One of [America’s] great strengths is that . . . we do not allow the Army, Navy, and the Marines and Air Force to be a police force. History is replete with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.

— Marine Major General Stephen Olmstead, testifying before Congress in 1989

For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I’ve been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer’s job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it’s supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it’s dangerous to conflate the two.

There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it’s a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it’s a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it’s why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies.

In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.

We are now in territory so uncharted that the framing of the police militarization debate no longer works. Having that discussion requires at least a shared understanding that both police officers and soldiers are obligated to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. Over the years, I’ve had clear, often pointed disagreements with police officials and their supporters over how to balance police safety, public safety, and individual rights, and about whether we do a sufficient job holding cops accountable for abuse and misconduct.

But there has never been a debate over whether the first obligation of law enforcement officers and soldiers should be to defend the Constitution. There has been disagreement over what protecting the public or defending the country ought to look like, but never over whether police and troops serve the public at all. I have never felt the need to argue that the police and military serve the country and their communities, and not a cause, a political party or a single man.

But this is where we are now. Like many politicians before him, Donald Trump doesn’t really appreciate the difference between cops and soldiers. But unlike those who occupied the White House before him, he seems to believe that federal law enforcement and the U.S. military — and really the entire federal government — exist to serve him and him alone. He has never really understood the concept of serving the public or the country because he has never understood the concept of public service in general.

We also know from Trump’s insane “bikers, cops, and troops” social media posts that he has always fantasized about having his own team of thugs who defend his honor and bring pain to his enemies. We’ve seen him openly encourage the crowds at his rallies to beat protesters.

Trump is now in the process of making that a reality. He is obliterating the safeguards in place to keep both the police and the military from turning on the public. He is taking personnel, tactics, and weapons from both institutions to create something utterly incompatible with a free society. What he’s making is more dangerous than either militarizing our domestic police or deploying the military for domestic law enforcement, and it’s something every aspiring authoritarian has done for centuries: Trump is creating his own personal paramilitary force — an amalgamation of border cops, ICE agents, Homeland Security, sheriff’s deputies, Guardsmen, and military (and probably soon, militia and extremist groups). This force is fiercely loyal to Trump, they operate in masks and unmarked vehicles, and they’re wholly unaccountable. They celebrate brutality, racism, and cruelty, and they seem believe that they’re on a mission from God.

One of the healthier aspects of American democracy is that for most of our history, the military understood the threat of asking soldiers to engage in domestic policing better than just about anyone — certainly better than elected officials. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration — and many in Congress from both parties — wanted the military to become an active participant in the drug war. And while the military itself has been far too cooperative when it comes to intercepting suspected drug boats, training local police and paramilitary tactics, the 1033 program, and other policies, when the administration wanted to bring U.S. active duty troops into U.S. cities for routine internal drug policing — soldiers conducting stop-and-frisks, Marines waging drug raids on private residences — the top brass at the Pentagon up to and including the Secretary of Defense resisted. The quote that begins this post is a good example.

Trump has never understood this tradition or the important reasons it exists. It’s been well reported now that during his first term, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring the active duty in to violently suppress peaceful domestic protests — which of course themselves were protests against police brutality. He openly asked his military advisors why he couldn’t just bring in soldiers to shoot the protesters. When Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mike Esper told Trump he couldn’t do this, he threw a tantrum. When Milley and Esper later wrote and spoke about it all, Trump accused them of treason and threatened to prosecute them — and to execute Milley.

Trump has never gotten over the fact that his staff wouldn’t let him shoot protesters (that’s a hell of sentence to write). Nearly everything he has done in his second term with respect to the military appears to have been done to ensure that no order he gives will ever be questioned again, no matter how cruel, abusive, or unconstitutional. So he has purged the military of any high-ranking officers who have expressed loyalty to quaint, founding-era principles like the firewall between the military and law enforcement. He terminated the JAG officers who set legal boundaries, prosecute abusive soldiers, and lay out the rules of engagement. He appointed an unqualified Joint Chiefs Chairman who — according to Trump — once said he “loved” Trump and vowed “to kill” for him. Perhaps most importantly, Trump handed the Defense Department over to a man who has declared that the U.S. military should be enlisted in a holy war, who believes Trump himself was sent by God, and who doesn’t believe in holding soldiers accountable for war crimes.

That’s on the military side. On the policing side, we can first point to the times Trump has celebrated or encouraged police brutality. We can go back to the 2020 protests here, too, when Trump and Bob Barr sent paramilitary teams from the Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations, who covered their name tags as they beat protesters and snatched people off the streets and shoved them into unmarked vehicles. And of course, there was the violent clearing of Lafayette Park using federal tactical teams supported by National Guard troops so Trump could pose in front of a church while clutching an upside down Bible.

