Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek released a statement after suggesting he may have to close down the agency after a judge ruled against DOGE this week.
The acting Social Security Administration (SSA) head called off shutting down the agency after he previously said he would do so in the aftermath of a temporary court order that blocked Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officials from accessing data.
In a statement on March 21, acting Commissioner Lee Dudek said that he is “not shutting down the agency” and that President Donald Trump “supports keeping Social Security offices open and getting the right check to the right person at the right time.” Employees at the agency will continue their work under the judge’s order, he stated.
The judge had given the agency “clarifying guidance” about the temporary order related to DOGE workers at the agency, according to his statement.
On March 20, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander barred DOGE from accessing Social Security systems that contain personally identifiable information and accused the agency of looking for fraudulent activity that may not exist.
In the aftermath of the order, Dudek told several media outlets that he may be forced to shut down the SSA.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” he told Bloomberg News last week. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”
“Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency” he told Bloomberg.
Separately, he told the Washington Post in an exclusive interview that “everything in the agency” involves personally identifiable information and that “unless I get clarification, I’ll just start to shut it down. I don’t have much of a choice here.”
His comments prompted a letter from Hollander to counsel of the SSA and the plaintiffs involved in the case. She wrote that she was aware of media reports that contained Dudek’s statements about potentially closing down the SSA in the wake of her order.
