When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public. Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government.
Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is primarily used by governments.
I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I’m observing how the government is increasingly pulling together data from various sources, and the political and social consequences of combining those data sources. Palantir’s work with the federal government using the Gotham platform is amplifying this process.
Gotham is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is deceptively simple: take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components and then connect the dots. Gotham is not simply a database. It takes fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms it into a unified, searchable web.
The stakes are high with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software enables law enforcement and government analysts to connect vast, disparate datasets, build intelligence profiles and search for individuals based on characteristics as granular as a tattoo or an immigration status. It transforms historically static records – think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages – into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.
These departments and agencies use Palantir’s platform to assemble detailed profiles of individuals, mapping their social networks, tracking their movements, identifying their physical characteristics and reviewing their criminal history. This can involve mapping a suspected gang member’s network using arrest logs and license plate reader data, or flagging individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status.
The efficiency the platform enables is undeniable. For investigators, what once required weeks of cross-checking siloed systems can now be done in hours or less. But by scaling up the government’s investigative capacity, Gotham also alters the relationship between the state and the people it governs.
Shifting the balance of power
The political ramifications of Palantir’s rise come into focus when you consider its influence and reach across the government. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone has spent more than US$200 million on Palantir contracts, relying on the software to run its Investigative Case Management system and to integrate travel histories, visa records, biometric data and social media data.
These integrations mean that Palantir is not just a vendor of software; it is becoming a partner in how the federal government organizes and acts on information. That creates a kind of dependency. The same private company helps define how investigations are conducted, how targets are prioritized, how algorithms work and how decisions are justified.
Because Gotham is proprietary, the public, and even elected officials, cannot see how its algorithms weigh certain data points or why they highlight certain connections. Yet, the conclusions it generates can have life-altering consequences: inclusion on a deportation list or identification as a security risk. The opacity makes democratic oversight difficult, and the system’s broad scope and wide deployment means that mistakes or biases can scale up rapidly to affect many people.
Beyond law enforcement
Supporters of Palantir’s work argue that it modernizes outdated government IT systems, bringing them closer to the kind of integrated analytics that are routine in the private sector. However, the political and social stakes are different in public governance. Centralized, attribute-based searching, whether by location, immigration status, tattoos or affiliations, creates the capacity for mass profiling.
In the wrong hands, or even in well-intentioned hands under shifting political conditions, this kind of system could normalize surveillance of entire communities. And the criteria that trigger scrutiny today could be expanded tomorrow.
Gotham’s capabilities may enable government agencies to carry out similar operations on a much larger scale and at a faster pace. And once some form of data integration infrastructure exists, its uses tend to expand, often into areas far from its original mandate.
A broader shift in governance
The deeper story here isn’t just that the government is collecting more data. It’s that the structure of governance is changing into a model where decision-making is increasingly influenced by what integrated data platforms reveal. In a pre-Gotham era, putting someone under suspicion of wrongdoing might have required specific evidence linked to an event or witness account. In a Gotham-enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns in the data – patterns whose importance is defined by proprietary algorithms.
This level of data integration means that government officials can use potential future risks to justify present action. The predictive turn in governance aligns with a broader shift toward what some scholars call “preemptive security.” It is a logic that can erode traditional legal safeguards that require proof before punishment.
The stakes for democracy
The partnership between Palantir and the federal government raises fundamental questions about accountability in a data-driven state. Who decides how these tools are used? Who can challenge a decision that was made by software, especially if that software is proprietary?
Without clear rules and independent oversight, there is a risk that Palantir’s technology becomes normalized as a default mode of governance. They could be used not only to track suspected criminals or terrorists but also to manage migration flows, monitor and suppress protests, and enforce public health measures. The concern is not that these data integration capabilities exist, but that government agencies could use them in ways that undermine civil liberties without public consent.
Once put in use, such systems are hard to dismantle. They create new expectations for speed and efficiency in law enforcement, making it politically costly to revert to slower, more manual processes. That inertia can lock in not only the technology but also the expanded scope of surveillance it enables.
Choosing the future
As Palantir deepens its government partnerships, the issues its technology raises go beyond questions of cost or efficiency. There are civil liberties implications and the potential for abuse. Will strong legal safeguards and transparent oversight constrain these tools for integrated data analysis? The answer is likely to depend on political will as much as technical design.