Since then, Trump and his subordinates have purged federal police agencies of anyone they suspect may be more loyal to the Constitution than Trump himself. Trump has fired inspectors general across the government and effectively neutered those and offices charged with enforcing professionalism and accountability. He has dissolved or defunded offices that protect whistleblowers. At the FBI — and presumably other federal police agencies — the administration is giving polygraphs to assess the agents’ loyalty, not to the Constitution or the rule of law, but to Donald Trump and his subordinates.

Modern police militarization began during the Nixon administration but really ramped up during the Reagan administration. Reagan had declared illicit drugs a “threat to national security,” in order to execute various emergency powers (sound familiar?). Governors called up National Guard troops to assist in the drug war. In Northern California, for example, Guard troops helped patrol wilderness areas to look for pot farms. Guard helicopters invaded hippie communes and music festivals. Other governors called up Guard troops to provide support for drug raids on public housing facilities and entire blocks of some cities.

These were excessive, unnecessary, and indicative of the drug war hysteria that had gripped the country at the time. But they were still nowhere near as radical and authoritarian as what Trump is doing now. The National Guard troops in the 1980s were called up at the discretion of state governors. However misguided those decisions may have been, those governors had at least been elected by the voters of those states, and were still subject to voters’ and state legislators’ ability to remove them.

Trump federalized the California National Guard over the objections of California’s governor. He then deployed them in Los Angeles over the objections of that city’s leadership. This has never happened before. Never before in U.S. history has a president deployed the National Guard in a state without the governor of that state first requesting National Guard help, much less over the governor’s explicit objection.

Trump also federalized the National Guard in a state that decidedly voted against him three times, then deployed them in a city that also rejected him three times, and by huge margins.

Not satisfied, Trump then sent in active duty Marines, too. It’s the first time a U.S. president has sent active duty troops into a U.S. city since the L.A. riots in 1992. It’s the first time a president has sent active duty troops into a U.S. city over the objections of state and local officials since Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce desegregation in 1957.

The militarization of the drug war in the 1980s is now widely considered to be a massive overreaction driven by moral panic and culture war anger. But it’s important to keep in mind that there really was a crack epidemic that was killing a lot of people. There also really was a spike in violent crime driven by turf wars as the drug spread to cities across the country. Dumb, counterproductive U.S. drug war policy is partially to blame much of that, and dumb, counterproductive drug war policy likely made it worse, but there was at least a plausible emergency in need of an urgent response.

Likewise, Los Angeles really was burning in 1992. Sixty-three people really did die in the rioting. The Little Rock Nine really were getting death threats in 1957, and the desegregation of Central High School came in the midst of racist terrorism in the Jim Crow south, with lynchings, bombings, and assassinations.

There is no such emergency in Los Angeles today. Trump’s entire justification for deploying the National Guard and Marines is an exaggeration built on a lie.

The thrust of Trump’s entire 2024 campaign was ramping up the fear of foreigners. The claim was that the Biden administration’s border policy had caused a surge in migrant crossings, which brought a spike in crime — and that the same lax policies were responsible for a surge in fentanyl overdoses.

Only the very first part of all of that has any grounding in reality. While there was an increase in asylum seekers in the first two years of the Biden administration, border crossings were falling when Trump took office. And the claim that Biden let in tens of millions of undocumented immigrants is pure fantasy.

The surge in immigration also did not cause a surge in crime. Violent crime and property crime began falling in 2023, and are now headed for historic lows. The evidence we have strongly suggests that immigrants — documented and otherwise — commit less crimes of all types than native-born people. And drug overdose deaths, too, started to decline in 2023.

Moreover, Trump’s claim to need emergency powers to deport drug smugglers, murderers, and rapists aren’t reflected in his priorities. The problem for Trump — and for Stephen Miller — is that it’s hard to find people who don’t want to be found, and undocumented people with violent records don’t want to be found. So to boost deportations figures, they immediately began arresting people who were following the law. One of the first things this administration did this year was rescind a Biden order prioritizing the deportation of people with violent criminal records to target people seeking asylum. This is a repeat of Trump’s first term, when he rescinded a similar order from Obama.

They started arrested undocumented people reporting for their “check-ins” with ICE as they challenged their deportations. Then they started arresting migrants who came here legally and were following asylum procedures as they showed up for court hearings. They started revoking green card and visas for political speech the administration doesn’t like,, then arresting and deporting those people. They started arresting people as they showed up for citizenship hearings.

