikers Island, just days after the Department of Justice instructed prosecutors to drop the public corruption case against the mayor. ICE had been prohibited from entering New York City’s notorious jail complex in the East River since 2015.

In her startling resignation letter, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon stated that Adams’s lawyers had sought a quid pro quo for their client to comply with Trump’s immigration enforcement demands.

“It sounds like the DOJ dropped the case against Adams, and in exchange he let you into Rikers. Is that what happened?” asked CNN host Dana Bash.

“No, I think that’s ridiculous,” Homan replied. He explained that it couldn’t possibly have been quid pro quo, because he’d first met with Adams months ago, before the case was dropped. He then explained that after that meeting, no progress had been made on getting ICE access to the prison complex, so they needed to meet again last week.

“We had that a couple months ago, long before this other discussion. So, I don’t think that had anything to do with that,” Homan insisted. “As a matter of fact, the meeting was very well. It’s the same meeting we had a few weeks ago, and the reason we had the follow-up meeting was because there was no action being done. So, we follow up on how we can get some of this stuff in place, and that’s what the meeting Thursday was about.”

Bash said that Homan had said he was “really unsatisfied” after his initial meeting. “What changed between then and now other than the Department of the Justice dropping the case against Adams?” she asked.

“I didn’t come out of that meeting unsatisfied, I was, I was a little, you know, after several weeks I was a little taken back that we hadn’t gotten any action on that yet, on getting into Rikers Island,” Homan said.

Bash was unconvinced. “Just looking at the series of events, sir, the fact that you didn’t get what you wanted, you came away not sure why he wasn’t doing what you wanted him to do, particularly with opening Rikers. The Department of Justice gets rid of the charges against him, and poof, he agrees,” Bash pressed.

Homan did little to assuage her concerns, insisting that the two had found a way to really connect “cop-to-cop, not border-czar-to-mayor.”

The two men didn’t seem quite as friendly during a disturbing appearance on Fox & Friends last week when Homan jokingly threatened to crack down on the mayor if he failed to perform.

Crucially, something did change between the first and second meeting. A five-page letter from Adams’s lawyer Adam Spiro to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove dated February 3, which made clear that Adams sought a specific quid pro quo agreement: relief in return for immigration compliance.

“As Mayor Adams continues to help with DHS’ ramping enforcement operations, the risk that his political opponents—and in particular, the City Council—will try to remove him from power will only increase,” the letter warned, adding that Adams’ “political muscle is weakened by an indictment.”

“There is a reason that the Justice Department does not prosecute sitting presidents, and while a mayor is not a president, Mayor Adams is nonetheless the leader of this country’s largest city and needs to be an important partner to the President and his administration. An honest balancing of these concerns against the unsupported prosecution theories in this case militates strongly in favor of dismissal,” Spiro wrote.

The Trump administration doesn’t appear to have a clear idea of just how many federal staffers they’ve let go.

During a rare emergency hearing on President’s Day, Judge Tanya Chutkan asked the government’s attorneys if they could confirm reports that thousands of federal employees had been fired over the weekend. But the Department of Justice lawyers could not answer.

“I have not been able to look into that independently or confirm that,” one government attorney said, reported MSNBC’s Adam Klasfeld.

That sent Chutkan reeling.

“The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small or common thing,” she said incredulously, according to Klasfeld. “You haven’t been able to confirm that?”

Chutkan then went on to describe the actions of Elon Musk’s DOGE—an agency that has not been congressionally established or funded—as “unpredictable and scattershot,” according to LawFare senior editor Roger Parloff.

In the weeks since Donald Trump was inaugurated, DOGE has reportedly severed thousands of qualified employees from their positions in the federal government. The department has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles—though the mass layoffs could potentially affect as many as 200,000 federal employees who fit that criteria.

“Musk hasn’t been appointed or confirmed,” Chutkan said, framing the lawsuit’s argument. “He’s been ‘tasked with’ this [job], all without congressional oversight.”

“That’s why I’m asking: will there be terminations? Where? When?” Chutkan said, according to Parloff.

But the government could only promise to circle back on the issue.

So far, Musk’s team has gained access to and gutted portions of the CDC, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the EPA, FEMA, NOAA, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration, even as the nation experiences an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation crashes.

The White House now claims that Elon Musk—the man who has been using DOGE to cripple the federal government—actually has no power over the pseudo-agency.

A three-page court declaration from the Trump administration, filed on Monday, revealed that the billionaire’s official title is actually “senior adviser to the president,” a position that holds “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.” And he isn’t the head of DOGE, or its employee either.

So if Musk isn’t in charge of DOGE, who is? And if he’s just some adviser with “no actual formal authority,” why is he seemingly involved in eliminating massive government programs, firing thousands of people, and holding press conferences in the Oval Office?

“I’m going to tell [Musk] very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education,” Trump said on Fox just over a week ago. “He’s going to find the same thing…. Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military.”

This declaration may also just be a farce, and Musk could very well be the one at the wheel for DOGE. This ambiguity makes it easier for Musk to feign ignorance and innocence while everyone else lives in fear of what he’ll decide to slash next.

Donald Trump spent his Valentine’s Day weekend firing health workers en masse from the government. 

Thousands of probationary employees in the Department of Health and Human Services were told they would lose their jobs following four weeks of leave, just one day after Robert F. Kennedy was confirmed as health secretary. All affected employees had only worked for the department for one or two years, or had recently been promoted. 

These employees included people working on improving health care, regulating food packaging, or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks. Many of them even had to tell their own bosses that they had lost their jobs, and their termination notices claimed they had poor job performance, according to The Washington Post, which obtained several such letters and spoke with former and current employees. 

“Unfortunately, the agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment in the agency,” the messages stated.

Jim Jones, the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner for human foods, resigned on Monday, citing Kennedy’s remarks about FDA staff and the “indiscriminate firing” of 89 members of the agency’s food program. 

“I was looking forward to working to pursue the Department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jones wrote in a letter to the FDA’s acting chief.  “It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump Administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda, however, it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role.”

The cuts also hit the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drawing an outcry from patient advocacy groups. 

“The cumulative effects of threatened cuts to federal health research funding and forced departures at our nation’s premier health agencies will put our global leadership and our nation’s health at risk,” a coalition of such groups, including the Friends of Cancer Research and the American Diabetes Association, said in a statement. 

Kennedy is only just starting his takeover of the department, which means the radical overhaul is only just beginning. In the coming weeks and months, the damage to America’s public health could be catastrophic.