Social Security Teeters as Musk Mucks About
They haven’t found anything other than ways to make life miserable for beneficiaries
"Ultimately, you're going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits," Martin O'Malley, former Social Security Administration commissioner in the Biden administration, said last week. "I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days."
Commerce Secretary and billionaire Howard Lutnick appeared on a podcast last week, hosted by fellow billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya to suggest that anyone who would actually complain about a missing social security benefit is a "fraudster,"
"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,"
In that context, let’s examine the DOGE/MAGA assault on the social security administration in progress. It’s worse than you probably imagine, based on a pack of lies, and is opening up endless opportunities for abuse.
In less than two months, the DOGE crew, working in tandem with Trump administration officials, have doubled and even tripled wait times for callers. Roughly 24% of calls are actually ending up with a human being talking to a claimant.
From the Washington Post:
Leland Dudek, who became acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs, has issued a series of rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust.
The moves have upended an agency that, despite the popularity of its programs, has been underfunded for years, faces potential insolvency in a decade and has been led by four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed. The latest controversy came last week when Dudek threatened to shut down operations in response to a federal judge’s ruling against DOGE that he claimed would leave no one in the agency with access to beneficiaries’ personal information.
Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions back home from angry constituents. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. AARP announced Monday that more than 2,000 people a week have called the retiree organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans.
Any discussion of Social Security has to start with the basic fact: Social Security has no impact on the national debt. I start with this because Republican politicians try to justify cuts to the program by pointing at the federal government's deficit spending.
Social Security is one of the country’s most popular and successful federal programs, and its pay-as-you-go arrangement is not a deceptive scam – it’s how the system was built to work.
“Social Security is a social insurance program. Workers and employers pay in, money goes to the Social Security Trust Fund and is paid out when due. Social Security has a Board of Trustees and professional actuaries who report annually on the health of the Trust Fund. Its solvent and the benefits are guaranteed (unlike the stock market or a private equity fund). In 89 years, Social Security has never missed a payment.”--Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans
Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are attempting to take over the Social Security Administration, making outrageous and easily disproved claims about fraud and waste. Perhaps you’ve heard about the 11 year old who’s receiving benefits, or the 150 year old people getting checks every month. It’s all bullshit.
Fraud! Fraud! Waste! Waste! Scream the chainsaw devotees. Instead, if you look at the DOGE savings pages for Social Security, they canceled information technology services, studies of beneficiaries, and various bureaucratic items. These administrative costs make up one half of one percent of the SSA budget, down from 2.2% in 1957. It’s a heckofva lot cheaper than having a “financial services” company run something.
There was nothing involving beneficiaries on the DOGE website. No fraud. No waste. No welfare queens. No civil war veterans. No home remodeling orders. No new curtains for the director’s office. Nothing.
From the Washington Post:
Already DOGE has canceled many contracts at Social Security, just as it has at many other federal agencies. A DOGE-run website late last week listed $50.3 million in cost savings from these canceled agreements.
That included funding for a University of Wisconsin at Madison project to understand how to prevent impostor scams. Government impostor scams — most commonly pretending to be from the Social Security office — resulted in estimated losses of at least $577 million last year, often by conning seniors into sharing personal data, according to the agency’s IG office.
“When you cut resources like this, there’s always room to make things more efficient. But you also could make things worse,” said Cliff Robb, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied impostor scams. “You could end up making fraud worse.”
Yet the so-called missing fraud and waste are all the deplorians and their defenders can talk about, usually preceded by the completely untrue descriptor “entitlements.”
When you examine what personnel and infrastructure actions have already been taken or proposed, not one of them has any evidence that efficiency will be enhanced. Seven offices have been closed, and dozens more are on the DOGE list of leases to be canceled, meaning beneficiaries will have to drive further, for appointments after waiting an average of two months for their case to be heard.
