Trump and Musk Are Trying to Dismantle Social Security From the Inside

In latest months, folks making an attempt to achieve the Social Safety Administration (SSA) have encountered web site crashes, computerized hang-ups and hours-long waits on the telephone or in particular person. However horrible customer support seems to be simply step one in Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s plan to destroy Social Safety — america’ largest social welfare program, which supplies advantages to 73 million people, or one in 5 U.S. residents.

President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk’s “Division of Authorities Effectivity” (DOGE) staff important entry and energy inside SSA. In simply three months, the company has applied plans to decrease the staff count from 57,000 to 50,000 (with rumors of deeper cuts to come back), began closing workplaces, made it more durable for folks to register and entry advantages, unfold lies about fraud, accessed recipients’ private data, and created an atmosphere of chaos, concern and confusion. All of the whereas, DOGE is on an obsessive hunt for widespread advantages fraud, which one federal judge characterized as “a seek for the proverbial needle within the haystack, with none concrete information that the needle is definitely within the haystack.”

Advocates concern that as DOGE makes Social Safety more and more nonfunctional, belief within the enormously popular program will erode, permitting Musk and his allies the chance to additional weaken or privatize features of this system.

Weakening Social Safety has severe and even lethal penalties: Amongst older individuals who obtain advantages, 39 % of males and 44 % of ladies derive more than half their income from it. Round 80 % of recipients are retired employees (or their spouses and dependents), who paid into the system throughout their working years, whereas the remainder qualify on account of a incapacity or are youngsters of deceased employees.

Regardless of its essential function lifting millions of Americans out of poverty, Trump and Musk repeatedly disparage this system as dysfunctional, rife with fraud, or an outright rip-off. In February, Trump falsely claimed that millions of useless Individuals have been amassing advantages, alleging: “It’s all a rip-off, the entire thing is a rip-off.” In the meantime, in a latest interview with Joe Rogan, Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And in a FOX Enterprise interview about DOGE cuts, Musk ominously known as entitlements like SSA “the big one to eliminate.” (The White Home insists Musk was referring to eliminating “waste and fraud,” not entitlement packages of their entirety.)

“By no means earlier than did we’ve a president claiming that there was all this fraud the place there wasn’t any, or all this waste the place there wasn’t any,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Safety Works, a political advocacy group that requires growth of Social Safety, informed Truthout. “After which utilizing that to make modifications precipitously, with none sort of thought — a few of that are simply going to create extra fraud. And nobody has ever had entry to all this information, folks’s most private information.”

DOGE Affect at SSA

Trump replaced his initial acting SSA Commissioner, Michelle King, a 30-year veteran of the company, in February after she refused to permit DOGE unfettered entry to recipients’ non-public information. Her alternative is Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer, who on the time was on administrative leave for leaking data to DOGE behind his supervisors’ backs.

Unsurprisingly, Dudek has acted as a rubber stamp for DOGE’s staff-cutting agenda.

“DOGE has been all around the Social Safety Administration,” stated Altman. “They’re calling the pictures.”

Beneath Dudek, SSA quickly laid off staff, provided buyouts to all the workers, ordered all the workforce again into the workplace full-time, dissolved teams, introduced the closure of 6 out of 10 regional workplaces and circulated plans to close dozens of subject workplaces.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say round 1,000 years of institutional expertise and information have walked out the door,” stated Altman. “The highest cyber safety folks, the highest individuals who keep the techniques, and so forth. … There has actually been an infinite mind drain from the company, and that’s persevering with.”

Dudek admitted, behind closed doorways, that he’s following the orders of DOGE and the White Home. “I work for the president. I have to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek informed senior SSA workers and advocates in a mid-March recording leaked to ProPublica. “I’ve needed to make some powerful decisions, decisions I didn’t agree with, however the president needed it and I did it.” Later within the assembly, Dudek stated: “Once more, I work for the president. DOGE is a part of that.”

Trump’s nominee to steer the company, Frank Bisignano, is a monetary companies CEO with a net worth of around $1 billion. Bisignano, who told CNBC he’s “basically a DOGE particular person,” has a fame for chopping workers, whereas taking house 380 times the compensation of the median worker at his firm.

Bisignano apparently lied at a March 25 affirmation listening to, telling the Senate Finance Committee he hasn’t had contact with SSA or DOGE. However a whistleblower told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) that Bisignano has had frequent conversations with SSA executives, requested specific approval of all hires and intervened to make sure a DOGE engineer was employed and given fast entry to non-public information techniques — claims that have been confirmed by the Washington Post.