Ultimately, Palantir’s Gotham is more than just software. It represents how modern governance might function: through data, connections, continuous monitoring and control. The decisions made about its use today are likely to shape the balance between security and freedom for decades to come.
Last week, we wrote about two federal judges who were clearly fed up with the Supreme Court’s shadow docket nonsense—one sarcastically “apologizing” to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the other flat-out calling their approach “Calvinball.” Turns out those weren’t isolated incidents. They were canaries in the coal mine.
Soon after that, NBC News dropped a remarkable report revealing that federal judges across the country—appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump—are openly criticizing the Supreme Court’s handling of emergency cases. And when I say “openly,” I mean they actually got ten federal judges to go on the record (anonymously) calling out the Court’s approach.
Having judges speak out like this is not normal. Federal judges don’t usually air their grievances with the Supreme Court to reporters. The fact that a dozen judges were willing to talk to NBC about this—even anonymously—suggests we’re looking at something approaching a judicial revolt.
Here’s how NBC describes the pattern that’s emerged:
Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.
And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation.
The judges aren’t just frustrated with being overturned—that’s part of the job. They’re frustrated with being hung out to dry by a Supreme Court that issues cryptic orders and then expects everyone to treat them as binding precedent.
“It is inexcusable,” a judge said of the Supreme Court justices. “They don’t have our backs.”
Another judge put it more bluntly:
The Supreme Court, a second judge said, is effectively assisting the Trump administration in “undermining the lower courts,” leaving district and appeals court judges “thrown under the bus.”
The numbers are staggering. Since Trump took office in January (and not including the latest data from this week), the DOJ has asked the Supreme Court 23 times to block lower court rulings on an emergency basis. The Court granted 17 of those requests. And NBC’s analysis found that five of those 17 decisions “included no substantive reasoning at all,” while seven others “included less than three pages of explanation.”
And we already know it’s at least one more to add to that list based on what happened this week.
It would be one thing (not a good one) if these were just “emergency stays” to deal with a rapidly changing situation. At least some of that would be somewhat understandable. But as we’ve been describing over and over again, the Supreme Court is treating these rushed, unexplained orders as binding precedent… and expecting lower court judges to understand and enforce their unexplained rules.
Ten of the 12 judges who spoke to NBC News said the Supreme Court should better explain those rulings, noting that the terse decisions leave lower court judges with little guidance for how to proceed. But they also have a new and concerning effect, the judges said, validating the Trump administration’s criticisms. A short rebuttal from the Supreme Court, they argue, makes it seem like they did shoddy work and are biased against Trump.
The judges are actually underplaying this. We’ve seen over and over when judges rule against the Trump admin, that MAGA supporters insist that the judges are “enemies of the people” and the Supreme Court is actually making that worse. Because when they do these half-baked, unexplained brain farts, leaving no guidance at all for lower court judges, and then sweep in and scold the judges later, it only reinforces that nonsense argument.
And, yes, judges are well aware of how this puts them all at risk.
“It is inexcusable,” a judge said of the Supreme Court justices. “They don’t have our backs.”
All 12 judges spoke on condition that they not be identifiable, some because it is considered unwise to publicly criticize the justices who ultimately decide whether to uphold their rulings and others because of the risk of threats.
Judges are increasingly targeted, with some facing bomb threats, “swattings” and other harassment. Judges especially involved in high-profile cases — and their families — have reported receiving violent threats.
Or, putting it more starkly:
The judge who said the Supreme Court justices are behaving inexcusably has received threats of violence and is now fearful when someone knocks on the door at home.
If major efforts are not made to address the situation, the judge said, “somebody is going to die.”
The three Democratic-appointed Justices each have tried to raise the alarm about this abuse of the shadow docket and how much damage it’s doing not just to the rule of law, but to the wider judiciary as well. But without much luck.
In the article, Just Kagan highlights how her colleagues are failing judges on the lower courts:
She referred to a different case in which Massachusetts-based Judge Myong Joun issued a ruling that blocked Trump administration plans to downsize the Education Department. The administration quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, whichruled in favor of the government.
Kagan noted that the case raised several legal issues, including what authority Joun had to step in, but the Supreme Court’sterse orderdid not explain on what grounds it was blocking his decision. The only writing was from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned an 18-page dissent.
“What’s that court supposed to think?” Kagan asked, referring to Joun. “It’s just impossible to know, and that puts the [lower] court in a very difficult situation.”
