Katie Rose
Quandt
Elon
Musk’s DOGE is inflicting crashes, hang-ups and hours-long waits on Social
Security recipients, eroding trust.
In recent
months, people trying to reach the Social Security Administration (SSA) have
encountered website crashes, automatic hang-ups and hours-long waits on the
phone or in person. But horrible customer service appears to be just the first
step in Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s plan to destroy Social Security — the
United States’ largest social welfare program, which provides benefits to 73
million people, or one in five U.S. residents.
President
Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency”
(DOGE) team significant access and power within SSA. In just three months, the
agency has implemented plans to decrease the staff count from 57,000 to 50,000
(with rumors of deeper cuts to come), started closing offices, made it harder
for people to register and access benefits, spread lies about fraud, accessed
recipients’ personal information, and created an environment of chaos, fear and
confusion. All the while, DOGE is on an obsessive hunt for widespread benefits
fraud, which one federal judge characterized as “a search for the proverbial
needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is
actually in the haystack.”
Advocates fear
that as DOGE makes Social Security increasingly nonfunctional, trust in the
enormously popular program will erode, allowing Musk and his allies the
opportunity to further weaken or privatize aspects of the program.
Weakening
Social Security has serious and even deadly consequences: Among older people
who receive benefits, 39 percent of men and 44 percent of women derive more
than half their income from it. Around 80 percent of recipients are retired
workers (or their spouses and dependents), who paid into the system during
their working years, while the rest qualify due to a disability or are children
of deceased workers.
Despite its
crucial role lifting millions of Americans out of poverty, Trump and Musk
repeatedly disparage the program as dysfunctional, rife with fraud, or an
outright scam. In February, Trump falsely claimed that millions of dead
Americans were collecting benefits, alleging: “It’s all a scam, the whole thing
is a scam.” Meanwhile, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Musk called Social
Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And in a FOX Business
interview about DOGE cuts, Musk ominously called entitlements like SSA “the big
one to eliminate.” (The White House insists Musk was referring to eliminating
“waste and fraud,” not entitlement programs in their entirety.)
“Never before
did we have a president claiming that there was all this fraud where there
wasn’t any, or all this waste where there wasn’t any,” Nancy Altman, president
of Social Security Works, a political advocacy group that calls for expansion
of Social Security, told Truthout. “And then using that to make changes
precipitously, without any kind of thought — some of which are just going to
create more fraud. And no one has ever had access to all this data, people’s
most personal data.”
DOGE Influence
at SSA
Trump replaced
his initial acting SSA Commissioner, Michelle King, a 30-year veteran of the
agency, in February after she refused to allow DOGE unfettered access to
recipients’ private data. Her replacement is Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer,
who at the time was on administrative leave for leaking information to DOGE
behind his supervisors’ backs.
Unsurprisingly,
Dudek has acted as a rubber stamp for DOGE’s staff-cutting agenda.
“DOGE has been
all over the Social Security Administration,” said Altman. “They’re calling the
shots.”
Under Dudek,
SSA rapidly laid off employees, offered buyouts to the entire staff, ordered
the entire workforce back into the office full-time, dissolved teams, announced
the closure of 6 out of 10 regional offices and circulated plans to close
dozens of field offices.
“It’s not an
exaggeration to say around 1,000 years of institutional experience and
knowledge have walked out the door,” said Altman. “The top cyber security
people, the top people who maintain the systems, and so forth. … There has
really been an enormous brain drain from the agency, and that’s continuing.”
Dudek admitted,
behind closed doors, that he is following the orders of DOGE and the White
House. “I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to
do,” Dudek told senior SSA staff and advocates in a mid-March recording leaked
to ProPublica. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree
with, but the president wanted it and I did it.” Later in the meeting, Dudek
said: “Again, I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”
Trump’s nominee
to lead the agency, Frank Bisignano, is a financial services CEO with a net
worth of around $1 billion. Bisignano, who told CNBC he is “fundamentally a
DOGE person,” has a reputation for cutting staff, while taking home 380 times
the compensation of the median employee at his company.
Bisignano
apparently lied at a March 25 confirmation hearing, telling the Senate Finance
Committee he hasn’t had contact with SSA or DOGE. But a whistleblower told Sen.
Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) that Bisignano has had frequent conversations with SSA
executives, requested explicit approval of all hires and intervened to ensure a
DOGE engineer was hired and given immediate access to private data systems —
claims that were confirmed by the Washington Post.
