Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billionin pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

Some local Head Start programs are already having to close their doors, and many program directors are encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies, they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to “justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.

Next on the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in greater numbers than any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower- and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.

The Trump administration has touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in a recent post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding.

The White House, and multiple agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between COVID and student learning.

An HHS spokesperson, in response to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency, sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established “Administration for Healthy America.”

Programs that serve kids have historically fared the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S. voters.

This dynamic may be part of why cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services — layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have received more political and press attention than those on the human services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located. That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens, among others).

All told, these programs have seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now, according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the exact numbers of cuts.)

Those losses have been most acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which — covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local providers they worked with. It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most energetic little ones. It was also the regional staff who had helped state child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass through” more money to families instead of depositing it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.

And it was the regional staff who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to routinely work together to address child support, child care and child welfare challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than political appointees in D.C.

In the wake of the regional office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director, asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”

“We’re trying to be reassuring to our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so does ours.”

That national system includes the complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of the child. Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would have little way of being enforced across state lines.

For that reason, the Trump administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed. (“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said, by DOGE’s recent unexplained move to access a highly confidential national child support database.

But even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of child support to families, Turetsky said. The staff members who’ve been pushed out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or mom about a change in the case.

When Liz Ryan departed as administrator of the Department of Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

But the Trump administration removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.

A spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.

Multiple nonprofits serving exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential grants.

“Look at what happened to the law firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.

“I never anticipated that programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are already underwater, to make up the funding gap. “When you look at this alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”

Dudek’s comments, delivered to a group of senior staff and Social Security advocates attending both in person and virtually, offer an extraordinary window into the thinking of a top agency official in the volatile early days of the second Trump administration. The Washington Post first reported Dudek’s acknowledgement that DOGE is calling the shots at Social Security and quoted several of his statements. But the full recording reveals that he went much further, citing not only the actions being taken at the agency by the people he repeatedly called “the DOGE kids,” but also extensive input he has received from the White House itself. When a participant in the meeting asked him why he wouldn’t more forcefully call out President Donald Trump’s continued false claims about widespread Social Security fraud as “BS,” Dudek answered, “So we published, for the record, what was actually the numbers there on our website. This is dealing with — have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?”

Throughout the meeting, Dudek made alarming statements about the perils facing the Social Security system, but he did so in an oddly informal, discursive manner. It left several participants baffled as to the ultimate fate of the nation’s largest and most popular social program, one that serves 73 million Americans. “Are we going to break something?” Dudek asked at one point, referring to what DOGE has been doing with Social Security data. “I don’t know.”

But then he said, in a more reassuring tone: “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Dudek embodies the dramatic whipsawing of life as a public servant under DOGE. For 25 years, he was the ultimate faceless bureaucrat: a midlevel analyst who had bounced between federal agencies, ultimately landing at the Social Security Administration and focusing on information technology, cybersecurity and fraud prevention. He was largely unknown even within the agency. But in February, he suddenly vaulted into the public eye when he was put on leave for surreptitiously sharing information with DOGE. It appeared that he might lose his job, but then he was unexpectedly promoted by the Trump administration to the position of acting commissioner. At the time, he seemed unreservedly committed to the DOGE agenda, writing — then deleting — a bellicose LinkedIn post in which he expressed pride in having “bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.”

Now, only weeks into his tenure, he was taking a far more ambivalent posture toward not just DOGE but Trump. On multiple occasions during last week’s meeting, according to the recording, Dudek framed the choices that he has been making in recent weeks as “the president’s” agenda. These choices have included planned cuts of at least 7,000 Social Security employees; buyouts and early retirement offered to the entire staff of 57,000, including those who work in field offices and teleservice centers helping elderly and disabled people navigate the program; cuts to disability determination services; the dissolution of a team that had been working to improve the user experience of the ssa.gov website and application process; a reduction of the agency’s footprint across the country from 10 regional offices to four; the terminations of 64 leases, including those for some field office and hearing office space; proposals to outsource Social Security customer service; and more.

“I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek said, according to the recording. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it,” he added later. (He didn’t name specific actions that Trump did or did not direct.)

At still another point, Dudek said that “I don’t want to fire anyone” but that “a lot of the structural changes that you’ve seen me make at headquarters, I’ve had long conversations with the White House about, and the DOGE team. … And that’s not to say I don’t have some more hard choices to come. The president has an agenda. I’m a political appointee. I need to follow that agenda.”