Meanwhile, Justice Brett Kavanaugh is out there thinking the biggest problem is people calling it the “shadow docket” or the “emergency docket.” He spent last week trying to rebrand this mess. At a judicial conference, he pushed for calling it the “interim docket” instead of the “shadow docket”:
“I think the term ‘interim docket’ best captures it,” Kavanaugh told attendees at the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit’s conference in Memphis on Thursday, after he was asked to “settle” the dispute over what to call the justices’ oft-criticized practice of issuing brief orders in pending cases without explanation.
Though the docket has also been called the “emergency docket,” for its handling of emergency requests for relief — or the “shadow docket” by critics who see it as opaque —Kavanaugh noted that not all of these requests the justices field are emergencies.
“It’s not real catchy, so I’m not sure it’ll bloom, but that’s the term” Kavanaugh said of his preferred label, which he’d also invoked in July at the Eighth Circuit’s conference in Kansas City.
Earlier this year, Kavanaugh also tried to defend this “no explanation” nonsense by arguing it might be more dangerous to give a full explanation:
Kavanaugh, speaking Thursday at the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, said there can be a “danger” in writing those opinions. He said that if the court has to weigh a party’s likelihood of success on the merits at an earlier stage in litigation, that’s not the same as reviewing their actual success on the merits if the court takes up the case.
“So there could be a risk in writing the opinion, of lock-in effect, of making a snap judgment and putting it in writing, in a written opinion that’s not going to reflect the final view,” Kavanaugh said.
But if that’s the case, then these cases should not, under any circumstance, bind the lower courts! It completely misses the point. The problem isn’t that they’re issuing emergency orders—it’s that they’re treating those orders as binding precedent while providing no guidance about what they actually mean.
Kavanaugh also gave a bizarre “well, we’re only human, and it’s tough for the justices to be consistent” explanation:
“It’s possible we screwed up, very possible, we’re human. But it’s also possible, and oftentimes is the case, that it’s the product of nine of us, or at least five of us, trying to reach a consensus or a compromise on a particular issue that might be difficult,” Kavanaugh told judges and lawyers attending the 6th Circuit Judicial Conference. “I’m fully aware that can lead to a lack of clarity in the law and can lead to some confusion, at times.”
“Consistency is a lot easier when it’s one person than when it’s nine. We try to be consistent. … We can do better. We’re always trying to do better,”
That’s not exactly reassuring when you’re dealing with constitutional rights and the rule of law.
And also, if you admit that you can’t be consistent and you’re making the judgment calls on too little information and you don’t want to explain you’re reasoning, maybe don’t sign onto a shadow docket ruling scolding judges for not understanding your vibes-based approach to interpreting the law?
When so many federal judges with decades of experience are willing to go to reporters—even anonymously—to criticize the Supreme Court’s approach, that’s not just institutional friction. That’s a breakdown of how the judicial system is supposed to work.
The Supreme Court has turned constitutional law into a guessing game where even experienced judges can’t figure out the rules. And when those judges try to follow established precedent instead of reading tea leaves, they get accused of “defying” the Court and face threats of violence.
That’s not jurisprudence. That’s not the rule of law. It’s a modern star chamber with no public legitimacy.
I know it’s never great to blame the victim, but this all could have been avoided if ICE officers hadn’t decided they all needed to act like paramilitary death squad members while raiding Home Deport parking lots. If you’re in the sort of business you feel you can’t do safely with your entire face exposed, you’re in the wrong business.
An activist has started using artificial intelligence to identify Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents beneath their masks — a use of the technology sparking new political concerns over AI-powered surveillance.
Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, estimates he and a group of volunteers have publicly identified at least 20 ICE officials recorded wearing masks during arrests. He told POLITICO his experts are “able to reveal a face using AI, if they have 35 percent or more of the face visible.”
I’m not sure what software Skinner is running on this particular box, but asserting a whole face can be accurately determined from only 35% of a face is a non-starter. I certainly wouldn’t trust cops with this tech add-on to existing facial recognition software. It’s no more trustworthy (perhaps even less!) when it’s being deployed by citizens.
While I’d like to believe regular people would be more careful and conscientious of this tech’s limitations when using it, there’s no reason to believe they won’t be just as bad as cops, who continue to ignore false positives (and false arrests) because the tech makes it easier to arrest people, even if it’s not all that great at actually identifying people.