Though the Finance Committee voted alongside celebration traces to advance Bisignano’s nomination in March, Senate Democrats are calling for Trump to withdraw the nomination. “There’s a belief hole between the nominee and the American folks earlier than he’s even gotten within the door,” Wyden stated in a press release.

Social Safety Recipients Are Scared

Social Safety staff and beneficiaries are feeling the consequences of the mayhem launched below Dudek. Workers is stretched skinny and demoralized, struggling to maintain up with fixed modifications from above, and coping with a rising backlog of claims. Spending freezes depart employees unable to buy workplace provides, make copies of paperwork or rent obligatory companies like interpreters for hearings.

The SSA web site is crashing repeatedly, and callers discover themselves hung up on or placed on maintain for hours. In the meantime, the staff in control of monitoring buyer expertise was minimize by DOGE. AARP reported that its assist line is flooded with calls from confused, annoyed and offended older folks.

“Morale is in the bathroom,” an worker told the Washington Post in March. “Everyone knows what DOGE needs to do, which is simply break us, to allow them to privatize us.”

“What’s happening is the destruction of the company from the within out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told the Washington Post. “I’ve folks approaching me on a regular basis of their 70s and 80s, they usually’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”

Even earlier than Trump got here into workplace, SSA was at a 50-year staffing low, following years of budget cuts pressured by Republicans. Whilst more than 11,200 Americans flip 65 every day, the company’s operating overhead costs stay extremely environment friendly at under 1 %, all of the whereas by no means lacking a month of funds. Nevertheless it won’t maintain that document for lengthy.

“This chainsaw of the Musk-Trump co-presidency is gutting this company. It’s breaking it from inside,” Martin O’Malley, former SSA commissioner below President Biden, testified earlier than the Democratic Steering and Coverage Committee on April 1. “And it finally will result in cascading failures, interruptions and system shutdowns that may finally — and I believe inside the subsequent couple of months — result in profit interruptions for the primary time in 90 years.”

A former deputy SSA commissioner below George W. Bush has expressed similar concerns that advantages may quickly be disrupted.

“It might seem that what they’re making an attempt to do is crater this company, and kneecap its potential to serve the general public,” O’Malley testified. “They’ve to do this, as a result of 80 % of Individuals consider that Social Safety needs to be strengthened and made higher. To allow them to’t actually rob it, till they wreck it and bitter sufficient of the general public in opposition to it.”

He warned: “I really consider that the Musk-Trump co-presidency has already taken 90 % of the actions essential to crater this company.”

Whereas Trump and Bisignano insist they won’t minimize advantages, advocates and Democratic politicians argue that chopping companies achieves the identical finish. “[T]listed below are backdoor methods to perform the identical factor as a advantages minimize,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) pointed out in Bisignano’s listening to. “[L]onger traces, extra errors, and everybody who provides up or dies earlier than they get their advantages sorted out on account of these delays can also be a profit minimize.”

Bisignano deflected a query on whether or not Social Safety needs to be privatized, stating, “I’ve by no means heard a phrase of it, and I’ve by no means considered it.” In his 2000 e book, Trump known as Social Safety a “Ponzi scheme” and called for its privatization. And in a leaked March email to staff, Dudek alarmed advocates by saying the company would start to outsource “non-essential capabilities to business consultants,” a seeming reference to privatizing features of this system.

Altman warned that as DOGE messes with SSA and makes system crashes extra probably, it may open the door for privatization. “There’s about $1.5 trillion that flows via Social Safety. None of that goes to Wall Road or any of those for-profit firms,” she stated. “However I believe these ‘tech bros’ and others would like to get their fingers on it.” She fears that if the Trump administration breaks the system and disrupts advantages, “They’ll say, ‘See? Authorities can’t do it. We’ve obtained to get the non-public sector.’”

She additionally warns that if SSA outsources buyer companies, folks needing help will discover themselves “trapped in an AI nightmare.”

“There are such a lot of causes that synthetic intelligence simply can not do what people do on this program,” defined Altman. “Individuals who name don’t at all times know precisely what their difficulty is, or the right way to describe it, and it takes some dialog to determine it out. And typically they’ve one downside, after which they uncover there’s three others. And the opposite factor is that folks name at very susceptible occasions. , they’ve misplaced a cherished one, or they’re disabled and may now not work.”

