With less than three days to go before government funding runs out, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is calling for a vote on the 30-day continuing resolution that top Democratic appropriators unveiled Monday night.
The guidance from the Democratic leader comes as Senate Democrats struggle with how to move forward after House Republicans shoved through the Trump-backed seven month continuing resolution on Tuesday. Some Senate Democrats have expressed a willingness to work with Republicans to avert a shutdown, while most of the party is opposed to helping Republicans as the Trump administration and Elon Musk continue to flout congressional spending appropriations, rescind funding for federal programs and shutter agencies.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.
Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”
Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”
But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”
Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”
Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.
“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)
At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”
Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.
Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”
Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.
The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.
Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.
And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.
“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.
In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”
“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”
Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.
“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”
He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.
Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”
Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.
“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”
I feel pretty certain that today is the last day to have any impact on what Democratic senators will do on the upcoming vote on the House-produced “continuing resolution.” There was apparently a pretty intense argument yesterday in a caucus meeting about what to do. (I’ll say more about that shortly). But I think Democratic senators have made a collective decision to keep their constituents in the dark about what they plan to do. That is part of a larger culture of opacity that has seemed to me to be an increasingly consequential part of the failure of civic governance in the country as the drama has played out. If you’re able to get any answers from your senator, please let me know.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
As far as most American families were concerned, schools’ post-pandemic reopening brought an end to an era of uncertainty in public education. In reality, the end of that era was never all that clearly defined. Now, as the Trump administration sweeps into office with reams of radical proposals, a new era of uncertainty for teachers and families has clearly arrived.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.
We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.
The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.
The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.
Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.
Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.
Ed Martin Threatens Another Dem In Congress
Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin now appears to be harassing people involved in the first impeachment of Donald Trump, sending one of his inappropriate letters of inquiry to Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA), the twin brother of former Trump national security aide Alex Vindman.
Martin purports to be seeking information about a company the brothers founded to help arm Ukraine against Russia and about the congressman’s personal financial disclosures, the WaPo reports.
Perkins Coie Sues Over Trump Executive Order
In a full-throated defense of itself and the legal profession, Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., to block President Trump’s executive order targeting it and its clients.
Appeals Court Judges Warn Of Threats To The Judiciary
Two GOP-appointees to the federal appeals court warned publicly of the increasing threats to judges not just as a safety concern but as an attack on judicial independence.
Judge Takes Up Mahmoud Khalil Case Today
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan will hold a hearing this morning on the Trump administration’s detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident of the United States.
The first order of business will likely be whether Furman has jurisdiction over the case or whether the government spirited Khalil to Louisiana fast enough to avoid jurisdiction in the Southern District of New York.
The case has roiled Columbia University but has national implications for free speech, the rule of law, and the legal protections afforded green card holders.
Judge To Trump: What About The Appointments Clause?
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D.C., declined to block the Trump White House’s takeover of the U.S. African Development Foundation – but he zeroed in on the most concerning aspect of the episode: Whether President Trump can bypass the Senate in appointing a new board for the foundation after he fired the old one.
“Where is the president’s authority to appoint without Senate confirmation?” Leon asked during Tuesday’s hearing. “How is that possible?”
Leon quickly issued a ruling in the case denying a temporary restraining order but putting the government on notice he would expect testimony from the DOGE representatives dispatched to take over the foundation and strip it bare.
Lawyers involved in some the pre-existing USAID lawsuits raced to obtain court orders to halt the shredding and burning of the documents, with a particular focus on those that would be relevant to the ongoing litigation over the purging of workers and the dismantling of the agency.
By the end of the day, the Trump administration had agreed to stop any further destruction of documents at USAID headquarters without first notifying opposing counsel and giving them a chance to take the matter before a judge. The administration denied it had destroyed any personnel records and said it would provide later today a sworn accounting of what exactly happened.
Sanctions Time
Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell is willing to endure promised sanctions by a federal judge in San Francisco rather than comply with a court order to provide testimony about the Trump administration’s purges of the federal workforce.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup had ruled Monday that Ezell couldn’t have his cake and eat it too by submitting a sworn declaration but declining to be cross-examined about it. “[T]he Trump administration Tuesday evening informed the court Ezell would not testify and withdrew his written declaration suggesting he did not order the probationary firings across government,” Government Executive reports.