Of course, all of the administration’s frontmouths claim ICE agents need masks for safety reasons, something that’s being echoed all too often by people who should know better (or at least have staffers that know better).
ICE agents “don’t deserve to be hunted online by activists using AI,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on border management and the federal workforce.
That’s not a statement anyone can honestly make. There are many things ICE is deserving of, and while being subjected to digital vigilantism is far from ideal, they certainly don’t need more legislated protections — not when they’re backed by billions of new tax dollars and the president’s hatred for all things migrant. But that is what’s happening now, in response to activists’ efforts like these.
On the other hand, some lawmakers are seeking to prevent ICE officers from wearing masks, although it’s unlikely any bill introduced with this end goal will ever go to committee, much less secure the number of votes needed to see it vetoed the minute it hits Trump’s desk.
But it does raise a lot of questions that demand answers, no matter how uncomfortable those answers might be. One of the questions it raises is why do we let cops do this sort of thing if it’s so obviously a problem if a regular person utilizes the same tech for the same reason (identification)? Are legislators really going to keep insisting federal officers are being victimized when this is the sort thing cop shops do far too regularly?
While the technology is recent, the method is not — and in fact a version of it has been used by American police departments on civilians. A 2019 study from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology found police departments digitally altering pictures and using artist sketches as the basis for finding suspects through facial recognition.
The biggest question is whether federal officers should be allowed to be masked when engaging in their duties in full view of the public. The answer should, unequivocally, be “No.” Not “No, unless…” or “No, but…” It’s a flat “No” from me. To answer this question any other way simply creates loopholes and excuses for officers, which will inevitably return to the ICE status quo of “everyone wears a mask all the time.”
Sure, if there are officers working in an undercover position, they’re free to conceal their identities. But of course they won’t mask up, because that might put their targets on edge. So, it’s obviously not a “protection” thing when ICE does it. It’s an intimidation thing that goes hand in hand with its abject cowardice thing. They don’t want to be identified because they don’t want to be held accountable for their actions — whether it’s being named in a lawsuit or simply being taunted by name by passersby during raids of Home Depot parking lots.
Is this a good way to fight back against ICE’s (don’t call it a) mask mandate? That’s a flat “No” from me. Using faulty tech to generate questionable IDs compounds existing issues and makes it far more likely to get innocent people hurt and generate legislation that will ensure that only the government gets to use this tech irresponsibly.
While I appreciate the fact that a lot of people feel helpless when faced with this day-to-day onslaught of ICE aggression, you can’t level the playing field by creating a different slope on your side of it. And as much as I want ICE officers to be forced to act like public servants while they’re performing their public duties, I also realize that’s simply not going to happen because that would mean ICE officers won’t be able to violate rights as regularly as they need to in order to keep pace with the administration’s bigoted bloodlust.
For now, the best moves are to express your support for legislators seeking to pass laws forbidding mask use by federal officers and doing what you can to help those affected by mass deportation efforts, whether that’s finding them legal assistance or simply shaming ICE officers out of neighborhoods and parking lots by turning your cameras on them and advancing on their position until they feel forced to retreat. There’s no big victory on the horizon. But every battle counts. Trying to bypass this grind with unproven tech add-ons isn’t going to speed up the process. It’s just going to do more harm than good in a world that already has an excess of harm to deal with.
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I didn’t like Charlie Kirk. His morals and principles, as expressed through his rhetoric and actions, disgusted me. I’ve no reason to mourn his death—and no plans to celebrate it.
Kirk was killed in what is most likely an act of politically inspired violence. He was shot during one of his usual speaking events; at the moment before he was shot, he was trying to link transgender people to mass casualty shootings in a way that statistics don’t bear out. His death will galvanize conservatives, who will claim that political violence is “not the answer” and “Democrats caused this” but who refused to condemn—and sometimes mocked—the attack against Paul Pelosi that was motivated by conservative rhetoric.
This brief essay isn’t necessarily about conservative vs. liberal, Republican vs. Democrat, or whatever other sociopolitical dichotomy you might have in your head. Sure, it would be easy to take that route, especially with Donald Trump as the head of the Republican table. What this essay is about is violence.
For months now, in this site’s comments sections, I’ve been mocked for (and pressured to give up) a stance I hold with complete sincerity: Violence should be the absolute last resort for any issue, especially sociopolitical ones. My stance has been erroneously likened to suicidal pacifism. I don’t believe in such a thing and I would never ask others to believe in it. What I do believe is that violence, like the murder of Charlie Kirk, creates more problems than it solves.
