ANNOUNCER – It’s You Earned This, the Social Security and Medicare podcast, brought to you by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and now your host, Walter Gottlieb.
WALTER: Laura Haltzel was a high-ranking official inside the Social Security Administration when Donald Trump and Elon Musk took over the agency in January. She was an eyewitness to the severe dysfunction that the Trump administration brought to the agency that delivers earned benefits for more than 70 million of us.
Laura took early retirement at the end of February, and she decided to speak out publicly about what she saw on the inside. Radical reductions in workforce; intimidation of employees; new roadblocks for seniors and people with disabilities simply trying to collect their earned benefits. Laura says “Mayhem is their M.O.” at the Social Security Administration today. So strap in, Everybody. This is a good one, and it’s really important. Hello, Laura, how are you doing?
LAURA: I’m doing well. Thank you so much. How are you?
WALTER: I’m good under the circumstances. Of course, there’s a firestorm of new news out of SSA every day that we have to respond to, but that’s part of what we’re going to talk about. I want to start off by asking you, when did you come to the SSA, and how many cumulative years were you there?
LAURA: Oh my, I first joined SSA back in 1998. So I have a long history of years at SSA, and I think when I added it all together, it ended up being just shy of 15 years at SSA, and various roles in the Office of Retirement Policy, in the Office of Data Exchange and Policy Publications, and most recently returning to SSA in June of 2024 to work in the Office of Research Evaluation and Statistics under the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy.
WALTER: And remind us what your title was when you resigned.
LAURA: Sure. I was then at the time serving as the Associate Commissioner for the Office of Research Evaluation and Statistics, and my last day in the office working for SSA was the last day of February.
WALTER: Why did you decide to leave the SSA, and under what circumstances did you depart?
LAURA: It was a very difficult decision to leave. My intent when I returned in June was to stay for another five, seven, ten years, and really make sure that the Office of Research Evaluation and Statistics was as prepared as it could be for what we know is coming, which is an in-depth discussion about how to ensure the long-term solvency of the Social Security program. I did not plan to leave until things started to really hit the fan with the Fork in the Road email. That started to put some concern into my plans.
WALTER: So the Fork in the Road email, for the purpose of our listeners, was a memo that all federal workers, I believe, received after Musk and Doge took over, and it basically was trying to bully federal workers into taking early retirement, with the implication if they didn’t take early retirement, they might lose their jobs, or that it would be very unpleasant to stay in their jobs. Is that an accurate summation of the Fork in the Road memo?
LAURA: Yes, basically. It was very clear that if you did not take the Fork in the Road, and this has sort of been the theme when the Fork in the Road came out, and then again with the early retirement option, each one of these has been accompanied with an email that says, you know, we really encourage you to consider leaving because there are going to be reorganizations. Your job may not be included in a reorganization. There are likely to be reductions in force or RIFs. And so it was very clear that the intent was to have as many people voluntarily leave as they could to reduce the number of reductions in force that they then would be required to take under their own control. And I’ll say the target number of 50,000 employees for SSA, it has never been clear where that magic number came from, who decided 50,000 is the correct number. That seems to have been arbitrarily chosen and to not have any connection to the reality of the work that SSA is required to do.
WALTER: Clearly, and we’ll get into that a little bit later. You were there during the Biden administration when Commissioner O’Malley was doing his level best to improve customer service. You were there at the beginning of the Trump administration where Michelle King was the acting Commissioner of Social Security. And you were there when Leland Dudek was promoted to acting Commissioner after Michelle King resigned in protest about the very activities that Musk and Doge were undertaking to weaken and dismantle this agency. I would love to hear your perspective, your eyewitness account of what happened there once Dudek took over.
LAURA: So Michelle King, who, I should note, I did have the opportunity to work with on multiple occasions when she herself was in the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy, very upstanding civil servant. When she resigned in protest, it was very much connected to the Doge efforts to obtain access to very sensitive SSA data. Everyone that works at SSA understands that our data is hidden behind a firewall. We are all required, on an annual basis, to sign an oath that says that we will protect the privacy of this data.