DOGE Is Mendacity About Fraud, Whereas Creating Alternatives for Theft

One other key technique to destroy belief in Social Safety is lying about widespread benefits fraud. Trump and Musk repeatedly tout the truth that millions of Social Security accounts exist for folks born greater than 100 years in the past — despite the fact that the overwhelming majority are usually not receiving advantages. Actually, of the 18.9 million centenarians within the SSA database with out a recorded demise date, 18.4 million haven’t obtained advantages in over 50 years. The declare is so off-base that even Dudek has disputed it.

Musk additionally repeatedly means that hundreds of thousands of noncitizens illegally obtain Social Safety advantages. At an April rally that was a part of Musk’s failed try to purchase a Wisconsin Supreme Courtroom seat, Musk and DOGE affiliate Antonio Gracias introduced a so-called “mind-blowing chart,” exhibiting that hundreds of thousands of immigrants have Social Security numbers. However this isn’t fraud: Immigrants who’re legally licensed to work are issued Social Safety numbers. Actually, undocumented immigrants (who don’t obtain Social Safety numbers, however are required to pay federal taxes) contributed $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, despite the fact that they’re ineligible to obtain advantages.

In an much more wild declare, Musk has repeatedly accused Biden of illegally handing out Social Safety numbers to immigrants to encourage voter fraud in a “large, large-scale program to import as many illegals as doable, finally to vary all the voting map of america.”

Musk, DOGE members and Vice President J.D. Vance have all additionally peddled the absurd lie that 40 % of calls to SSA are fraudulent. This can be a gross misrepresentation of a completely completely different statistic: That 40 % of SSA direct deposit fraud incidents occurred by way of telephone calls. In congressional testimony, O’Malley corrected the declare, noting that, the truth is, just 0.032 percent of calls to SSA are profitable makes an attempt at direct deposit fraud.

Musk, who has promised to slash $2 trillion from the federal price range, appears to hope to search out a lot of that in SSA. However the fraud and waste simply aren’t there: On common, SSA makes $9 billion in improper funds annually, representing lower than 1 % of complete funds (largely via overpayments and error, not fraud), most of which is finally recovered, in accordance with a 2024 Inspector General report.

“They’ve simply completed this again and again on Social Safety, simply developing with these wild claims that bear no resemblance to the reality,” Kathleen Romig, director of Social Safety and incapacity coverage on the Heart on Funds and Coverage Priorities, told the Washington Post.

What’s extra, DOGE appears to be utilizing its fraud allegations to justify main coverage overhauls. “Within the title of stopping fraud, they make these modifications, and the modifications maintain coming,” stated Altman. “It’s created waste and inefficiency, and truly the chance for fraud.”

Citing fraud safety, SSA abruptly introduced in mid-March that folks would no longer be able to use for advantages or make modifications to their direct deposits by telephone. As a substitute, these actions may solely be completed on-line or in-person at a subject workplace.

Social Safety advocates and recipients have been alarmed. Many older Individuals lack web entry or the technological savvy to use for advantages on-line — an issue set to worsen if the SSA web site retains crashing. However to go to in particular person, they must wait hours on the telephone to make an appointment, survive with out advantages for weeks or months till the subsequent obtainable appointment and journey to the sphere workplace (at least a 45-mile round trip for six million older adults, a lot of whom don’t drive). The SSA estimated that ending these telephone companies would add 75,000 to 85,000 new in-person office visits every week.

In response to public outcry, SSA scrapped the changes on April 9. However different modifications stay in place, and the speedy bulletins have created an atmosphere of confusion and concern for recipients.

Relatively than rooting out precise fraud, the confusion at SSA has made recipients extra vulnerable to scams. “Scammers have been sending out very official trying notices saying, ‘Okay, you’ve obtained to authenticate your self, or your advantages are going to cease,’” stated Altman. “It appears very official, and also you’re determined, you possibly can’t stay with out your advantages.”

DOGE meddling additionally will increase the chance of an information breach. In testimony, former SSA performing Chief of Workers Tiffany Flick described how, below Dudek, DOGE associates got delicate data with out requisite coaching, which they considered from inside Trump’s Workplace of Personnel Administration workplaces, surrounded by White Home staffers. On this atmosphere, she warned, “Others may take photos of the information, switch it to different areas, and even feed it into AI packages. In such a chaotic atmosphere, the chance of knowledge leaking into the fallacious fingers is critical.” She additionally warned that SSA’s IT is constructed on an “extremely advanced net of techniques” which might be extraordinarily dependable, however may simply be damaged by DOGE associates, resulting in advantages delays.