Sure, Kirk is dead, and he will never again spread his brand of vile rhetoric anywhere. But now Kirk is being turned into a martyr to a cause and a party for which he likely didn’t intend to die; those who believe in the MAGA movement will use his death as a rallying cry for going after the “enemies” of that movement (and its leader). His murder is likely to beget more violence, which will cause more pain and more strife, which will further fracture our already fragile society. No social good is served by him being murdered in an act of political vigilantism.
My beliefs about violence are driven by the idea that the use of violence curtails any chance of a situation being solved peacefully. Violence always makes a conflict worse, especially when it becomes the go-to “answer” for conflict resolution instead of the last resort. But I recognize that violence can sometimes become a necessity—which is why I say that people should forgo the use of violence unless all non-violent paths to resolve a conflict have either been exhausted or taken off the table. Even then, one should only use as much violence as is necessary to stop a situation from getting worse. Lethal violence is the line that should only be crossed when it, too, is the last available option. Once someone is dead, you can’t bring them back, so you better be goddamn sure that killing them is the only way to save yourself from them.
Charlie Kirk is dead and nothing will bring him back. We are all a little worse off for his death—not because he was a good person, but because his death is likely to inspire more violence. That will cause far more problems than murdering him could ever hope to solve.
Earlier this month, we noted how Wired and Business Insider were among a half-dozen or so major news organizations that were busted publishing fake journalism by fake journalists using AI to make up completely bogus people, narratives, and stories. The Press Gazette found that at least six outlets were conned by a fraudster going by the name of “Margaux Blanchard.”
A week later and the scandal is much bigger than originally stated.
Business Insider has had to pull upward of 40 stories offline for being fabricated. Washington Post and Daily Beast have found that “Margaux Blanchard” appears to be part of a much larger operation using “AI” to defraud news outlets and mislead the public. Most of the pieces were fake personal essay type writing for experiences that were completely made up, by a rotating crop of different fake authors.
And most of this stuff should have been caught by any competent editor before publication:
“The Beast’s review found several red flags within the since-deleted essays that suggest the writing did not reflect the authors’ lived experiences. This included contradictory information in separate essays by the same author, such as changing the gender and ages of their supposed children, and author-contributed photos that reverse-image searches confirm were pulled from elsewhere online.”
Recall that back in May, Business Insider executives celebrated the fact they had laid off another 21 percent of their workforce as part of a rushed pivot toward automation. But not only does that automation have problems with doing basic things (not plagiarizing, writing basic headlines, and citations), it’s opened up new problems in relation to propaganda and fraud.
Again, early LLM automation has some potential. But the kind of folks who own (or fail upward into positions of management at) major corporate media outlets primarily see AI as a way to lazily cut corners and undermine already underpaid and mistreated labor. As you see at places like Business Insider and Politico, these folks don’t appear to genuinely really care whether AI works or makes their product better. In large part because they’re exceptionally terrible at their jobs.
There’s automation and what it can actually do. And then there’s a deep layer of fatty fraud and representation by hucksters cashing in on the front end of the AI hype cycle. That latter part is expected to have a very ugly collision with reality over the next year or so (it’s something research firms like Gartner call the “trough of disillusionment.”) Others might call it a bubble preparing to pop.
Most extraction class media owners have completely bought into the hype, in part because they really desperately want to believe in a future where they can eliminate huge swaths of their payroll with computers. But they’re not apparently bright enough to actually see the limitations of the tech through the haze of hype, despite no limit of examples of the hazards of rushed adoption of undercooked tech.
The fact that this is still going is absolutely insane. If you haven’t followed along with us in the saga of Katy Perry, the famous pop star, and Katie Perry, a local Australian clothing designer, and the trademark dispute between the two, I will happily catch you up in truncated form. Please note that I will stick mostly to first names to avoid confusion as much as is possible. Here we go.
Katie Taylor in Australia has a clothing line sold under the label “Katie Perry.” She sued Katy Perry because the singer sold clothing merch during a 2014 tour in Australia, nearly 9 years later. She claimed at the time that this was trademark infringement, indicating that she was concerned that the public would be confused into thinking the concert merch was produced by Katie’s company (keep this in mind, it will be very important later). Amazingly, the courts agreed and ruled that Katy’s company, Kitty Purry, was liable for infringement. Katy appealed the decision, which Katie indicated was a personal attack against her, despite her having initiated the trademark lawsuit to begin with. The courts ended up finding for Katy on appeal, reversing the lower court’s ruling that infringement had occurred and canceling Katie’s trademarks as a result. Part of the reasoning for that included evidence that Katie had actually attempted to associate her clothing line with Katy, rather than the other way around, and that Katy had used the nom de plume for several years before Katie’s clothing line had even been formed.