Dudek also more than once dismissed Trump’s claims about Social Security fraud, which the president amplified just hours after Dudek’s meeting in a speech to Congress in which he implied that millions of probably-dead people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security benefits. There are indeed 110-year-old and older people in one of the Social Security databases that the DOGE team has been looking at, Dudek said, but those people are “not in pay status” — they’re not actually being paid benefits. “These are records we never bothered with,” he explained.

Still, Dudek and two of his deputies, who also spoke intermittently at the meeting, seemed hesitant to more publicly resist Trump’s misstatements. A spokesperson chimed in to say that they were proud of a recent press release in which, in mild language, they’d obliquely contradicted some of the false claims. The other official said that DOGE’s narrative about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us” but that “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Spokespersons for Dudek and the Social Security Administration, the White House and Elon Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Dudek’s remarks come at a time when many Social Security employees are feeling confused about Dudek, his role versus DOGE’s and what it all means for the future of the Social Security Administration, according to ProPublica’s conversations with more than two dozen agency staffers. Many said that because the recent cuts at the agency have been carried out in a piecemeal fashion, the public doesn’t seem to be grasping the totality of what is happening to the program, which is having its 90th anniversary this year.

The layoffs — and the looming specter of potentially thousands more employees taking a buyout by a Friday deadline — have meant even less attention to the complicated casework of low-income elderly people and people with physical and intellectual disabilities, as ProPublica has reported.

Meanwhile, DOGE, which Musk has portrayed as a squad of techno-efficiency geniuses, has actually undermined the efficiency of Social Security’s delivery of services in multiple ways, many employees said. Under DOGE, several Social Security IT contracts have been canceled or scaled back. Now, five employees told ProPublica, their tech systems seem to be crashing nearly every day, leading to more delays in serving beneficiaries. This was already a problem, they said, but it has gotten “much worse” and is “not the norm,” two employees said.

And under a policy that DOGE has applied at many agencies, front-line Social Security staff have been restricted from using their government purchase cards for any sum above $1. This has become a significant problem at some field offices, especially when workers need to obtain or make copies of vital records or original documents — birth certificates and the like — that are needed to process some Social Security claims, one management-level employee said.

“Elections have consequences,” Dudek wrote in a March 1 email to the agency’s staff.

In the meeting last week, Dudek was asked about many of these organizational changes, according to the recording. Regarding the closure and consolidation of regional offices as well as the cuts to the part of the agency that helps evaluate disability claims, which is already severely backlogged, he said: “It certainly was done at the administration level. That would have not been my first preference. I think we need to see what’s going to happen in terms of fallout.”

“Again,” he said, “I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Dudek, who had been scheduled to speak for only 15 minutes, according to a copy of the agenda, instead spoke for around an hour, talking about everything from his upbringing by a disabled mother who’d depended on Social Security, to a 1989 book titled “Bureaucracy” that mentions Trump. He continued to vacillate between sharing advocates’ concerns for vulnerable Social Security recipients and sticking up for some of what DOGE has been trying to do at his agency.

“I actually like having the kids around,” he said, adding that although they were unfamiliar with the “nuances” of Social Security, he was trying to get them to be more thoughtful. “They’re thinking about work differently.”

He confirmed that the DOGE team members had broad access to Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personal data, but he claimed that if they were to do anything illegal with that information, he’d have them investigated and potentially prosecuted. He said he wanted to bulk up resources for field offices and customer service, even as front-line workers received buyout offers just like other staffers.

Throughout, Dudek emphasized that he wanted constructive feedback and open conversation, because he cares deeply about the Social Security Administration and the people it serves. He was honest about his shortcomings: “I’m in a role that I did not expect to be in,” he said. “I am an IT guy and a fraud guy.”

Dudek will eventually be replaced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s long-term pick to run the Social Security Administration. At times, Dudek sounded fatalistic.

“I’m the villain,” he said in the recording. “I’m not going to have a job after this. I get it.”

“Social Security will not be touched,” Trump answered, echoing a promise he has been making for years. Despite his eagerness to explode treaties, shutter entire government agencies and abandon decades-old ways of doing things, the president understands that Social Security benefits for seniors are sacrosanct.

