SSA tech shop to be led by another DOGE associate

The Social Security Administration now has two associates of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in technology leadership roles as the agency continues to make headlines over DOGE’s access to sensitive information about Americans.

Scott Coulter — the founder of an investment management fund who has been working as a DOGE associate at both SSA and NASA already — is now SSA’s chief information officer, according to an internal agency email obtained by Nextgov/FCW. 

SSA’s previous CIO, Michael Russo, has been moved to serve as a senior advisor at the agency focused on modernizing its archaic technology. 

The switch comes days after a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive information about Americans on SSA systems, leading its acting leadership to temporarily threaten to cease operations at the agency completely. Russo is listed under the defendants in that lawsuit filed by labor unions, retirees and the advocacy group Democracy Forward.

The agency’s acting commissioner Leland Dudek confirmed in a court document Monday that SSA’s 11-person DOGE team no longer has access to the agency’s systems with personally identifiable information in them, although that document doesn’t name specific DOGE individuals working at the agency. 

Both Coulter and Russo have DOGE ties and were named as “DOGE associates” in a recent  court declaration from former SSA acting chief of staff Tiffany Flick, who described DOGE’s push to access SSA systems and data as “based on the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts.” 

Now, Coulter will be “responsible and accountable for all agency information technology,” as SSA policy describes, while Russo will be focused on modernizing legacy systems from within a perch in the Office of the Commissioner, according to the internal email. SSA did not respond to a request for comment.

Coulter has reportedly been working at NASA in addition to SSA. The firm he founded, Cowbird Capital, shuttered last year, per Business Insider. 

Russo has worked for years as an executive at a tech company that does payment processing for Musk’s Starlink, according to ProPublica. The CEO of that company, Shift4 Payments, is Trump’s nominee to lead NASA. 

At SSA, Russo was evasive about why DOGE affiliates needed immediate access to systems and data in the early days of the Trump administration, pushing for one DOGE partner to have access to “everything, including source code,” Flick wrote in her court declaration.

Now, Russo and Coulter will be working for the agency’s acting leadership, Leland Dudek. He was a mid-level SSA employee elevated to the role in mid-February after the agency’s former acting head left the post over DOGE access to systems. At the time, Dudek was being investigated for improperly sharing information with DOGE.

More recently, Dudek  announced several tech initiatives — like beefing up anti-fraud efforts, using more artificial intelligence and streamlining IT contracts — as top priorities for the agency moving forward. The agency’s CIO would presumably play a large role in those efforts in addition to being at the center of future developments around DOGE access to systems.

Trump’s pick for Social Security commissioner, financial technology executive Frank Bisignano, also stressed the importance of technology during a confirmation hearing on Tuesday, telling senators that “one of the greatest efficiency opportunities we have is using artificial intelligence.”