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 Se ..
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