Still, the DOGE team landed at the Social Security Administration this week, with Musk drawing attention for his outlandish claims that large numbers of 150-year-old “vampires” are receiving Social Security payments. DOGE has begun installing its own operatives, including an engineer linked to tweets promoting eugenics and executives with a cut-first-fix-later philosophy, in multiple top positions at the Social Security Administration.

Their first wave of actions — initiating the elimination of 41 jobs and the closing of at least 10 local offices, so far — was largely lost in the rush of headlines. Those first steps might seem restrained compared with the mass firings that DOGE has pursued at other federal agencies. But Social Security recipients rely on in-person service in all 50 states, and the shuttering of offices, reported on DOGE’s website to include locations everywhere from rural West Virginia to Las Vegas, could be hugely consequential. The closures potentially reduce access to Social Security for some of the most vulnerable people in this country — including not just retirees but also individuals with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, as well as children whose parents have died and who’ve been left in poverty.

The Social Security Administration, headquartered just outside Baltimore, has more than 1,200 regional and field offices — nearly a fifth of all of the federal government’s offices nationwide. There are 119,000 visitors to these brick-and-mortar facilities every business day. Many of them do not have high levels of computer and internet literacy and need someone to help them through all the legalese of a nearly century-old social program with a wonky user interface. This is also where elderly people can apply for Medicare, which doesn’t have physical outposts of its own. And it’s where hearings are held — due process provided — for beneficiaries who believe that they have been unfairly kicked off of desperately needed assistance.

“It’s where people access government,” said Kathleen Romig, a longtime expert on the program at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who recently served at the Social Security Administration in a temporary capacity.

In the event of more Social Security office closures like the ones that the Trump administration has begun pursuing — the president is broadly moving to close a range of offices and has even floated the idea of terminating every single federal lease — it is disproportionately poor people with lower levels of education who will become less likely to apply for and get help, research on past closures has found.

The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. But in a recent Fox News interview, press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized “fake news reporters” for “fear-mongering” about Social Security’s future under the Trump administration. She said that Musk is only going after fraud and waste in the program.

The roughly 15 million recipients of Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits — many of whom are severely disabled and destitute, or are orphans — are among the least politically powerful people in the U.S. Many told ProPublica that the distance to their closest Social Security office is already long, and that wait times to get a representative on the phone or a claim or an appeal processed can range from hours to years. Even before Trump was inaugurated, the agency’s staffing levels were at a 50-year low due to a decade of budget caps and cuts authored by congressional Republicans.

Several SSI and SSDI beneficiaries in rural areas told ProPublica that they have been watching with anxiety as Trump and Musk slash through federal agencies, knowing that any further office or staffing cuts to the Social Security Administration could be catastrophic for them.

Bryan Dooley, a 34-year-old with cerebral palsy who lives outside of Winston Salem, North Carolina, uses a wheelchair and struggles with speaking (he communicated with me through a caretaker). He said that his Social Security benefits, which he receives directly because of his disability and because that disability entitles him to a portion of his late mother’s Social Security, were mistakenly cut off several months ago. As he fights to get the assistance turned back on, he has been depleting his savings account trying to pay his mortgage.

“I really want to stay in the house where I lived with my mother,” he said. “Otherwise it’s a 24-hour care facility for me.”

Dooley, who works part time for a nonprofit called Solutions for Independence that helps others with disabilities, said that “we’re all watching” the developments at the Social Security Administration. If his local office were to be closed, he noted, he might have to coordinate with a caretaker or family member to take him 100 miles to Raleigh for administrative hearings on his benefits; scheduling appointments, already extremely difficult, would become almost impossible. “It would be a nightmare for all of us,” he said.

That nightmare is now on its way to becoming a reality in White Plains, New York, the site of one of the agency’s hearing offices on DOGE’s list of closures. According to a letter that New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand recently sent to the Social Security Administration, the White Plains office, which serves beneficiaries across seven counties, currently has more than 2,000 cases pending. Starting in May, elderly and disabled people across the region will have to travel up to 135 miles to the next-closest office, which for some of them will be in another state.

“Does the Administration have plans to close additional SSA offices?” Gillibrand asked.