When none of that was getting Miller to his quotas, he ordered ICE to start raiding places where he thinks undocumented people accumulate — to cast a wide net and see what comes back. So they started raiding churches, community centers, and Home Depot parking lots. Here’s a screen grab from a raid on a Home Depot parking lot in Van Nuys, California.

Here’s a story about a legal resident who says ICE agents pulled him from his vehicle, took him to a cemetery, and beat him.

They started pulling over motorists who looks vaguely Latino and forcing them to prove their citizenship (white motorists were released). They were caught casing a Puerto Rican heritage museum in Chicago. (Puerto Ricans, of course, are American citizens.) Now they’ve started raiding farms (which will only exacerbate fear among farmworkers, who aren’t showing up for work, leaving produce to rot on the vine).

Trump also stripped hundreds of thousands of people who were here legally under protected status — the people he falsely accused of eating pets and “taking over” Aurora, Colorado during the 2024 campaign. His administration has now started arresting them too, including Afghans who aided U.S. troops during the war.

They’re also, predictably, detaining and arresting U.S. citizens.

The Texas-born high school student who was detained by immigration officials for more than three weeks told CNN Thursday he was treated less than human at a US Customs and Border Protection facility.

Francisco Galicia, 18, says he was held in filthy, overcrowded conditions where he was not allowed to shower for 23 days, forced to sleep on a cement floor and not given enough food. By the time he was released Tuesday, after word spread about his detention following a report by The Dallas Morning News, he said he was malnourished, having dropped 26 pounds.

“They were not treating us humanely,” Galicia told CNN during a wide-ranging interview. “…The stress was so high, they (detention center agents) were on me all the time. It was like psychological torture to the point where I almost (agreed to be deported). I felt safer to be in the cell than to be with the officers. ”

And Trump is now openly floating the idea of deporting U.S. citizens. Can he do that legally? No. Could anyone stop him if he tried? It’s getting increasingly difficult to say.

To be clear, most of this unconstitutional. You cannot send people to foreign prisons in countries they’ve never stepped foot in without due process. You can’t imprison legal residents because you don’t like an op-ed they wrote. You can’t force every Latino-looking person to carry papers they must produce on demand to prove they’re in this country legally.

But that’s not only what they’re doing, Trump’s “immigration czar” is boasting about it.

A recent Washington Post analysis found that 61 percent of the people Trump has deported had no criminal record at all. Of the remaining 39 percent, half were convicted of traffic or immigration offenses, and another quarter were convicted of drug offenses. That leaves just 10 percent who were convicted of violent or property crimes. A similar analysis by the Cato Institute found that 65 percent had no criminal record, and just 7 percent had been convicted of a violent crime.

It was after these raids on courthouses, Home Depots, car washes, and other public facilities that Angelenos began protesting and pushing back. But if there’s one thing Trump took from his last term it’s that he will not tolerate dissent. So when city residents began interfering with these actions, Trump sent in the National Guard — and then the Marines. A compliant right-wing media quickly disseminated out-of-context images that made the city look like an anarchist hellscape. The city was actually fine, as even the LAPD confirmed at the time.

That was a month ago. Both the National Guard and Marines are still there. In 1992, the federal troops left Los Angeles after seven days.

The real reason Trump deployed the masked mix of ICE, DHI, and Border Patrol agents, and then National Guard troops and Marines was to project power. It’s the same motivation behind his sad sack military parade. Trump has never been shy about his desire to have his own force well-armed thugs he can dispatch to punish his enemies and enforce his will. Over the course of his professional life, he has expressed his admiration and envy for autocrats who do. So he’s now building one.

Don’t expect the courts to stop any of this. The administration has been able to exploit gaps in both the U.S. Code and federal case law to will their aggressively unconstitutional tactics into law. These loopholes exist because we’ve long had a system that presumed the executive branch would operate in good faith — that even illegal or misguided policies would at least be motivated by president whose priority is the public interest. That was a mistake.

For more than a century, for example, the federal courts have operated under a doctrine called the presumption of regularity. The doctrine assumes that government officials discharge their duties in the public interest, and that when executive branch makes an argument in front of the courts, they do so in good faith.

I’m a crazy civil libertarian, but I’ve never really understood the good faith presumption that the courts grant to government. There’s ample evidence that government officials act in their own self interest — particularly elected officials. But it’s an especially dangerous idea now, with an administration whose default posture is to lie. What the “regularity” doctrine means in practice is that we start every challenge to a Trump administration policy — deporting people to foreign torture sites, civil war zones, and places where they’re likely to be murdered; deporting people for First Amendment-protected speech; shutting down government programs for petty, vindictive reasons; I could go on — with a presumption that the administration isn’t lying to the courts, and that its stated actions for these policies are its actual reasons for doing them. The abundant evidence to the contrary doesn’t seem to matter.