We will not disclose it. We are required to take an annual training every year that insists that we learn that every violation of accessing data inappropriately or inadvertently. Disclosing data inappropriately, is something that could result in a five-year prison sentence and a $5,000 fine, or both, per instance of that violation. So it is drummed into every SSA employee that this data is sacred. You are not supposed to make it open to the world. So when I heard about Michelle’s departure, I understood immediately why she took that step and why Tiffany Flick took her step at the same time, because they knew that this was contrary to everything that we have all been trained to protect.
WALTER: Remind us who Tiffany Flick is.
LAURA: Tiffany Flick was the right-hand person to Michelle King when she was the acting commissioner at SSA, so she was seeing everything that Michelle was and helping her in her temporary role as acting commissioner, pending the confirmation of the presumed appointee.
WALTER: So you’re saying that if you did what Elon Musk and his inexperienced, unqualified IT bros had done, you could have faced five years in jail or five grand in fines?
LAURA: That’s correct and it’s per instance. So let’s say you know you accessed a hundred records just by whatever fate. So that’s a hundred times five years in prison or a hundred times five thousand dollars in fines. So it’s not a small amount.
When you think that every American has their Social Security number, their earnings histories, some very sensitive medical information for those that have submitted applications for disability insurance benefits. These are highly sensitive documents in every instance would be subject to that fine and or prison sentence, because the idea is data should be limited to those who actually need access at the granular level.
Even though I was an associate commissioner, I did not have access to the main system to go in and change anything or even see anything, because I did not have a need. That is intentional.
WALTER: What kind of sensitive personal data of Americans are included in SSA’s database, and why the hell would Elon Musk and his IT bros ever need access to that? What is their game?
LAURA: The intent that they’ve stated is to go after waste, fraud and abuse, and I think some of this boils down to a very clear misunderstanding of how our programs work, because they began their hunt with the Treasury Department and clearly didn’t understand that it is perfectly normal for humans to have multiple beneficiaries off of one person’s earnings history, off of their Social Security number, because we have spouses who received benefits on behalf of another spouse that worked. We have children, survivors’ benefits who are again being paid from one Social Security number. So that led them to SSA’s door when they realized that they weren’t getting the answers they wanted out of the Treasury’s numbers. And unfortunately, you cannot really use the data in the way that they are attempting to, because there really is no waste, fraud and abuse of any significant number. That is going to amount to what they are looking to find in order to cover the cost of the tax reductions that the Trump administration is trying to extend.
So the information that they are hacking into is everybody’s earnings history over their life, because most people don’t understand SSA processes, the W-2 forms on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.
So not only are they accessing sensitive information such as a Social Security benefit amount or your Social Security number, they’re accessing federal tax information or FTI, which is again, subject to the same types of penalties for access inappropriately as social security’s own data. So earnings is one piece, benefits is another. It could be the health information that a number of individuals are required to submit in order to qualify for disability insurance. So the magnitude of the data that is being shared through DOGE is so much bigger than probably most people even realize.
WALTER: So you believe that their primary agenda in getting their paws on that data was so that they could dig through it looking for supposed examples of fraud. I know that a lot of people are freaked out about the world’s richest man and oligarch having their personal data though.
LAURA: Correct, right. Once the barn doors are open, the question is how will that data be used? And nobody knows the answer to that question. That’s the big problem. It was never supposed to leave the barn in the first place. Even if they were going after it for waste, fraud and abuse, unless you understand how the programs work, you’re not gonna find anything meaningful. Aside from which we know that less than 1% of benefits are improper payments overall.
Of all of the benefit payments that are made improperly, we’ve got 0.3% that are overpayments. Of that, only 3% of all overpayments were considered to be fraudulent according to SSA’s own inspector general. So that’s less than 1% of 1% of Social Security benefits that are even potentially fraudulent across the board.
WALTER: That didn’t stop Musk and Trump from extrapolating from that data that 150 year-olds or 360 year-olds are somehow receiving social security benefits.