You would think that might have been enough, but Katie appealed the ruling up to the High Court, arguing both that it was trademark infringement for Katy Perry to sell Katy Perry merch and that the rescinded trademarks should be restored. Well, the latest reporting on how that appeal is going seems to be centered around just how famous Katy was in 2008.
How famous was Katy Perry in 2008?
That’s one of the questions Australia’s highest court is considering, after hearing arguments in a long-running trademark dispute between the pop star and a fashion designer with almost the same name. Ms Taylor registered a trade mark in 2007, and says she didn’t know of Perry’s existence at the time.
But it was a different story when she re-registered a year later, with documents lodged in the High Court showing she’d heard I Kissed a Girl on the radio and bought it on iTunes. More than a decade on, Ms Taylor took the singer to court, accusing her of infringing the “Katie Perry” trademark by selling branded shoes, clothing and headwear while on tour in Australia.
I Kissed A Girl was released in April of 2008, for what it’s worth, and was the song that launched Katy Perry into worldwide stardom. Besides that, this nitpicking over the level of fame at a single point in time largely ignores the analysis of the lower court and its stance that the limited nature of the type of clothing Katy Perry was releasing was such that public confusion wasn’t going to be a thing. These were concert items, not to be confused with a more typical fashion line.
Which, on the question of Katie’s trademarks, is something her own lawyers appear to agree with.
The designer sat in the front row of the courtroom’s public gallery wearing a black jacket and pants, accompanied by her mother and stepfather.
Her lawyers argued shoppers were savvy enough to distinguish between the two spellings, and would not think Ms Taylor’s clothes were linked to the pop star.
Except that if that’s true, then what in the hell are we doing here? If we trust the public to not make an association between the two, then this isn’t causing public confusion, and there is no need to have brought the trademark action against Katy Perry at all.
The larger point is that this is way, way too much time, energy, and effort for a trademark dispute that needn’t have occurred at all. Of all the folks invested in this dispute, it appears the Australian public has no stake in any of it.
“Qualified immunity” is included nowhere in the Bill of Rights. But that’s because it’s not your right. It’s a right that only exists because the Supreme Court said it should exist. And ever since it made this proclamation, it’s done everything it can to ensure this judicial doctrine can swallow nearly any rights violation thrown at it.
Qualified immunity giveth and taketh away. It giveth get-out-of-lawsuit-free cards to cops and taketh away their accountability. “No checks. No balances.,” to paraphrase the Ayn Randiest of our population.
Consequently, we get this sort of thing (highlighted by Gabriel Malor on Bluesky) far too often: the conclusion that rights have most likely been violated, followed by judges stating after a dramatic pause something to the effect of “well, but the people who make and enforce the laws really had no way of knowing that.”
That’s the conclusion the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court arrives [PDF] at following several pages of discussion, even when a lot of that discussion deals with credible claims of deliberate indifference and things that certainly look a whole lot like cruel (but, sadly, not all that unusual) punishment.
Prisoner Abre Jackson was sent to solitary confinement following an altercation with guards — something expedited by an “adjustment hearing,” which was a one-sided affair where Jackson was allowed to raise his claims against the officers, but not allowed to call witnesses or demand presentation of jail recordings of the altercation.
Things went from bad to worse following this so-called “hearing.” Jackson was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement. This is how Jackson described it in his lawsuit:
In a declaration opposing defendants’ motion for summary judgment, Jackson asserted that his disciplinary segregation cell, unlike Pontiac’s general population area, had feces and urine on the walls, constant noise with inmates banging on cell doors, water contaminated with bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease, and roaches and mice. He also said that inmates in the disciplinary segregation cells, unlike inmates in general population, throw feces and urine at other inmates when they are in the hallways.
The lower court couldn’t even be bothered to find anything wrong with this, ruling that Jackson had no “sufficient” protected liberty interest in being held in a cell that didn’t contain other people’s waste products, bacteria-infested water, vermin, or in the vicinity of other inmates who tended to use their human waste products as projectiles.
