Stephen Miller’s wife berated the head of the Social Security Administration to promote a false claim about rampant fraud on the agency’s customer service line that was being pushed by Elon Musk.
Katie Miller, a former White House aide who later joined Musk’s team full time, called then-acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek and bluntly told him to keep repeating that 40 percent of calls to the SSA were from scammers and fraudsters even though the claim had zero basis in fact.
“The number is 40 percent,” Miller told Dudek during an April 1 phone call, according to The New York Times. She insisted that Dudek stick to the figure, despite SSA staff writing a response to correct it, because Donald Trump believed Musk. “Do not contradict the president,” she said.
Katie Miller’s loyalty to Musk is hardly surprising. She was reportedly with him “almost all the time” while both were in the White House, according to The Wall Street Journal, just before Musk had a dramatic public falling-out with Trump.
While officially serving as a “special government employee,” Miller was also on Musk’s payroll before exiting alongside him last month—sparking questions about where her true loyalties lay.
The Times cited the false SSA scammer stat as yet another example of how Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed misleading claims and fabricated data to justify its cost-cutting crusade.
Frank Bisignano, who replaced Dudek as SSA commissioner, even provided some doublespeak by suggesting Musk’s 40 percent figure was both inaccurate and true at the same time.
“We’re going to be a fact-based, rule-based organization that can count,” Bisignano told the Times while acknowledging the 40 percent figure pushed by Musk was not true.
However, in a follow-up statement, Bisignano said: “The work that DOGE did was 100 percent accurate.”
The Times suggests that Musk’s 40 percent figure is a “distortion of a completely different statistic” involving calls in which fraudsters tried to steal money by changing bank account information.
In March, the SSA said 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is linked to people trying to change information over the phone. A number of MAGA figures, including Musk and Vice President JD Vance, twisted this figure to mean 40 percent of all calls to the SSA are fraudulent.
SSA staff tried to amend this figure in an April 1 memo to DOGE leaders—the same day of Katie Miller’s call—to state that 25 to 30 percent of allegations of direct deposit fraud are for direct deposit changes made over the telephone.
According to an analysis by Nextgov/FCW, less than 1 percent of SSA calls show any potential signs of fraud.
The SSA and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
In a bizarre aside, the Times also reported that during his brief tenure atop the SSA between February and May, Dudek compared his role to that of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, as detailed in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film.
“Haven’t they seen Schindler’s List?” Dudek asked staff. “Don’t they know what’s going on?”