LAURA: Correct, and a lot of that again goes back to their lack of understanding of how the program is structured, how the data is structured, and the fact that these people are in our system, but not receiving benefits. And Tiffany Flick’s statement on the record made it very clear that any attempts to provide briefings on why this was a misinterpretation were left by the wayside. And that’s truly unfortunate because so much of this could be avoided if they had just followed the normal procedure of having a new administration come in and be briefed up on the programs.
WALTER: So not to do too much inside baseball, but I do want to go back to Leland Dudek. He apparently was disciplined or placed on leave for assisting Musk and Doge in getting their hands on Americans’ personal data. Then in the blink of an eye, Michelle King leaves and Leland Dudek is elevated from an obscure position at SSA to the acting commissioner. And then from your standpoint, what does he do once he gets that power?
LAURA: Well, he requested some briefings on various parts of Social Security, but those briefings were very truncated. Everybody prepared, all the deputy commissioners prepared a very high-level overview of what their offices do. Because I don’t know if anyone has ever worked in such a large organization, but just because you’ve worked in one part of SSA doesn’t mean you’re familiar with the entire organization and how it works.
So coming from one shop, he certainly would have needed to have been briefed by all of the deputy commissioners. But most of the deputy commissioners reported back that those briefings were essentially shut down shortly after they started. That most people were lucky if they got through one slide out of maybe five. So he then began to send around the very strongly worded emails about eliminating the ‘waste and fraud and abuse,’ and basically implying that most of the employees at SSA were somehow part of that problem. And that did not land well, obviously, morale-wise with those who were at the agency.
WALTER: I do want to talk about that. But I just want to clarify: Dudek reportedly told Social Security advocates in a closed door meeting, hey, I’m just taking orders from the top and I don’t agree with all these decisions, but I have to implement them. On the same hand, it seemed like he was a kind of true believer in this Musk/Doge nonsense. Where do you come down on that?
LAURA: I thought that that was very fascinating to see come out last week. It was very clear when he was speaking to the SSA deputy commissioners and staff that he was running the show and this is what we’re doing. He never said anything about anyone else calling the shots. So then for him to say I’m just following orders really made all of us cringe, frankly, because you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re saying I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do and it’s important, which is how everything had been framed previously, or it’s I don’t agree with it, but I’m doing it because you know my boss told me to. So it was very fascinating to hear that come out just last week.
WALTER: So under the Dudek regime or under his ‘leadership,’ if you want to call it that — maybe we put leadership in quotes — there were emails to the employees bullying them to try to take early retirement. There were these emails that, you say, communicated to the employees that they were semi-worthless. There were public pronouncements and leaks that the administration intended to cut seven thousand jobs at SSA when the workforce was already at a 50-year low, at a time when 10,000 baby boomers are reaching 65 every day. We’ll talk about the customer end of this, but what did this kind of abuse do to the workforce at SSA — who I presume are good public servants who only want to serve beneficiaries, right?
LAURA: I think something that gets lost frequently and all of these conversations is that people come to public service, particularly at Social Security, because they believe in the mission of SSA. Almost everybody is affected by Social Security. You’re either contributing to it yourself so that you have a guaranteed stream of income and retirement, or you may have parents who are currently receiving Social Security retirement benefits.
Every single person in America is benefiting from Social Security, so those of us that have dedicated really our lives to the program have done so because we believe in how important it is. The people who are at SSA are not there for glory. They’re not there for just a paycheck. This is a calling, and the goal has always been to do the best for the American public, and it’s very frustrating. I wish people could spend a day with me when I was at SSA. People are putting in hours long over their normal tours of duty because they care.
WALTER: I’m so glad that you said that so the people outside government understand the dedication of those civil servants. I still want to know, though, Laura, what was the impact on the morale and well-being of the employees at SSA of all this abuse coming down from the top? When I was working on a blog post, you told me some stories, including an unfortunate woman who lost 20 pounds, so I just wonder if you could go over some of that again.