The Appeals Court says the allegations in this case sure look enough like rights violations they should probably be placed in front of a jury:
A reasonable jury could conclude that the combined effects of Jackson’s three-month assignment to disciplinary segregation and the conditions of his segregation imposed what Sandin called “an atypical and significant hardship.” 515 U.S. at 484. If so, then Jackson was deprived of a liberty interest entitling him to the “minimum procedures appropriate under the circumstances” to ensure the “protection of the individual against arbitrary action of government.”
Then it goes completely in the other direction:
We do not decide that issue because, as we explain next, the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity on the liberty interest question.
And that means guards and prisons can continue to shove inmates into filthy cells and generally ignore any obligation to care for their health and well-being because this court — for whatever reason — has decided it’s not actually going to make a judgment call on the constitutionality of the alleged acts. Instead, it will give the government the benefit of a doubt, because the fewer times the government exercises any common sense or discretion, the less likely it is that the next case with similar facts will result in the removal of qualified immunity protections.
Also, the court says that while the circumstances were admittedly awful, they just weren’t awful enough to either (1) declare this a rights violation with a precedential decision, or (2) roll back immunity so the facts could be further developed by the trial court.
On the conditions factor, the conditions Jackson alleges here, though “more severe than those found in the general prison population,” are “hardly analogous to a confinement that deprives a prisoner of all human contact or sensory stimuli,” Hardaway, 734 F.3d at 744, like the conditions the Supreme Court found sufficient to create a liberty interest in Wilkinson. And on the duration factor, Jackson has not “presented case law stating that a [three]-month period of confinement under conditions similar to [his] implicates a liberty interest.”
When your only “human contact” is the involuntary reception of their hurled fecal matter, harsher solitary conditions might actually be preferable, especially if those cells were a bit freer of vermin and/or contaminated water. And the court saying three months of confinement under these conditions just isn’t terrible enough to justify further examination by the judicial system says probably more than the court intended to say about its general attitude towards plaintiffs who also happen to be convicted criminals.
The government wins again and it’s a clean win that doesn’t establish any new boundaries for it to begrudgingly respect. This prison and its employees can go right back to doing the sorts of things they did to this plaintiff, virtually assured of escaping any future lawsuits by mumbling the same things about a lack of precedent that might indicate otherwise. And the government’s reaction to lawsuits like this is never “oh, that was close, maybe we’d better fix some stuff.” It’s always the same thing: let’s just keep abusing people repeatedly until someone finally makes us stop.
On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”
Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.
DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”
The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.
DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”
Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.
Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.
It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.
DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”
The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.
The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”
In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”
For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.
The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.
They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.
They did none of these things.
Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.
Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.
Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.
By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.
Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.
Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.
To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.
Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)
At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”
Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.
In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.
After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.
In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.
But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)
Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.
In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.
Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)
Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”
Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”
DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.
Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.
In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.
Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”
Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.
Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedlysaid that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)
Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”
Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.
Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.
Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.
Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.
Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)
Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.
“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.
Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”
Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.
During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)
Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”
But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)
This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.
But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.
“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”
“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)
One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.
But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”
Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.
Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.
In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.
DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.
When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.
Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)
Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.
Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.
As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.
“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”
“How dare you,” Miller said.
Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”
But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.
Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.
Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.
On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”
Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.
It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.
“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)
As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”
Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.
“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”
Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.
Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.
And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.
Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.
Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”
Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”
Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”
As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”
The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”
Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”
Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.
Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.
Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.
In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”
Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.
The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”
This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don’t have one of those at the moment, so if there’s any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself.
Let’s lay a bit of groundwork quickly. Trump gets elected again for some fucking reason. He hires Elon Musk to run a government-destroying government agency for some fucking reason. Trump signs a big ugly budget bill that makes a mockery of the extremely mock-able (and hideously destructive) “work” performed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or D.O.G.E. to those who like cheap laughs and mass layoffs). Musk quits, gets in a social media fight with Trump, and suggests there’s a good reason Trump won’t release the Epstein files despite leveraging claims of a Democratic party underground sex fight club (or whatever) to get himself elected, but this time with bit more of the popular vote.
Trump, after spending months claiming the files are filled with evidence of Democratic pedophiles preying on minors, suddenly decides there’s nothing to see here. Some members of his vocal fan base are far from amused by this sudden reluctance to release the files they’ve been assured for months, if not years, will finally bury the opposing party once and for all.
