What Happened When Doge Stormed Social Security
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The article explores how a group of Dogecoin enthusiasts briefly took over a Social Security Administration online community, raising questions about online culture and the potential for disruption; commenters discuss the implications and humor behind the event.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 5, 2025 at 8:22 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 5, 2025 at 9:37 AM EDT
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Oct 5, 2025 at 5:21 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Few people realize how complicated the rules of Social Security are. That giant scroll? I’ve never seen it, but I’ve listened to many hours of discussion about how individuals might approach filing their benefits. There are many, many caveats.
There is a great opportunity for a software reboot that involves test interfaces so users can model their scenarios. The ACA marketplace offers something like this, a step in the right direction.
It’s time to enable reasonable self-service for these programs. Hopefully DOGE is the first of the incremental efforts that can bring it.
They were staffed by real professionals. Ex-Googlers and other tech talent were already working on these problems.
In contrast, DOGE was a bunch of 22 year old idiots someone found on Discord.
What have they accomplished? Other than mishandling customer data and finding some unused software licenses, it’s not clear to me.
The problem is everyone thinks solving these massive problems is easy - but it takes years of effort, inch by inch. But I guess DOGE is better for headlines, and that’s what people seem to care about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Servic...
More monstrosities were to follow.
Double sow because DOGE itself was not a real government agency. Which then create a massive loophole for it to be run by a guy who didn't go through the appointee congressional approval process if it were a real agency.
And yet it was wielding power over real agencies with real appointees at the head...
Much like many others in this administration. People worth their merit to lead these organizations say no, so we're left with egotistical personnel who were destined to top out at middle management.
> 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.”
It was frustrating to watch how this obviously false claim was being pushed so hard.
It’s hard to know who’s telling the truth, but this claim feels unsurprising: Someone did a query and found a lot of rows of people born over 120 years ago, shared it in something like a Signal group, and then Elon ran with it like it was proof that they were all receiving benefits. Once the seed for the headline was played they didn’t want to hear any evidence that the claim wasn’t true.