The plans of Elon Musk — the richest man on Earth — to slash Social Safety and power mass layoffs will trigger tens of 1000’s extra Individuals to die whereas ready for his or her incapacity advantages to be accredited, a brand new report by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has discovered.
Proper-wing cuts to Social Safety have already prompted an erosion in services over the past decades, and lately, the quantity of people that die throughout the wait time for profit determinations has risen drastically, to 30,000 folks.
But when “shadow president” Musk and President Donald Trump’s plans to cut the Social Security Administration by as much as half are absolutely realized, the wait time might greater than double to 412 days — leading to practically 67,000 folks dying this 12 months alone whereas ready for an preliminary resolution on their eligibility for advantages.
That is a mean of practically 190 folks per day, the evaluation finds.
“President Trump and Elon Musk have advised that ‘hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands’ of useless folks obtain Social Safety checks. That’s an outrageous lie designed to undermine Individuals’ religion in Social Safety,” stated Sanders.
“As an alternative of slashing Social Safety’s employees, closing down Social Safety area places of work, we ought to be making it simpler, not more durable, for seniors and other people with disabilities to obtain the Social Safety advantages that they’ve earned and deserve,” the senator went on.
The wait time to be accredited for advantages is commonly extraordinarily burdensome for would-be recipients. Sanders’s workplace performed a survey asking folks about experiences ready for advantages, and uncovered mass struggling imposed by the already eroded system.
“The tales they shared paint an image of day by day hardship: the stress of affording well being care, meals, and fuel; the anxiousness of dwelling paycheck to paycheck; and the sensation of hopelessness that comes from fixed monetary pressure, together with from seniors and other people with disabilities who depend on Social Safety,” the report says.
One particular person, Monique, of Florida, stated: “I’m unemployed and attempting to get on incapacity. My life is all ache and stress. I’m all the way down to my previous couple of hundred {dollars}. I desperately must see a number of specialists for my ongoing care, however I’m freaking out that I’ll now not have the ability to pay my prices of dwelling. I take a number of prescriptions they usually’re expensive.”
The Trump administration is already properly on its approach in its plans for cuts. The Washington Submit has reported that Musk’s “Division of Authorities Effectivity” (DOGE) has already laid off 7,000 staff throughout the company since February, and has plans for much extra cuts to the remaining 50,000 employees inside Social Safety.
Musk, seemingly accountable for these choices, has a net worth of over $360 billion. Not like working class Individuals, he doesn’t pay absolutely into Social Safety with each paycheck — in actual fact, since the wage cap on Social Safety is simply $168,000, Musk stopped paying into the program four minutes into 2025, in response to back-of-napkin math.
In the meantime, Musk’s plans elsewhere within the authorities are driving report layoffs, pushing a whole lot of 1000’s extra American staff and their households into uncertainty. A Challenger report printed Thursday discovered that, with over 275,000 layoffs, March was the third worst month in U.S. historical past for layoffs, solely behind April and Might of 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was largely pushed by Musk’s announcement of DOGE’s plans to get rid of over 216,000 positions throughout the federal authorities, with over 280,000 job cuts outlined over the previous two months. Over 4,000 jobs outdoors of the federal government, in the meantime, have been reduce as a result of grant and different funding cuts — lots of which legal experts say are in opposition to the legislation.
On the similar time, extra cuts could possibly be on the best way, with growing fears that the U.S. will soon go by a recession because of the sweeping tariffs Trump applied on Wednesday. The tariff announcement led to the most important one-day drop in the DOW and S&P 500 for the reason that outbreak of COVID.
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