Although the
Finance Committee voted along party lines to advance Bisignano’s nomination in
March, Senate Democrats are calling for Trump to withdraw the nomination.
“There’s a trust gap between the nominee and the American people before he’s
even gotten in the door,” Wyden said in a statement.
Social Security
Recipients Are Scared
Social Security
employees and beneficiaries are feeling the effects of the mayhem introduced
under Dudek. Staff is stretched thin and demoralized, struggling to keep up
with constant changes from above, and dealing with a growing backlog of claims.
Spending freezes leave workers unable to purchase office supplies, make copies
of documents or hire necessary services like interpreters for hearings.
The SSA website
is crashing repeatedly, and callers find themselves hung up on or put on hold
for hours. Meanwhile, the team in charge of monitoring customer experience was
cut by DOGE. AARP reported that its help line is flooded with calls from
confused, frustrated and angry older people.
“Morale is in
the toilet,” an employee told the Washington Post in March. “We all know what
DOGE wants to do, which is just break us, so they can privatize us.”
“What’s going
on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s
accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told the Washington Post. “I have
people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside
themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
Even before
Trump came into office, SSA was at a 50-year staffing low, following years of
budget cuts forced by Republicans. Even as more than 11,200 Americans turn 65
each day, the agency’s operating overhead costs remain incredibly efficient at
below 1 percent, all the while never missing a month of payments. But it might
not keep that record for long.
“This chainsaw
of the Musk-Trump co-presidency is gutting this agency. It is breaking it from
within,” Martin O’Malley, former SSA commissioner under President Biden,
testified before the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on April 1. “And
it ultimately will lead to cascading failures, interruptions and system
shutdowns that will eventually — and I think within the next couple of months —
lead to benefit interruptions for the first time in 90 years.”
A former deputy
SSA commissioner under George W. Bush has expressed similar concerns that
benefits could soon be disrupted.
“It would
appear that what they’re trying to do is crater this agency, and kneecap its
ability to serve the public,” O’Malley testified. “They have to do that,
because 80 percent of Americans believe that Social Security should be
strengthened and made better. So they can’t really rob it, until they wreck it
and sour enough of the public against it.”
He warned: “I
truly believe that the Musk-Trump co-presidency has already taken 90 percent of
the actions necessary to crater this agency.”
While Trump and
Bisignano insist they will not cut benefits, advocates and Democratic
politicians argue that cutting services achieves the same end. “[T]here are
backdoor ways to accomplish the same thing as a benefits cut,” Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Massachusetts) pointed out in Bisignano’s hearing. “[L]onger lines,
more errors, and everyone who gives up or dies before they get their benefits
sorted out due to those delays is also a benefit cut.”
Bisignano
deflected a question on whether Social Security should be privatized, stating,
“I’ve never heard a word of it, and I’ve never thought about it.” In his 2000
book, Trump called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and called for its
privatization. And in a leaked March email to staff, Dudek alarmed advocates by
saying the agency would begin to outsource “non-essential functions to industry
experts,” a seeming reference to privatizing aspects of the program.
Altman warned
that as DOGE messes with SSA and makes system crashes more likely, it could
open the door for privatization. “There’s about $1.5 trillion that flows
through Social Security. None of that goes to Wall Street or any of these
for-profit companies,” she said. “But I think these ‘tech bros’ and others
would love to get their hands on it.” She fears that if the Trump
administration breaks the system and disrupts benefits, “They’ll say, ‘See?
Government can’t do it. We’ve got to get the private sector.’”
She also warns
that if SSA outsources customer services, people needing assistance will find
themselves “trapped in an AI nightmare.”
“There are so
many reasons that artificial intelligence just cannot do what humans do on this
program,” explained Altman. “People who call don’t always know exactly what
their issue is, or how to describe it, and it takes some conversation to figure
it out. And sometimes they have one problem, and then they discover there’s
three others. And the other thing is that people call at very vulnerable times.
You know, they’ve lost a loved one, or they’re disabled and can no longer
work.”
DOGE Is Lying
About Fraud, While Creating Opportunities for Theft
Another key
strategy to destroy trust in Social Security is lying about widespread benefits
fraud. Trump and Musk repeatedly tout the fact that millions of Social Security
accounts exist for people born more than 100 years ago — even though the vast
majority are not receiving benefits. In fact, of the 18.9 million centenarians
in the SSA database without a recorded death date, 18.4 million haven’t
received benefits in over 50 years. The claim is so off-base that even Dudek
has disputed it.