Reporting at Axios and Popular Information makes it clear that major changes are coming for phone service at Social Security offices. After walking back a leaked memo saying all phone service would be canceled, another plan was hatched (and leaked).
Phone service would still be available to people who call the agency and don't need to verify their identity, like someone making a general inquiry. Of course, that would entail having phone calls answered and/or not put on hold for hours at a time. (I have experienced this)
The identity verification changes would mean that people who previously could apply for, or update, benefits over the phone would have to travel to a local field office to do so. These changes, if implemented, would "cripple field office operations, and they're already badly paralyzed," a former official told Axios.
Here’s where things are already at. The goal of DOGE is to create more of this, from the Seattle Times via Brad Willis at Perspectives:
82-year-old Leonard “Ned” Johnson’s Social Security was cut off this year after the agency declared that he was dead. $5,201 in Social Security payments was removed from his bank account retroactively. His Medicare was canceled. He had to call his local Social Security office several times a day for weeks to get an appointment to prove that he was very much alive. Mr. Johnson says he faced a long line at the office just to get in, and his case remains unresolved.
"When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now," Ned said.
The bottom line with the changes being made internally with the Social Security Administration, including laying off 7,000 of its 57,000 employees, will have the net effect of making the beneficiary experience even more difficult and challenging. This fits in with the goal for reactionaries to make government services less palatable with the aim of making privatization easier.
While DOGErs are rooting around in files that were supposed to be confidential so you’d trust the system, there’s word that they’ve already found a sinister use for the data. Immigrants who are here legally and have been granted a number for tax paying purposes are going to have their lives opened up to immigration authorities.
Social Security staff provided members of the DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.
You should be horrified with what can be done with that information, like creating databases to track people who are disabled, noncitizens, transgender, or have received treatment for HIV and AIDS. The data also included detailed tax, employment and earnings records for hundreds of millions of Americans, medical records like the identities of doctors someone has visited and prescription and non-prescription drugs that were administered.
From Rolling Stone:
The agency data could be used by hostile foreign governments to locate defectors and political dissidents inside the United States; officials in DOGE and the Trump administration itself could theoretically use the data to threaten elected officials and journalists, among other political foes, or create databases of transgender Americans and citizens who were born in other countries.
A federal judge has temporarily put a halt to DOGE access to Social Security data, saying:
“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” said U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in a 137-page ruling. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
This is only a temporary restraining order, leaving room for DOGE team members to eventually regain access to sensitive data of recipients, but only after certifying they had completed required training and after providing a “detailed explanation” — potentially with court review — of the need to obtain “non-anonymized” data.
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Let’s talk about privatization, the goal of the right. They’ve hated Social Security since its inception, and now that they realize they can’t just “disappear it”, the idea is to make it crash and burn. This problem will then become an opportunity, a business opportunity.
People mistakenly think that Social Security is a kind of savings account the government holds for you and you get that money back with interest when you retire. The Social Security Administration perpetuates this misconception by providing statements showing total contributions. But they only do this because it's more palatable to the public to think of it this way than what it actually is: an income transfer vehicle.
Social Security is a system that keeps retired people from becoming destitute by giving them a portion of the wages from currently employed people. It's a generational transfer of funds. The amount of Social Security benefit you receive when you reach retirement age is related to your lifetime average wages, but not how much you paid into the system. The goal is to provide about 40% of your pre-retirement earnings.
The lifetime average wage used for the calculation is capped, so no matter how much is earned, the benefit can never exceed a certain amount. So it's not your money coming back. It's the government taking a portion of younger people's wages and giving them to you.
The road to privatization starts by outsourcing agency functions and ends with private enterprise taking over the trust fund. Then the fees will start, a few dollars for direct deposit, a few more for id cards, then a management fee for redirecting taxes to assorted investments. Keeping the system funded will depend on personal data being sold.