The more Trump avoids the issue, the more guilty he looks. But the entire government works for Trump now, and that means the agencies involved in the Epstein investigation are now obliged to act as though there’s nothing Trump to see here.
Enter James O’Keefe and his quasi-journalistic enterprise. Project Veritas has mainly been used as a “gotcha” effort to lead unsuspecting victims into saying things Project Veritas can then edit into proverbial smoking guns, even if that means employing further deception while engaging in the editing process.
Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has apparently rubbed O’Keefe the wrong way. Project Veritas engaged in some undercover work that apparently resulted in acting deputy chief of the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations telling a woman he wanted to fuck (but in the sexual sense) that he and the DOJ were going to “redact every Republican” from any future release of Epstein investigation files.
While that is all very hilarious, what’s even funnier is the DOJ’s attempt to distance itself from this mini-scandal while somehow hoping to salvage a bit of its Trump-tainted reputation. You won’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes, but here’s the DOJ’s official response, which appears to be a dying phone’s screenshot of a Notes app note that looks for all the world like a digital approximation of a forced confession… especially when a separate font is used to denote who’s confessing to this egregious error in judgment.
The official DOJ Twitter account posting the equivalent of a screenshotted Notes app apology from a phone on 30% battery after the acting director got honeypotted on Hinge and confirmed plans of an Epstein/Maxwell coverup.
If you can’t see the embed, I truly feel for you. Click the blue link above and transport yourself to Bluesky to see the original. Trust me, it’s worth it.
But here’s the text contained in the (deep breath) DOJ’s X post of a screenshot from a phone with 30% battery life, repeated verbatim:
Acting Director Pollak:
I met a woman named Skylar on Hinge, a dating app, in July 2025, her profile is no longer findable. We had two dates (August 4 and August 16). She claimed to be an au pair in Georgetown. She gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our dates. Had I a clue, the first date would have ended immediately and there never would have been a second one.
Let’s pause here briefly to consider what’s being said here and who it’s being said by. This is the Acting Director for the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations. And the defense he’s offering is this: had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to continue being tricked. That’s something that (1) should go without saying no matter who’s saying it, and (2) a pretty stupid thing for someone in his position to be saying after they’ve already been successfully snowed.
Back to the alleged confession:
My profile indicated I did “Government” work but did not specify for which agency. I have never discussed what I do at DOJ.
We’ll stop here as well. The recording shows Schnitt not only telling “Skylar” that he has worked at the DOJ for “twenty-three years” but also telling her he’s going to be the “acting deputy chief” for the “next few months” and that he works closely with federal law enforcement, US attorneys’ offices, and DOJ prosecutors. So, that’s just a lie stuck in the middle of a “I was thinking with my dick” confession.
But before I ride Schnitt any harder, let’s continue with the alleged apology/confession:
The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done or learned via work. I have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding [Ghislane] Maxwell other than what is reported in the news. I also never divulged anything about what I do at work. I recall that she asked if I had any knowledge about Maxwell and I specifically said I only know what’s been reported in the media.
Obviously, they’re his “personal” comments. He didn’t think he was speaking on the record. And, given Trump and the DOJ’s extreme reluctance to engage in a substantive release of the Epstein investigation files, there’s no way he ever would have been cleared to speak on the record about the case. But he definitely said stuff that hasn’t been reported in the media, most particularly the stuff no member of the administration would dare to state on the record: specifically, the whole “redact all the Republicans” thing.
I don’t doubt that Schnitt is en route to the DOJ exit doors, but it’s hard to believe this is something he wrote himself and handed over voluntarily to his superiors at the DOJ. An official statement generally is delivered via a press release or emailed memo.
This is a screenshot of an app — one so carelessly made the people posting it didn’t even bother to crop the screenshot. And the font used for Schnitt’s alleged signature is a completely different font than the body of the post, which suggests someone else entirely composed this statement and copy-pasted Schnitt’s email signature block into the Notes note.
But even if this is all on the up-and-up and this is actually Schnitt’s confession, why was it handled this way? The DOJ is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and lapses of judgment like these should be treated with firings, not the casual uploading of phone screenshots to the government’s official social media accounts. And no matter what the DOJ says or Schnitt has to say for himself after being suckered into a honey trap, the general public knows better than to believe Trump’s DOJ is going to do anything other than protect the president and party officials from being exposed as committing the sexual crimes they’ve spent years accusing Democratic party members of engaging in.
