Orders to cancel a program that electronically registered Maine newborns for Social Security came from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, not from the federal retirement and disability program’s commissioner, who had previously taken responsibility, according to new reporting from the New York Times.
The Social Security in March canceled two contracts for the program, which allowed mothers to register their infants for Social Security from hospital maternity wards. After public blowback, the administration quickly reinstated the contracts.
In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek said he canceled the program to get back at Maine Gov. Janet Mills for an exchange she had with President Donald Trump over the state’s policy of allowing transgender girls to compete in female sports.
“I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” Dudek told The Times in March. “I screwed up. I’ll admit I screwed up.”
Last week, the Times reported that the order had actually come from a DOGE engineer, who in an email to Dudek flagged the two Social Security contracts along with roughly three dozen other federal contracts in Maine as “nonessential.”
“We should cancel them,” the 23-year-old engineer wrote on Feb. 27, less than a week after the clash between Mills and Trump.
The Times described Dudek as having been picked from a mid-level job to run the massive federal agency because of his willingness to cooperate with the newly created DOGE, and that in early months of the Trump presidency, Dudek was pressured to advance a “false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data” that was being used by Musk and his allies to gain access to Americans’ personal information.