The more likely outcome would be an ALT-401k plan, whereby the intergenerational nature of the system would be discarded, and the income stream (deductions) would go toward 401k and IRA savings vehicles, which inherently favor those who can afford to contribute to them and take on the risk of potential loss.
Governmental oversight would be eliminated along with any rules involving eventual payout tied to pay in. And if the market crashes, then it’s tough luck for retirees. Their “account managers” would have already taken their cut.
A first step in this process has already occurred, namely cutting off benefits for recipients when overpayments (often the fault of the agency) occur. This happens with .07% of all payments, and it used to be that a repayment plan was the usual resolution. Now, the checks just stop coming, and since beneficiaries can’t call anymore, they’ll have to wait until given an appointment to discuss the matter, which can take weeks.
There’s a larger philosophical argument about the existence of social security and other programs based on the collective welfare of the citizenry. The Silicon Valley cyber-libertarians currently purchasing the government don’t see a democratic republic as a necessity in the future.
They don’t so much need our meager pensions as they need our belief in the common good to go away. They aim for a future where governance involves fluid, meritocratic hierarchies, which are believed to be best served by markets. A better way of describing this is techno-market-feudalism. The king and his court rule, and the people obey.
Saving social security in the short run involves lifting the cap on earnings that can be taxed, along with an overhaul of care systems.
The shortest path to that situation involves public acceptance that billionaires are a bad idea. Too much money makes one mentally ill, unable to be productive in a social sense, and perpetuates poverty as a condition of life for many people. Setting the upper limit for wealth at $100 million for a 100% tax rate seems like a good place to start.
Merchant of Menace: Trump and the Jews by Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect
One bitter irony in Trump’s love-bombing of the Jews has not gotten nearly enough attention. Trump has paired his exaggerated and hypocritical solicitude for the Jews with his escalating punishment of any institution that embraces affirmative action for Black people, otherwise known as DEI.
Think about it. Trump is singling out Jews to get special consideration and protection, while he bans and punishes any special consideration of Black people and blocks even basic civil rights enforcement. Yes, antisemitism is a blight. But honestly, if you compare the Jewish experience in America—a refugee community that thrived here as nowhere else in the world—with the Black experience—suffering the inhumanity of slavery, persecuted through the ravages of Jim Crow, and never really escaping the scourge of discrimination—which community has more of a right to say, “I don’t feel safe”? Which has more of a claim on the government for extra protection?
Ideally, civil rights and civil liberties should be protected evenhandedly. But here is Trump, using fake solicitude for Jews to bash liberal universities and abolish civil rights enforcement for Black people.
This will not end well.
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Did DeMaio Staffer Join SD Republican Central Committee as Riverside Resident? by Ken Stone at Times of San Diego
DeMaio himself is accused of leading a “cult” that is bleeding the San Diego GOP of money, with one leader saying “quite a few individuals and organizations have grown tired of [his] intimidation and bullying tactics.”
Party fundraising has dried up so much that DeMaio is having to subsidize the party, the GOP insider told me. “Republican women’s groups are unofficially boycotting the party,” the insider said. “Committee members routinely yell at each other. At the March [Executive Committee] meeting, it was reported that the party had approximately $32,000 cash on hand between state and federal accounts.”
The Central Committee meeting last month was supposed to net between $10,000 and $12,000 according to the budget and instead cost $300,” I was told.
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Trump Anti-Voting Order Draws Furious Pushback by Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket
After President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday that experts said could potentially disenfranchise millions, Democratic election officials and voting rights advocates swiftly vowed to fight it.
“This is not a statute. This is an edict by fiat from the executive branch, and so every piece of it can be challenged through the regular judicial process,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said in an interview with Democracy Docket.
Fontes called Trump’s order a “cheap substitute” for the SAVE Act — the GOP’s nationwide proof of citizenship bill — that he doesn’t think will pass through the Senate, but also offered a particularly nefarious reading of its true purpose: setting up a way to cancel the 2026 midterm elections.