LAURA: I’ve talked about it in terms of a daily assault of electronic torture. You never know what emails coming in next, with another random deadline of 5 pm to implement some incredibly inefficient process. The uncertainty about jobs that these people are performing …and it isn’t just their own jobs… It’s concerned about the work actually getting done and how the public is going to suffer if their work is not completed. So that’s a lot of weight for these people to carry on top of the assaults on their character. The morale of the entire agency has cratered. I’m still very much in touch with my former colleagues, and to say that there have been tears in the eyes of staff and managers is an understatement. You can hear the anxiety in their voices. I have had staff that have suffered their own health issues as a result. It is not a healthy environment. It is very toxic.
WALTER: Did one of your staff actually lose 20 pounds and felt that she had to save her health?
LAURA: Yes, unfortunately, it’s a very real phenomenon. That stress manifests itself in a lot of ways for folks and for this one employee, she was unable to eat and she lost a lot of weight – at least 20 pounds – when she came to tell me that she was going to take the early retirement option because she felt her health was in jeopardy. I had the same problem my entire last week in SSA. I wasn’t able to eat, I wasn’t able to drink, I wasn’t sleeping- I had maybe two hours of sleep a night because there was just so much on my mind- and it is absolutely not sustainable. That’s, unfortunately, I think, also part of the intent behind this assault. It is not just mismanagement – although some of it, I believe, truly is mismanagement – but a lot of it is intentional, absolutely intentional psychological warfare against the federal system and the federal employees.
WALTER: And you can’t call that anything else but just plain out cravenness and cruelty. I want to go back to the impact on the public now that you’ve spoken so eloquently about the impact on the staff that serves the public. Because under Dudek and Musk and Doge, there have been several policy changes that also seem unnecessary and cruel at the same time. They announced that they’re going to start clawing back again 100% of people’s (benefit) checks who had benefit overpayments, mostly not their own fault. So the default clawback would be 100%.
That inflicts financial pain on people who are not aware that they were overpaid, and it may not be their fault. They tried to take away the ability of parents to register their newborns in the hospital for Social Security. They have just this week announced that you’ll hardly be able to do anything on the 1-800 phone line anymore. You won’t be able to complete a benefits application, whether you’re a senior or a disabled person or a family member. You will now have to jump online and perhaps go to an SSA field office just to file for new benefits. So again, does this really harm the public, and what do you think their real agenda is in doing this?
LAURA: There’s no question that this is going to harm the public. The lines to make an appointment at a field office are months long in some cases, and again, to make those appointments, you still have to call the 800 number. So you’re sitting on hold on the 800 number to make an appointment that’s months away for no good reason, and a lot of the problems are going to be self-inflicted because we are simultaneously saying we’re going to reduce the number of field offices across the country. So people will have to travel further to do anything that requires being in person at SSA, and frankly, the only thing that I could glean from what they’re attempting to do is to make it a lot harder for people to simply access the benefits that they have already paid for, and it’s unfortunate because there’s literally no need. If they were truly concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, which was part of what the memo that came out earlier this week seemed to be focused on, there are a lot of ways that we do that already.
Why on earth are we sending people into Social Security field offices to make a change in their bank routing when we have systems in place already to do that? Let the Social Security people focus on the Social Security benefits side. Changing a bank routing? We have a way around that.
WALTER: And it seemed to me that not only was there very little, if any, fraud on the phone line when people were claiming benefits, but the representative could ask you questions to validate your identity without your being forced to go online or to a field office.
LAURA: Right, right. Not everybody can afford to have a smartphone. Not everybody can afford to have a laptop. Not everybody can afford to have internet access. So again, if you’re going to pick a different alternative, why are you driving people into the already overrun field offices? They seem to have chosen the path that is going to be the hardest for the elderly, the disabled, those who are not able to drive.
WALTER: My mom is 90 years old. She’s on Social Security. She barely knows how to work her landline phone. She has no Wi-Fi, no computer, no cell phone, let alone a smartphone. So I think that’s probably not atypical of some of the seniors who are on Social Security.
LAURA: No, I would agree. And my own mother had difficulties with anything to do with online banking, online Social Security. Frankly, when my father passed, I called SSA’s 800 number to provide them with that information just because I wanted to spare her the process of dealing with anything online. And it’s going to not be a real valid option for a large portion of, again, who are our target beneficiaries? Older individuals, people who have disabilities, and people who have low income and low assets who are receiving supplemental security income. These are people who can’t save to buy a computer or save to buy a phone because the asset limits are so low. So how exactly are they going to get their benefits? It seems that if you aren’t going to cut Social Security benefits directly, this is a pretty easy way in some ways to reduce the number of people who are applying.
