President Donald Trump appointed a fraud detection expert to lead the Social Security Administration (SSA) after its acting commissioner reportedly resigned following a dispute over access to sensitive documents, according to The Washington Post.
Leland Dudek, who manages SSA’s anti-fraud office, will serve as acting commissioner while the Senate vets Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee for permanent commissioner. Dudek replaces Michelle King, a 30-year SSA veteran who quit after refusing to provide sensitive records to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team, according to the outlet.
“@POTUS has nominated the highly qualified and talented Frank Bisignano to lead the @SocialSecurity Administration, and we expect him to he swiftly confirmed in the coming weeks,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, wrote on X. “In the meantime, the agency will be led by a career Social Security anti-fraud expert as the acting commissioner.”
The appointment comes after Musk highlighted potential fraud in federal entitlement programs, claiming it “exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.” Musk specifically pointed to millions of Social Security numbers belonging to impossibly elderly people — some apparently over 200 years old.
“Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as “ALIVE” when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem,” Musk wrote Monday. “Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second.”
About 44,000 of the 18.9 million Social Security number holders over age 100 still collect benefits, while an estimated 86,000 people above that age are thought to be alive, according to an SSA Office of Inspector General report.
The selection of Dudek reportedly upset more senior SSA officials who felt passed over by the move. The agency has long struggled with budget and staffing issues, which former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley believes will worsen with DOGE’s involvement and leadership changes.
“At this rate, they will break it. And they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley, who served under former President Joe Biden, told the outlet. “It’s a shame the chilling effect it has to disregard 120 executive service people. To pick an acting commissioner that is not in the senior executive service sends a message that professional people should leave that beleaguered public agency.”
King’s departure follows similar incidents across federal agencies, most recently a dispute over DOGE’s access to taxpayer information at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A federal judge is expected to rule on DOGE’s access to IRS and other data Tuesday afternoon.
The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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