This Week in Dudek-Enabled Social Security Administration Screwups: Terminated Contracts Edition (Updated Mar 8, 2025)

Monumental Screwup Followed By "Oops I Made a Mistake" Memo from Dudek

The news of the monumental screw-up hit the wires late yesterday and this morning. Parents of newborns in the State of Maine could no longer enroll their child in the automated system to request assignment of a social security number. They would now have to take their newborns and documentation to a social security field office to physically apply for their cards. Effective immediately.

Why? Because the Social Security Administration, under the direction of DOGE had started terminating contracts between the SSA and individual state public health offices that allowed the data to flow seamlessly to the SSA. It is a process that has been in place since 1980 and 99% of newborns’ parents participated. It made the process much faster, convenient, and efficient for all parties involved.

And now, after fierce pushback from constituents and the Maine congressional delegation, egg-on-his-face acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek, who as already admitted DOGE is telling him what to do and has also allegedly admitted that he bullied agency executives to cooperate with DOGE, has reversed this decision and issued an apology:

“I recently directed Social Security employees to end two contracts which affected the good people of the state of Maine,” Dudek wrote. “In retrospect, I realize that ending these contracts created an undue burden on the people of Maine, which was not the intent. For that, I apologize and have directed that both contracts be immediately reinstated. (Both birth and death contracts) continue in place for every state and were not affected. As a leader, I will admit my mistakes and make them right.”

There is only a little, teeny problem here. The contract was terminated on February 28, 2025. It is dead. Dead as a doornail.

Sources: https://www.fpds.gov/common/jsp/LaunchWebPage.jsp?command=execute&requestid=243341489&version=1.5


One thing drilled into the heads of contract specialist and contracting officer be their lawyers is that there “ain’t breathing no life into a dead contract. Dead is Dead.”

That means two things:

UPDATED MARCH 8, 2025:

It seems the SSA Contracting Office utilized the leverage of FAR 49.102 to rescind the termination notice.

I would argue that if they had indeed issued the written notification by modifying the contract to end it on February 28, 2025 as they did, this is not the written notification contemplated by the FAR and that by changing the end date the way they did the contract is still dead. We will leave that for those KOs as they made the decision on what to do, and every KO will interpret things differently.

IN addition, the other 5 states were only partial terminations to remove submission of race and ethnicity records, and those partial terminations have not been removed (yet restored under Maine).

All of this begs the question: Why was Maine singled out for complete termination? Was it retaliation by Trump against the Governor and Senator Collins?

1. As it has been terminated, as five other state contracts for these services have been, it will have to be re-solicited and placed as a new award;

2. Not knowing what kind of funds Social Security uses to fund these contract, if it used one-year operations funds and this contract and the others were awarded and funded with FY24 money, they are going to have to find FY25 money to fund the new awards because this is now a bona fide need of FY25. Any unbilled FY24 funds would be lost to them. If they use no-year money, this problem will hopefully be solved.

To sum up, DOGE ordered Dudek to cancel this five year contract that as in its base year in the amount of $76,658 with four one-year option periods in the name of “efficiency’ and “saving money.” Now it is going to have to be done all over again, costing SSA even more money as they try to do it with reduced staff.

BRAVO ZULU MUSK, DOGE, AND DUDEK ON THIS MONUMENAL SCREWUP THAT WOULD GET ANY OTHER APPOINTED AGENCY OFFICIAL FIRED!