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Commentary: A Social Security insider describes DOGE's rampage at the agency and the threat to your benefits
It started on Jan. 31, when someone named Mike Russo showed up at the Social Security Administration offices outside Baltimore and started introducing himself as a representative of DOGE, the federal budget-cutting service headed by Elon Musk.
Over subsequent days, he urged seniorSocial Security Administration officials to take the deferred resignation offer that had been sent out by DOGE under the heading “Fork in the Road.” The so-called Department of Government Efficiency set up its own internal team at the agency to ferret out information from its files. Social Security officials offered to brief the DOGE team about how the agency operates to ensure that payments are made accurately; they didn’t seem interested.
These details and others are drawn from an extraordinary declaration made in Maryland federal court by Tiffany Flick, who rose during her 30 years with the agency to become acting chief of staff to acting Commissioner Michelle King. Flick retired shortly after King was replaced as acting commissioner by Leland Dudek, formerly a mid-level agency employee, on Feb. 16.
If SSA’s…procedures are not followed…that could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.
— Former Social Security official Tiffany Flick
Flick’s declaration includes an explicit warning that DOGE’s rampage through the Social Security Administration “could result in benefits payments not being paid out or delays in payments.”
Make no mistake: This would be catastrophic to millions of Americans and a politically toxic development.
The undermining of Social Security by the Trump administration has already begun. In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”; as I wrote, that demonstrated that he knows nothing about Social Security, and nothing about Ponzi schemes.
Trump has stated that he’s “not touching” Social Security, but in his March 4 address to Congress he claimed that Musk had uncovered vast fraud at the agency, though he didn’t back up that claim.
Trump officials have taken steps to cut Social Security employees by more than 10%, which would undermine the agency’s already overstretched ability to provide customer service to claimants and beneficiaries.
Most recently, the administration briefly canceled the right of Maine residents to register their newborns for Social Security numbers remotely at birth, requiring them instead to bring their infants to a Social Security field office to complete the necessary paperwork.
Following an uproar, that action was reversed within a day, but it raised suspicions that it was undertaken to punish Mainers for their Democratic governor’s public upbraiding of Trump at a Washington meeting.
Social Security has made payments earned by American workers, their survivors and dependents for 85 years, without a break. That record is fundamental to the program’s overwhelming popularity, the confidence it enjoys among its roughly 70 million current beneficiaries and its stature as the greatest safety net program in American history, keeping more than 22 million Americans out of poverty.
Flick’s declaration was filed as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and other plaintiffs seeking to block DOGE’s access to the Social Security Administration and its data. I asked the Social Security Administration for comment on Flick’s assertions, but haven’t received a reply.
The declaration makes sickening reading. She describes how her agency was invaded by know-nothing DOGE employees who ran roughshod over agency rules and procedures designed to protect the confidentiality of private personal information about beneficiaries and their family members, as required by law.
Social Security master files that DOGE demanded and may have received access to include “information about anyone with a Social Security number, including names, names of spouses and dependents, work history, financial and banking information, immigration or citizenship status, and marital status,” Flick states.
The DOGE representatives were secretive about what they were doing at the agency, she writes. They appeared to be focused on “the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts.” Their concerns fell into three categories: “untrue allegations regarding benefit payments to deceased people of advanced age;…single Social Security numbers receiving multiple benefits…; [and] payments made to people without a Social Security number.”
Each of those concerns, Flick writes, was “invalid” and “based on an inaccurate understanding of SSA’s data and programs.”
The assertion that payments are being made to people as old as 150 years, as I reported earlier, resulted from DOGE’s misunderstanding of the agency’s software; nevertheless it was bandied about by Musk at a White House press briefing and repeated in exaggerated form by Trump in his March 4 speech.
As for multiple benefits being paid on single Social Security numbers, that’s normal: “DOGE seemed to misunderstand the fact that benefits payments to spouses and dependents will be based on the Social Security number of a single worker,” Flick explains.
And she states that SSA officials have never seen evidence that benefits are inappropriately being paid to people without a Social Security number. DOGE didn’t give agency officials “enough information to understand the source of the concern.”
Officials who tried to block them were sidelined. As Flick describes the incursion, Dudek informed her on Jan. 30 that Russo and another DOGE representative would shortly be arriving at the agency.
Because Dudek was a mid-level employee, Flick asked why he was in contact with anyone at DOGE. She told him to cease any such contact, and informed him that all further contact with DOGE would be handled by the office of acting Commissioner King.
Over the next week or two, King’s office was peppered with demands from DOGE that a software engineer, Akash Bobba, be given access to SSA data.
“That request was unprecedented,” Flick says, not only in its nature but its haste. Ultimately, Bobba was given “read-only” access to limited SSA data. Flick soon determined that Bobba was not working in a secure location, as was required under agency rules, but off-site at the Office of Personnel Management, a separate executive branch agency.
She says it appeared that other, non-SSA people were working with him and may have had access to the protected personal information. Of greater concern, although Bobba had “read-only” access to the data, meaning that he couldn’t change it, he had the ability to “copy and paste, export, and screenshot that data.”
In any case, Russo demanded that Bobba have access to “everything, including source code,” Flick declares. “Generally, we would not provide full access [to] all data systems even to our most skilled and highly trained experts.” The request to give Bobba unfettered access to the data “without justifying the ‘need to know’ this information was contrary to SSA’s long-standing privacy protection policies and regulations,” but no one would explain why its access was needed.
Dudek was placed on administrative leave on Feb. 14 and an investigation was opened into whether he had inappropriate contact with DOGE. Two days later, President Trump named Dudek acting commissioner.
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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