The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration made a startling warning Friday that he might have to shut down the system that undergirds the agency, and then backtracked after a judge said he had misinterpreted a court order.
Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner, issued the warning in a series of interviews with news outlets, including Bloomberg News and The New York Times, in response to the judge’s order Thursday that barred Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team from access to sensitive records.
In the interviews, Mr. Dudek suggested that he was interpreting the ruling to mean that the entire system used for the agency’s work might need to shut down, since he considered many employees, including himself, to be affiliated with DOGE.
“At the very least, it means shutting down my broad unit, the C.I.O. and general counsel,” Mr. Dudek said Friday morning. “I don’t know how I can run an agency doing that. I guess I would have no choice but to terminate everyone’s access.”
Mr. Dudek told The New York Times then that he would comply with court orders and had already terminated the access for DOGE workers, as required, and was waiting for more court guidance.
While Mr. Dudek later confirmed that the agency’s work would continue, the mere possibility of a drastic halt at an agency that sends payments to more than 73 million people each month set off alarm bells among some lawmakers and beneficiary advocates. Forty percent of older Americans rely on Social Security as their primary source of income and would face economic hardship if benefits were not paid out on time, said John Hishta, senior vice president of campaigns at AARP.
“Social Security has never missed a payment,” Mr. Hishta said in a statement. “The commissioner should focus on making sure checks go out on time and people get the customer service they deserve.”
By Friday afternoon, the guidance Mr. Dudek was seeking had come. In an informal letter, Judge Ellen Hollander of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland wrote that Mr. Dudek appeared to have misinterpreted an order she handed down the day before.
On Thursday, Judge Hollander had barred the agency’s top officials and their staff from granting Mr. Musk and anyone on his team unfettered access to a variety of the agency’s data systems.
The order, directed as much at DOGE as at the Social Security Administration, also instructed anyone affiliated with Mr. Musk who had already collected “non-anonymized” data to “disgorge and delete” any still in their possession.
Even so, Judge Hollander noted that she was not stopping the agency from continuing to work with Mr. Musk’s associates as long as privacy concerns were taken into account. And in the letter on Friday, she appeared puzzled that Mr. Dudek had concluded that nearly all members of his staff would need to have their longstanding employee access to the agency’s systems revoked.
“Such assertions about the scope of the order are inaccurate,” she wrote, citing news reports from earlier on Friday. “Employees of SSA who are not involved with the DOGE Team or in the work of the DOGE Team are not subject to the order.”
Soon after, Mr. Dudek issued a statement acknowledging the guidance and said that he wouldn’t shut down the agency.
“President Trump supports keeping Social Security offices open and getting the right check to the right person at the right time,” Mr. Dudek said in the statement, adding that employees would continue their work under the temporary restraining order.
The incident underscores what has been a chaotic month since Mr. Dudek, a fraud expert for the agency, became the acting commissioner after he collaborated with Mr. Musk’s associates, who were seeking to obtain access to agency data over higher-level officials’ opposition. In that time, rapid changes have arrived at a staid and cautious agency that sends $126 billion in payments to Americans each month, including deep proposed cuts to staffing, the restructuring of offices and announced changes in procedures for people making claims.
Mr. Dudek told The Times that he wanted to protect the Social Security system, which he said he had been a beneficiary of as a child, and thought that the DOGE officials could help. He acknowledged, though, that he had made mistakes.
His tenure may be short-lived regardless. On Tuesday, the Senate is holding hearings to consider Frank Bisignano, the chief executive office of a payment technology company, to be the new commissioner.