The administration has also exploited loopholes in federal law that allow presidents take extraordinary, dubiously constitutional actions in times of crisis or emergency. There are various versions of this throughout the U.S. Code. Other presidents have exploited these loopholes, too. But they’ve done it under more plausible claims of emergency, or for more benign policies. Biden used the Covid pandemic to suspend evictions or pause student loan payments, for example. Trump is the first to do it for the express purpose of silencing critics, punishing enemies, imprisoning dissenters, and brazenly trampling on constitutional rights.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom challenged Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines into Los Angeles, the administration argued that the federal courts can never review such decisions. The Ninth Circuit shot down that argument, but they did find that Trump’s justification for this particular emergency — that protests and alleged violence were threatening the ability of immigration officers to carry out deportations — was valid.

The problem is that this justification was also a lie. A week before that ruling, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in which she declared that the reason for the deployments was to “liberate” Los Angeles and California from it’s “socialist” leaders — leaders (who are not socialist) who had been democratically elected by the people of California.

Any inclination to think Noem was engaging in rhetorical hyperbole here was dispelled when the administration declined to correct or walk back her comments. Instead it defended them.

This is what historians of fascism call the dual state model. In court, autocratic governments exploit the inherent validity and deference granted to the state to make plausible, legal-ish arguments in defense of sweeping new powers. Meanwhile, they’re using that power in an entirely different manner on the ground. Authoritarian governments have used the dual state model to subvert democracies for generations.

Trump himself has on multiple occasions expressed some version of the idea that he plans to send troops to blue cities to “liberate” them from their leadership. ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service, and DOJ have now arrested, roughed up, detained, and indicted several high-profile elected Democrats, progressive political leaders, and activists. They have threatened to arrest and prosecute mayors and governors. Internal documents show that the ICE-Border Patrol sweep of L.A.’s MacArthur Park last week was intended as a theatrical show of force. There was no public safety objective. The entire point of the display was to terrorize and intimidate the city’s Latino population, along with anyone who might defend them.

Trump has boasted for years about his plans to “unleash” ICE and Border Patrol. His actions since 2020 have made clear that the only transgression for which law enforcement officers will be held accountable is showing insufficient fealty to him and his administration. He has celebrated and encouraged police brutality, and reversed previous administrations’ mild attempts to recognize the dangers of police militarization.

ICE and Border Patrol have also long been among the most abusive police agencies in the federal government, with long records of abuse and little interest in holding rogue agents accountable. They’ve also been among the most feverishly pro-Trump agencies.

The ICE budget in 2024 was $8.7 billion. Under the behemoth bill Trump just signed into law, its operating budget will grow to $75 billion, with another $105 billion to build detention centers and aid in “every state of the deportation process.” The 2024 Customs and Border Protection budget was $20 billion. Under the new bill that will nearly triple. Tens of billions more will go to Homeland Security and to assist state immigration enforcement like Operation Lone Star in Texas.

This new budget will allow this administration to increase the size of Trump’s deportation army several times over. There’s no way to staff up at those levels before Trump’s term is over without lower hiring standards. Imagine the sort of person who looks at the recent stories and videos of ICE agents engaging in racist profiling, weaponizing parents’ love for and desire to protect their children, raiding churches and schools, interrogating children, arresting grandmothers, U.S. citizens, beloved community figures, and the hardworking father of three Marines — imagine the sort of person who looks at all of that and says, “Yes, that’s what I want to do for a living.” This is who will soon comprise the bulk of Trump’s immigration force.

The kicker here is that the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable, even for egregious, willful abuses of power. In 2022, the court slammed shut the last remaining meaningful opening to file a civil lawsuit against federal agents who violate constitutional rights.

That leaves only criminal liability and extra-legal accountability. Criminal liability would require Trump’s own DOJ to prosecute ICE agents. That isn’t going to happen. State and local officials might try to prosecute abusive federal officers in state court, but thus far all the government has had do in such cases is ask a federal judge to remove those cases to federal court, at which point the become DOJ jurisdiction, at which point DOJ drops the charges.

That leaves only extra-legal accountability — shunning, shaming, and the imposition of other social consequences on officers who commit abuses. And this is precisely why the administration is encouraging officers to mask their faces and shield their identities. It removes the last remaining means of accountability.