In a lawsuit introduced by unions and retiree advocacy teams, federal Choose Ellen Lipton Hollander issued a preliminary injunction in mid-April, blocking DOGE from accessing private SSA information, and ordering them to delete any already obtained, together with Social Safety numbers, medical data, fee and financial institution information, earnings and tax data. She additionally required DOGE to take away software program put in on SSA techniques and cease accessing SSA code.

This was an extension of Hollander’s March temporary restraining order, through which she famous that “the DOGE Workforce is basically engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, searching for a fraud epidemic, based mostly on little greater than suspicion.” Complaining in regards to the order to Bloomberg, Dudek initially claimed it could force him to essentially shut down the agency, and promising: “I’ll comply with it precisely and terminate entry by all SSA staff to our IT techniques.” Hollander known as Dudek’s illustration “inaccurate,” noting that her order “expressly applies solely to SSA staff engaged on the DOGE agenda.” In response, Dudek walked again his threats to shut down SSA.

Weaponizing Social Safety

Dudek has additionally helped Trump weaponize Social Safety. In late February, SSA abruptly cancelled two contracts for the gathering and upkeep of knowledge on births and deaths in Maine, a transfer that would have forced parents to register their newborns at a Social Safety workplace as an alternative of the hospital. When a senior SSA official warned that the cancellations would enhance fraud, Dudek emailed back: “Please cancel the contracts. Whereas our improper funds will go up, and fraudsters could compromise identities, no cash will go from the general public belief to a petulant youngster.”

That “petulant youngster” was Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, whom Dudek believed had been “disrespectful” and “unprofessional” to Trump. Mills had drawn Trump’s ire for insisting that Maine would comply with state and federal legislation, and wouldn’t ban transgender athletes from women’ and girls’s sports activities. Whereas the information contract cancellations have been rolled again, Trump has continued other retaliatory attacks on the state.

The Trump administration can also be utilizing SSA to assault immigrants. In April, SSA added thousands of migrants to the company’s “demise grasp file,” with the intention of chopping them off from banks, bank cards and authorities advantages.

And in March, it was reported that SSA has frozen a process called Enumeration-Beyond-Entry, through which immigrants who’re granted work authorization are robotically issued and mailed Social Safety playing cards. This modification will create extra work and prices for SSA, whereas including hurdles for immigrant employees.

Are We at Threat of Operating Out of Funds?

Regardless of being enormously common, SSA has lengthy weathered assaults from the suitable — usually via claims this system is unsustainable. From the mid-Eighties via 2020, Social Safety collected extra annually than it paid out, permitting it to build trust funds worth $2.8 trillion. However because the American inhabitants ages, the most recent Social Safety Trustees’ Report signifies that by 2033, the company could now not be capable to pay out full advantages.

However there are answers to shore up this system. At present, wages above $176,100 are usually not taxed for Social Safety. Altman’s group, Social Safety Works, helps payments from Democratic congressmembers that will lift or eliminate this so-called “wage cap.” As well as, the payroll tax may very well be elevated, and promoting and expanding legal immigration would enhance the scale of the workforce.

Regardless of Republican assaults, Social Safety has remained extraordinarily common through the years. And thus far, public anger over the present issues appears to be directed at Trump, Musk and DOGE. Voters have berated Republican Congressmembers at city halls, demanding they shield Social Safety and sharing their horror stories and fears. Trump’s approval ranking dropped in mid-March, together with a drop among older people from 49 to 45 %.

Whereas Democrats have by no means tried to destroy the Social Safety system, many Democratic presidents have signed laws lowering or chopping advantages for sure teams. In 1994, Invoice Clinton supported cutting people off disability SSA benefits after 36 months if their incapacity was based mostly on drug or alcohol use. And in a 2011 effort to compromise with Tea Get together congressmembers obsessive about decreasing the nationwide debt, Barack Obama supported an finally failed “grand discount” settlement that will have raised taxes on the wealthy whereas chopping social security internet packages, together with Social Safety. (Within the last month of his presidency, Joe Biden signed legislation that boosted some recipients’ advantages, by ending provisions that restrict advantages for some public service retirees.)

Though SSA has lengthy confronted assaults, Altman stated this time is “qualitatively completely different.”

“It strikes me what they’re making an attempt to do is persuade all people there’s an infinite quantity of fraud. Then they’ll say, ‘Hey, we’re not chopping authentic advantages. We’re chopping fraud.’ And in addition, maybe make the entire thing collapse, and privatize the administration. After which past that — who is aware of.”