The Social Security Administration declined to respond to a detailed list of questions about DOGE’s recent efforts at the agency, including the 10 office closures and staffing reductions. A spokesperson did provide a brief statement on the White Plains situation, saying that the agency had been informed by the General Services Administration that the White Plains office’s lease would not be renewed and that there are no plans to replace the office. Many hearings will take place online through video and audio, the spokesperson said.

DOGE’s capture of the Social Security Administration began this week when Trump elevated to acting commissioner a low-level official named Leland Dudek.

In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, Dudek acknowledged that he had been surreptitiously feeding information to DOGE before his promotion. “I confess,” he wrote. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE… I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” He added: “Everything I have ever done is in service to our country, our beneficiaries, and our agency.”

After Dudek was put in charge of the agency, he told staff that he hoped to reassure them that “our continuing priority is paying beneficiaries the right amount at the right time, and providing other critical services people rely on from us.” He also rebutted some of Musk’s claims regarding widescale Social Security fraud.

In a separate meeting, he told Trump administration officials and congressional staffers that one of his new ideas is to “outsource” the jobs of Social Security Administration call center employees, The Wall Street Journal reported late this week.

Still, DOGE has proceeded more carefully with firings and layoffs at the Social Security Administration than it has at other agencies. Whereas aviation safety and nuclear security specialists, veterans affairs staff and firefighters, medical researchers and many others have all been forced out of their jobs by DOGE in recent weeks, it wasn’t until this Thursday that a much smaller number of recently hired or recently promoted Social Security staff started receiving emails saying that their jobs were not “mission critical.” According to emails shared with ProPublica, these staff members had eight hours to decide if they wanted to request another job within the agency, likely at lower pay and in another city (such a job would not be guaranteed, and relocation expenses would not be covered).

These emails appear to have gone out largely to Social Security Administration policy staff and lawyers, including those who help administrative law judges write decisions in disability cases — decisions that may now take longer and potentially have more errors in them as a result, one agency official told ProPublica. “Claimants will have adverse effects in terms of delay and also losing benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Social Security disability cases already have huge backlogs at the hearing stage, often taking more than a year.

Still, notably, employees “serving the public directly,” like those in field offices, were spared from these layoffs, at least for now.

That said, staff at Social Security’s regional offices around the country were not listed as “mission critical,” reflecting a further misunderstanding on DOGE’s part of what disabled people in particular need from the agency, legal aid attorneys in multiple states told ProPublica. When a low-income SSI or SSDI recipient has a problem that a front-line rep at a field office can’t explain or fix, or is just too overloaded with cases to deal with, it is regional staff who can help resolve the situation. When a person with an intellectual disability doesn’t understand why their benefits are being cut off or why they haven’t received notices in the mail about their case, regional staff can look through the case file and figure out what to do.

Regional staff do not yet appear to have been affected by DOGE’s layoffs, but many are now feeling on edge. One regional team leader, who also spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation, said that “nobody knows how the RIF [Reduction in Force] is going to work” in the coming days, weeks and months. Offices could be closed at the same time that remote staff are ordered to return to an office, creating a situation in which some SSA employees will face multiple-hour commutes each way every day, all but forcing them to leave their jobs and thus stop serving beneficiaries.

“We think that’s the plan, so that they don’t have to explicitly do as many layoffs” at an agency as popular and heretofore untouchable as the Social Security Administration, said Jessica LaPointe, a council president for the American Federation of Government Employees. LaPointe represents Social Security’s field office and teleservice workers.

That’s not to mention the attrition that could result from the low morale that has been spreading across Social Security Administration employees’ Signal threads and blogs this week; the agency is already the most overworked and demoralized of nearly any across the federal government, surveys of federal workers have found.

“And meanwhile the beneficiary ranks just keep exploding,” the regional team leader said. (The number of Social Security recipients has grown by over 13 million since 2010, as Baby Boomers surge into retirement.)

Even maintaining level staffing, several Social Security experts told ProPublica, would, in population-adjusted terms, amount to a major reduction in the program’s ability to provide benefits and services to its clients.

Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who was commissioner of the Social Security Administration from December 2023 to November 2024 and also previously served as governor of Maryland, told ProPublica that he believes this week marked just the start of what might be a long four years for Social Security. “The American people through a lifetime of work earn not only these benefits but the customer service necessary to process these benefits,” he said. “Their money went to that, too.”

Trump and Musk “are going to break the largest, most important social program in America,” O’Malley predicted — even if they have to do so gradually.