The administration says the masks are to prevent “doxing,” and has cited a “700 percent” increase in assaults on ICE agents.

Both the defense and the statistic are nonsense.

First, unless they’re operating undercover, it is not illegal to publish or publicize the names of federal agents — nor should it be. They are state employees who have the power to arrest, detain, and kill. Of course their names and identities ought to be public information. Of course the people they stop, detain, arrest, or abuse should have names and badges to seek redress in court.

Second, the 700 percent figure is absurd. From The New Republic:

On Tuesday, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported on X that DHS told him assaults against ICE and federal immigration enforcement are now up 690 percent from last year. While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

It’s also worth noting that the increase comes at a time when, under Trump, the number of ICE encounters taking place has increased staggeringly—a fact that criminal justice journalist Jessica Pishko said makes the figures “uniquely unimpressive.

Don’t forget that the administration claimed that New York City comptroller Brad had Lander “assaulted” agents when video showed nothing of the kind. So there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of even the already remarkably low figure of 79.

Meanwhile, Trump and his administration have pushed the idea that it should be illegal for anyone who isn’t law enforcement to wear a mask in public, particularly at protests.

The terms of the police militarization debate always rested on the mutual assumption that the police and the military are separate institutions with separate missions and separate safeguards to protect democracy.

Under the new law Trump just signed, his deportation force will become the largest police force in the country — and larger than the militaries of many countries. It will be staffed with agents who have been vetted, hired, and trained based not on their loyalty to the Constitution or rule of law, but to a single man. Their state plan is to use this force to terrorize entire communities, arrest and detain critics, suppress dissent, and intimidate elected leaders into silence. Meanwhile, Trump himself has already followed the pattern set by other authoritarians before embarking on mass atrocities by dehumanizing the people his force will target — calling them “scum” and “vermin” who “poison the blood” of the country.

Thanks to the acquiescence of Congress and the Supreme Court, Trump’s new police force will operate with virtually limitless power. The agents themselves will be shielded form criminal liability. The people who order them to commit crimes and constitutional violations will be protected by Trump. And Trump himself has been insulated from criminal liability by the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Trump’s paramilitaries will be free to operate anonymously, and will be wholly unaccountable to any person, political entity, or institution — other than Donald Trump.

Back in 2007, the neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen was agitating for war with Iran. At about that time, Reuters published a series of photos from a drug raid in Tehran in which masked police broke into a residence from which alleged drug dealers were distributing cocaine.

On the Pajamas Media site, Ledeen wrote:

Terrifying pictures, to be sure. For me, the most revealing thing about them is that the police feel obliged to wear masks while conducting a drug bust in the capital. Tells you something about the relationship between the people and the state.

Ledeen’s post has since been swallowed by the internet, but you can read my reaction to it at the time here.

As you might deduce from my response, Ledeen was fairly naive about the way drug raids were (and still are) conducted in the U.S. That, or he was just being willfully obtuse.

But his gut response to the Tehran raids is still instructive. The Trump era has this aggravating, gaslighting tendency to wash away widely-shared, baseline democratic principles — concepts like the peaceful transfer of power, the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, due process, that the DOJ shouldn’t be weaponized against the president’s enemies, that the president should not use his office to enrich himself, that concentration camps are bad.

Ledeen, predictably, became an avid Trump supporter. He died in May, and I haven’t seen anything he wrote specifically about the ICE raids. But that isn’t really the point.

There was a time when it was just accepted that secret police forces were a bad thing, a thing we associated with totalitarian governments. There was a broad, overwhelming consensus that masked, unaccountable agents snatching people off the street and hustling them off to secret detention centers, abusive prison camps, foreign gulags, and concentration camps surrounded by alligators was not the sort of thing we associated with a free society. There was a time when it was just understood that “your papers, please” was language East German Stasi might use, but that we’d never tolerate here in the United States.

There was also a time when we understood that, as history has shown over and over, political leaders who expresses a desire to build secret police forces that answer only to them are dangerous demagogues who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

We’re in dire times.

CORRECTION: I have removed a video from this post that initially purported to show immigration enforcement officers walking through a neighborhood in Utah. A local outlet has since reported that they were actually U.S. Marshalls serving a homicide warrant. My apologies for the error.

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A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.

“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”

“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says. 

by Eli Hager

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Since the arrival of a team from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is in a far more precarious place than has been widely understood, according to Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration. “I don’t want the system to collapse,” Dudek said in a closed-door meeting last week, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. He also said that it “would be catastrophic for the people in our country” if DOGE were to make changes at his agency that were as sweeping as those at USAID, the Treasury Department and elsewhere.

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”