Musk Watch
NYT: “Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.”
Wired: “Sources also tell WIRED that Musk has wanted a government shutdown—an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one—in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown.”
NBC News: “President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom Tuesday in a conspicuous favor to his adviser Elon Musk, the car company’s billionaire CEO.”
The Purges
DoE: The Trump administration is purging the Department of Education of half of its staff
NASA: The space agency has begun purging scientists ahead of a Trump administration deadline.
NOAA: The Trump administration began cutting the chronically understaffed NOAA workforce by 10%, or more than 1,000 people.
HHS: The Trump Administration is shuttering a half dozen regional legal offices at HHS that target fraud.
EPA: The EPA plans to close all of its environmental justice offices, according to an internal memo obtained by the NYT.
The Destruction
“The whole system of finding, diagnosing and treating tuberculosis — which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease — has collapsed in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia” since President Trump froze foreign aid, the NYT reports.
Johns Hopkins University is planning layoffs after the Trump administration cancelled $800 million in grants to the school, mostly through USAID, the WSJ reports.
The Trump administration is considering cancelling the government’s lease of the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory, which maintains the longest continuous record of measurements of atmospheric CO2 and contributed the data for the Keeling Curve, Reuters reports.
The Trump administration has slashed the GSA division in charge of preserving and maintaining some 26,000 pieces of public art, the WaPo reports.
CDC Nominee Trafficking In Anti-Vax Disinformation
Dave Weldon, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the CDC, was still pushing the debunked link between vaccines and autism as recently as last month in a meeting with Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), she told Bloomberg.
Quote Of The Day
“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government. If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”–Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at Johns Hopkins University
House-Passed CR Heads To The Senate
With a Friday deadline to fund the government, the GOP-controlled House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. Attention now turns to the Senate, where Democrats are divided over whether to filibuster the CR and shut down the government to try to extract some concessions from the Trump White House.
The Scale Of The Trump Carnage Is Staggering
I find it useful to use longtime foreign policy and national security reporters whose voices are familiar as a gauge for how far and fast things are eroding:
In a span of only 50 days, President Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II. …
But perhaps the more remarkable thing is that Mr. Trump is eroding the old order without ever describing the system he envisions replacing it with. His actions suggest he is most comfortable in the 19th-century world of great-power politics, where he, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, negotiate among themselves, and let lesser powers fall in line.
Here’s the big question: As Trump takes the wrecking ball to the old version of American foreign policy, what does he intend to construct in its place? His career shows little evidence of strategic thinking. He has been a disrupter and dealmaker rather than a builder. His first term was marked by constant changes in personnel and policies, with few enduring achievements. …
Trump seems to envision a new balance of power with three poles: the United States plus Russia and China, whose leaders he sees as kindred spirits. The rest of the world, including the United States’ oldest allies, must fend for itself.
Neo-Manifest Destiny: Go North, Young Man
President Trump’s saber-rattling, bullying, expansionist rhetoric toward Canada might offer a glimpse of the ultimate destination for the runaway MAGA train: a neocolonial world with geographic spheres dominated by the United States, China, and Russia.
But, as sobering as that prospect is, it comes with an insane level of stupidity and ignorance, not the least of which is a 21st century president cosplaying as William McKinley, the last president of the 19th century who oversaw American expansionism abroad at the height of the last Gilded Age:
Trump: "When you take away that artificial line that looks like it was done by a ruler … you look at that beautiful formation of Canada and the US, there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that. And then if you add Greenland, that's pretty good."
Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.
The House passed Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) continuing resolution 217-213, getting one step closer to avoiding a shutdown just days before the government is set to run out of funding.
The vote was largely along party lines. One Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) voted against the bill, and one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), voted to support it.
The bill advances against the backdrop of the Trump administration and its billionaire advisor Elon Musk continuing to ignore congressional appropriations bills such as this one, lawlessly shutting down agencies and ending funding for federal programs.
The Senate will now take up the bill.
TPM will continue CR coverage from the Hill throughout today. Follow along here:
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The House passed Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) continuing resolution 217-213 Tuesday afternoon, bringing Congress one step closer to avoiding a shutdown just days before the government is set to run out of funding.