WALTER: We have been saying for a long time that is the true agenda, to cut Social Security one way or the other. And it’s not really a coincidence given that Musk a few weeks ago called it a Ponzi scheme.
LAURA: Yeah, that was really disappointing, and I will say it. That day that came out, I happened to be at a doctor’s office and the people around me were talking about Social Security — and they were all saying this is ridiculous. We pay into this system, we want to make sure that we get our money back and if Musk prevents us from being able to get our Social Security, there’s going to be hell to pay. And these were people that ranged from, you know, 40 to 30 to 50 to 60.
So this is a universal concern and a universal support. Both parties, the majority of people in both parties, according to a recent National Academy of Social Insurance poll, strongly support preserving Social Security and they would rather pay more to receive their benefits than have anything else done. And that is just the fact that, unfortunately, it seems Mr. Musk doesn’t understand. Mr. Trump, I think, understood that when he said he was not going to touch Social Security benefits. The problem here is that we are, in fact, touching Social Security benefits by making it that much harder for people to actually claim their benefits.
WALTER: We have been saying that if Trump promised not to touch Social Security, well, his fingerprints are all over it now, Folks. There’s no question about that. I want to wrap up by pointing out that you are one of the first people who is on the inside of SSA during the beginning of the Trump administration, who witnessed all of this mischief, who has come out, is a private citizen now, and is willing to speak out publicly and on the record about what’s going on, which takes some courage. Why did you decide to do that, and did you have any concerns that there might be retribution for your telling the truth?
LAURA: I did it because I promised every person on my staff that I would not allow what was happening to go unnoticed by the public, because their concerns are really about the public, so I promised them that I would be a voice on the outside. And, yes, I understand that there are going to be repercussions there. There are going to be jobs that I’m not going to be offered. There are going to be positions that I am denied because I have stated what I’ve seen. This is the time when you have to decide what you’re going to stand for, and I can’t let this go without it being on the record as to what’s been happening. It’s too big, it’s too important. I didn’t spend 27 years focusing on Social Security to watch it be dismantled.
I simply hope that it is enough that Congress will stand up and protect SSA and protect the program, and that the White House will see that the public doesn’t agree with their approaches to, in theory, making things more ‘efficient’ when they’re not, and it’s harming everyday Americans every day.
WALTER: That is a courageous and eloquent statement. I really respect and admire not only your civil service work, but what you’re doing now to get the truth out, and I think that listeners and the general public, like the ones in the doctor’s office, will be inspired by what you’re saying to let Washington know that what’s going on at SSA and with Social Security under Trump, Musk and Doge is not acceptable. So thanks for being a great example of speaking truth to power and speaking out, Laura. Anything to add before we go?
LAURA: No, just, I’m grateful that you all are shining a light on this. I’m grateful that it is starting to resonate across the country and I’m seeing it come up in town hall meetings now. I’m very glad that the public is starting to see exactly what this might mean for them and it’s gonna take their involvement. So I really encourage them. Call your members, tell them how you feel about these changes. Otherwise, one day, it’s gonna be too late, and we don’t want it to be too late.
WALTER: We don’t want to turn around and find out that this program that’s been working so well for 90 years has been hobbled or dismantled. By the way, our CEO, Max Richtman, was just at a town hall with Congressman Steve Cohen in Memphis last night and a lot of those constituents were up in arms about what’s going on. Laura, thanks again for being generous with your time.
LAURA: Not at all glad to be here, thank you.
WALTER: If you’re fed up with Trump and Musk’s interference in the Social Security program, tell your members of Congress, tell the White House. Go to town halls held by your elected representatives. Show up, speak out — and save our earned benefits. And to join us in this fight, visit ncpssm.org and click join. Our engineer is Shahab Shokouhi; our editor is Steve Lack; and I’m Walter Gottlieb saying, “You earned this!”