In recent years, the Social Security Administration along with the U.S. Digital Service were working to make it simpler for people with disabilities to apply for Social Security benefits. Officials conducted surveys of poor, elderly and disabled SSI applicants about what would make the process less burdensome, and they then began creating a simplified application — with plain-language questions and some pre-populated answers — that would eventually be available to complete on paper, by phone or online.

The goal was to reduce the time that applicants spend applying for benefits as well as the time that agency staff spend processing those applications. Or, in other words: government efficiency.

Yet these efforts have been slowed now that Trump has renamed the U.S. Digital Service the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service.

“In conversations with regular people about how Social Security could be more efficient, they usually say that they want more staff on the phone lines and taking appointments, and more office locations, so that they don’t have to wait 60 days after their spouse or parent died, or wait for months after developing a life-changing disability,” said Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Right now we’re hearing all these generalities about the government being too big, rather than a focus on individual people trying to access services from that government.”

Which of these philosophies the Social Security Administration adheres to for the remainder of Trump’s time in office will depend in part on which is embraced by Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to become the permanent agency commissioner, who will replace Dudek once confirmed by the Senate. Bisignano’s attitude toward Social Security, its staffing, its regional and field offices, and its customer service hasn’t yet fully come into focus. He hasn’t yet been questioned at a confirmation hearing.

What is known about Bisignano is that he’s an experienced finance executive who oversees a $20 billion company. And that during his time as CEO of Fiserv, the payment-processing giant, his company generated savings by closing about a hundred locations and terminating thousands of employees, providing them with the opportunity to apply for other roles.

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.

Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.

There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.

Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.

One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a China Palace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.)

An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.

Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.

For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.

Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars.

In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.

Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.

According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.

She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?

State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”

“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”

This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)

These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.

“If you’re a private school that gets most of its money now from the public, which has happened in Arizona, at that point there should be accountability for you as there is for public schools,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right and pro-voucher education reform think tank. “If the public is paying your bills, I don’t see what the argument is for there not to be.”

To illustrate this double standard: Private school parents can speak at public school board meetings, and they vote in school board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend, let alone request the minutes of, a private school governing body’s meetings, even if that school is now being funded with taxpayer dollars.

Defenders of universal voucher programs counter that the goal of American education should be a free market of educational options for families to choose from, unburdened by excessive state regulations and paperwork. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has maintained that in such a system, schools would have “a strong incentive to meet the needs of their students since unsatisfied parents can take their children and education dollars elsewhere,” which the group says would create “direct accountability to parents.”

Yet in a truly free market, opponents say, consumers would have information, including about vendors’ past performance, to make purchasing decisions in their own best interests.

And if the product fails and has had a history of similar problems — as Title of Liberty did — there would be recourse, as with “lemon laws” that protect consumers who’ve unknowingly bought a defective car.

Several ESA parents across the Phoenix area said in interviews that they absolutely want educational choice and flexibility, but that they also want the sort of quality assurance that only government can provide. Most said that the Arizona Department of Education should provide at least some information as to the background and credentials of private schools and other educational providers that accept voucher money, and also that the department should do something to protect families from badly unqualified providers.

Rebekah Cross, a mother of five in the northwest Phoenix suburb of Peoria, said that the ESA program, overall, has been “life-changing” for her family; she is also an administrator of multiple Facebook groups of ESA parents. Still, she said, it’s “on you” to check the credentials and the criminal history of every private school founder and provider to whom you’re considering paying your ESA dollars, because in Arizona, “anybody can start a private school, you have no idea.” There are mostly “just rumors to rely on,” she said.

Cross pointed out that many local private schools and other educational vendors have started advertising on Facebook and elsewhere that they are “ESA certified,” even though there’s no state “certification” beyond simply signing up to receive the voucher payments. “There’s no criteria; that’s not a thing,” she said.

“You’re putting your kid in [a school], hoping it’s going to work,” Cross said. “If it closes midyear, you’re kind of screwed.”

Doug Nick, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Education, responded that state law “makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,” even ones receiving public dollars.

Regarding publicly funded private schools closing midyear, he said that parents “have the wherewithal” to find another schooling option “regardless of the time of year,” and that the law “does not contemplate the department making recommendations to parents” at all.

Asked if the department knew how much public money had gone to Title of Liberty, Nick responded, “We don’t track that information since there’s no business reason to do so.”

