WASHINGTON — The temporary leader of the Social Security Administration acknowledged Tuesday in an email to staff that he’s made mistakes in his rapid shakeup of the agency but said he wouldn’t be deterred.

Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, has shuttered internal offices, announced plans for mass layoffs and briefly canceled contracts in an apparent act of political retaliation against the state of Maine.

In his email, Dudek said the “unprecedented level of media coverage” of his changes, rather than the changes themselves, might have been “stressful” for the agency’s nearly 60,000 employees, whom he praised for continuing to do their jobs.

“Personally, I have made some mistakes, which makes me human like you,” Dudek said in the email, which was obtained by HuffPost. “I promise you this, I will continue to make mistakes, but I will learn from them.”

The message landed amid mounting questions about how Dudek’s changes, enacted at the behest of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, could negatively affect services for the 70 million Americans who rely on Social Security for retirement and disability benefits.

“I feel like we’re being pranked,” one SSA employee told HuffPost, adding that their colleagues laughed at Dudek’s vow to continue making mistakes.

Dudek was a mid-level staffer at Social Security who was put on administrative leave for collaborating with DOGE. He was then made acting commissioner when his predecessor in that role refused to grant Musk’s minions access to agency databases with sensitive personal information about practically everybody in America.

Drafts of an internal memo obtained by several news outlets indicate Dudek and DOGE are looking for ways to curtail phone service for agency tasks that require people to verify their identities. Instead, beneficiaries will have to either go online or, if they can’t — which may be the case for many elderly beneficiaries — they’ll have to travel to field offices to verify their identities in person. At the same time, the agency is working to close down some of its 1,200 field offices across the country.

Musk and President Donald Trump have obsessed over “fraud” at Social Security, pointing to agency records that show Social Security numbers belonging to recipients who are more than 110 years old. The outdated records have been a known issue for years and do not indicate the agency is actually paying fraudulent benefits, but Trump and Musk have falsely insisted otherwise.

“We’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty,” Trump said during an address to a joint session of Congress this month.

Dudek previously has acknowledged making mistakes. In a press release, he apologized for canceling contracts with the state of Maine that all states use for providing Social Security numbers for newborns and for recording deaths so the agency can stop payments.

“I realize that ending these contracts created an undue burden on the people of Maine, which was not the intent,” Dudek said, without elaborating on the actual intent. Trump has been feuding with Maine’s Democratic governor about transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports in the state.

HuffPost readers: Do you have insight into what’s happening at the Social Security Administration? Tell us about it ― email arthur@huffpost.com.

Next week, the Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing with Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to be the next commissioner.

On Tuesday, Dudek said in his email that the Social Security Administration would “address our customer service deficiencies” by making changes to the 800 number, such as by adding “a self-scheduling option for post-entitlement appointments.” He said the agency would address fraud in part by “establishing state-of-the-art methods for identity proofing,” including over the phone.

Social Security gets 80 million phone calls a year. As of February, according to an online performance dashboard, the average call took longer than 20 minutes to answer. Fewer than half of calls get answered at all.

Martin O’Malley, the previous commissioner of Social Security under President Joe Biden, told HuffPost earlier this month the rapid organizational changes and staff cuts could impair the agency’s performance so badly that it could actually miss benefit payments for the first time in 90 years.

“I hope that doesn’t happen, but I believe it will,” O’Malley said. “And at the very least, you are going to see wait times skyrocket.”

Tiffany Flick, a former senior Social Security official who left amid the DOGE purge, said in an affidavit this month in a court case that DOGE workers were reckless with data and clueless about fraud — and that Dudek went to great lengths to help them.

“I understand that DOGE associates have been seeking access to the ‘source code’ to SSA systems,” Flick wrote. “If granted, I am not confident that such associates have the requisite understanding of SSA to avoid critical errors that could upend SSA systems.”