Edwards, the Title of Liberty founder, first had the idea for her own school more than a decade ago. She’d long been an educator; she even ran a tutoring business in high school, she told me. At the beginning of her career, she taught Head Start and kindergarten in public and charter schools.

Through that experience and also seeing her own six kids not always having their individual needs met in Arizona’s K-12 system, she came to the conclusion that “to try to teach every child the same is ridiculous.”

Edwards began pitching the state charter board on a concept for a school that would meld principles of hands-on learning, borrowed from the Boy Scouts of America, with a proposal that students be grouped by learning level — “novice,” “apprentice” and so on — rather than into standard grade levels.

The board ultimately allowed her to open this school, ARCHES, in 2018. But it kept a close eye on her finances, in no small part to try to prevent a damaging outcome for students like a midyear closure. While giving her room to innovate, which is a chief goal of charter schools, the board monitored her enrollment numbers and staffing.

As it turned out, Edwards had persistent problems not just with low state test scores but also with unsustainably low enrollment, which would later plague Title of Liberty.

In our interview, she attributed those issues to the transience of many students during the pandemic and post-pandemic period as well as her business managers not being as experienced “as they probably should have been.”

This March, the charter board issued a notice of its intent to revoke ARCHES’ charter contract — a rare, serious move, according to ProPublica’s interviews with board members. (Edwards later reached an agreement with the board to surrender the charter.)

At that hearing, one of the board members commented to Edwards that “I love the fact that you have, you know, ideas and plans and things. … [But] I’m concerned about the kids. I’m concerned about the staff. I’m concerned about the families.”

Another added: “Don’t let that take away personally, on your end, the value of your intent.”

She didn’t. Edwards wanted to keep helping kids, she told me, including several ARCHES students whose families decided to stick with her.

She had the private school idea almost immediately. A post appeared on ARCHES’ Facebook page: “Hey parents! Interested in joining us next year at Title of Liberty Academy?” This was accompanied by an invitation to an “ESA workshop” to help them fill out voucher applications.

Meanwhile, Jason Mow, an ARCHES board member who was helping with its transition to Title of Liberty, tried to recruit new students: “Get your kids out of the government run schools,” he posted, adding, somewhat paradoxically: “The state ESA program will pay for tuition!!!!”

At one point, a parent asked him whether — if state money was going to be funding the school — it would be required to take part in state testing.

“As a private school using ESA, we have a great deal of latitude and not mandated to,” Mow answered.

He also said, “This is how we save the Republic.”

This last comment was part of a larger move that Edwards’ school was making: not just from charter to private and from some public accountability to none, but also from secular to religious with a right-wing bent, which was fully allowed even though it would be bankrolled by taxpayers. So, where ARCHES had touted an “American Revolutionary Classical Holistic Educational System,” Title of Liberty would simply be a “private faith-based school focused on the values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Meanwhile, Edwards had already been planning to move the school into a new space: a series of storefronts in a strip mall that another charter school had previously occupied.

Over the summer, largely through sheer force of personality, she enrolled about two dozen students.

But Title of Liberty was ultimately even more disorganized than ARCHES had been. For one, Edwards told me, “We didn’t yet have [enough] students enrolled to be able to afford teachers. … But we had to have teachers in order to be able to get students.” She ended up hiring mostly her own family members, both for teaching positions and to do much of the school’s financial paperwork.

She also blamed difficulties with the ESA process, like some parents being told that they hadn’t submitted their email addresses or signatures in the right format. She made clear that none of this involved the state actually scrutinizing her school; still, she wasn’t able to obtain ESA funding as quickly as she had expected to.

The landlord, waiting on unpaid rent, finally asked Edwards to pack up the school and leave. According to one of the property managers, “She just left the space for us to deal with this shit,” which he said amounted to six large dumpsters’ worth.

Edwards responded that she couldn’t afford moving vehicles or storage space for all of those desks, bookshelves, books and files. She said that she’d provided the landlord with information about another school that could have moved in and used the furniture and supplies. (A representative of the owner of the building said that they were done with questionably funded schools by that point, and that they gave Edwards time to clear out.)

“It all depends on how you define success,” Edwards told me. “I feel like the time that our kids had with us was valuable and they learned a lot and took a lot with them from that.”

“We did try to hold to a super high standard,” she added, noting that there’s no one at the state level checking on all the other private schools out there that might not care to meet that standard.

Calls for school transparency and accountability used to be a feature of the center-right education reform movement. No Child Left Behind, one of President George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievements, mandated that public school students in certain grades undergo standardized testing in core subjects, on the grounds that schools should have to prove that they’re educating kids up to state standards and, if they’re not, to improve or else risk losing funding.

That testing was often rote, providing incomplete information as to the varied lives of students and pressuring many teachers to “teach to the test,” critics alleged. But it did offer a window into school performance — which, in turn, gave the voucher movement ammunition to criticize failing public schools.

Still, early voucher efforts too included basic transparency and accountability measures. When vouchers were first proposed in Arizona, for instance, a state task force said that “private schools must also participate in the same accountability process as public schools in order to qualify for state funding.” Louisiana’s voucher program, similarly, required participating private schools to administer state student achievement tests just like public schools did.

But voucher advocates changed course between 2017 and 2020. By that time, several academic studies had found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.

Asked about a set of particularly negative findings out of Louisiana, DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, blamed the state’s voucher program for being “not very well conceived.” Part of the problem was that it was overregulated, she and other advocates said.

In the years since, fully unregulated universal ESA programs have become the favored program design of many school choice supporters.

The result is a situation in which, on the one hand, the Arizona Department of Education annually publishes detailed report cards on all public schools in the state, including charter schools. You can look up any Arizona public school’s overall letter grade (ARCHES had a D when it was still a charter school); the academic performance and progress of that school’s students, including by demographic categories; the experience levels of its teachers, and so on.

On the other hand, Arizona private schools receiving public funding have to do no public reporting at all. If they want, they can self-report their enrollment and performance numbers to be published on websites like Niche.com, but they are free to exaggerate.

In other words, it’s not that this newer ESA model has been a clear academic success or failure. It’s just that the public, and more specifically parents, can’t know.

Not all states keep information as hidden as Arizona. At least five, for example, require schools that accept voucher money to be accredited or to provide evidence that they don’t have financial troubles.

Yet even these minimal efforts at transparency and accountability have been opposed by big-money voucher supporters.

Walmart heir Jim Walton, for instance, gave $500,000 this year to defeat a proposed Arkansas state constitutional amendment that would have required private schools receiving state funds to meet the same educational standards that public schools do. At the Ohio Legislature, provisions of a proposed bill that would’ve made voucher schools submit an annual report showing how they’re using state funding were recently removed under pressure from voucher advocates.

And in Arizona, Republicans in the Legislature have opposed every effort by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to increase oversight of private schools that receive ESA money — except for one reform: They decided that such schools must fingerprint their teachers.

But the new law doesn’t require the ESA schools to run those fingerprints through any database or to use them in any way.

About a month ago, I asked parents if they could still pay Title of Liberty from their taxpayer-funded voucher accounts. I was curious not because I thought Edwards was collecting voucher money for a closed school but because it remained listed in ClassWallet, the Arizona Department of Education’s privately owned payment interface for ESA schools and vendors.

One mom sent me screenshots showing that she could indeed still pay the shuttered school from her ESA account, though she would need to produce an invoice.

What’s more, when she’d clicked on it in ClassWallet, “ARCHES Academy” was what had popped up — the name of the failed charter school that was repurposed into Title of Liberty.

The school, whatever it was called, was still open, as far as the state of Arizona was concerned. (It was only disabled in ClassWallet after recent inquiries from ProPublica.)

Wanting to make triple-sure that I wasn’t missing something, I drove over to the strip mall a few weeks ago to see if anything was still going on there.

What I found inside was a scene of school choice in its endstage. A sort of zombie voucher school, with dozens or possibly hundreds of books and papers scattered across the floor. Student records, containing confidential information, had been left out. There was food in the cafeteria area, molding.

Under quotes from the Book of Mormon painted on the walls and a banner proclaiming that Title of Liberty would strive to be a “celestial stronghold of learing [sic],” a document was sitting on a table. It offered guidance for parents on how to select the right school for their little ones, including this line: “You might be surprised how many schools are just flying by the seat of their pants.”

And on top of a file cabinet next to that was a stack of postcard-sized flyers that had been printed off at Walmart, reading, “Sign up your student for ESA.”