Musk also
repeatedly suggests that millions of noncitizens illegally receive Social
Security benefits. At an April rally that was part of Musk’s failed attempt to
buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, Musk and DOGE associate Antonio Gracias
presented a so-called “mind-blowing chart,” showing that millions of immigrants
have Social Security numbers. But this is not fraud: Immigrants who are legally
authorized to work are issued Social Security numbers. In fact, undocumented
immigrants (who do not receive Social Security numbers, but are required to pay
federal taxes) contributed $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, even
though they are ineligible to receive benefits.
In an even more
wild claim, Musk has repeatedly accused Biden of illegally handing out Social
Security numbers to immigrants to encourage voter fraud in a “massive,
large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to
change the entire voting map of the United States.”
Musk, DOGE
members and Vice President J.D. Vance have all also peddled the absurd lie that
40 percent of calls to SSA are fraudulent. This may be a gross
misrepresentation of an entirely different statistic: That 40 percent of SSA
direct deposit fraud incidents occurred via phone calls. In congressional
testimony, O’Malley corrected the claim, noting that, in fact, just 0.032
percent of calls to SSA are successful attempts at direct deposit fraud.
Musk, who has
promised to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget, seems to hope to find
much of that in SSA. But the fraud and waste just aren’t there: On average, SSA
makes $9 billion in improper payments each year, representing less than 1
percent of total payments (largely through overpayments and error, not fraud),
most of which is ultimately recovered, according to a 2024 Inspector General
report.
“They have just
done this over and over again on Social Security, just coming up with these
wild claims that bear no resemblance to the truth,” Kathleen Romig, director of
Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, told the Washington Post.
What’s more,
DOGE seems to be using its fraud allegations to justify major policy overhauls.
“In the name of preventing fraud, they make these changes, and the changes keep
coming,” said Altman. “It’s created waste and inefficiency, and actually the
opportunity for fraud.”
Citing fraud
protection, SSA abruptly announced in mid-March that people would no longer be
able to apply for benefits or make changes to their direct deposits by phone.
Instead, these activities could only be done online or in-person at a field
office.
Social Security
advocates and recipients were alarmed. Many older Americans lack internet
access or the technological savvy to apply for benefits online — a problem set
to worsen if the SSA website keeps crashing. But to visit in person, they would
have to wait hours on the phone to make an appointment, survive without
benefits for weeks or months until the next available appointment and travel to
the field office (at least a 45-mile round trip for 6 million older adults,
many of whom don’t drive). The SSA estimated that ending these phone services
would add 75,000 to 85,000 new in-person office visits each week.
In response to
public outcry, SSA scrapped the changes on April 9. But other changes remain in
place, and the rapid announcements have created an environment of confusion and
fear for recipients.
Rather than
rooting out actual fraud, the confusion at SSA has made recipients more
susceptible to scams. “Scammers have been sending out very official looking
notices saying, ‘Okay, you’ve got to authenticate yourself, or your benefits
are going to stop,’” said Altman. “It looks very official, and you’re
desperate, you can’t live without your benefits.”
DOGE meddling
also increases the risk of a data breach. In testimony, former SSA acting Chief
of Staff Tiffany Flick described how, under Dudek, DOGE associates were given
sensitive information without requisite training, which they viewed from within
Trump’s Office of Personnel Management offices, surrounded by White House
staffers. In this environment, she warned, “Others could take pictures of the
data, transfer it to other locations, and even feed it into AI programs. In
such a chaotic environment, the risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is
significant.” She also warned that SSA’s IT is built on an “incredibly complex
web of systems” that are extremely reliable, but could easily be broken by DOGE
associates, leading to benefits delays.
In a lawsuit
brought by unions and retiree advocacy groups, federal Judge Ellen Lipton
Hollander issued a preliminary injunction in mid-April, blocking DOGE from
accessing personal SSA data, and ordering them to delete any already obtained,
including Social Security numbers, medical information, payment and bank
records, earnings and tax information. She also required DOGE to remove
software installed on SSA systems and stop accessing SSA code.
This was an
extension of Hollander’s March temporary restraining order, in which she noted
that “the DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in
search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” Complaining
about the order to Bloomberg, Dudek initially claimed it would force him to
essentially shut down the agency, and promising: “I will follow it exactly and
terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.” Hollander called
Dudek’s representation “inaccurate,” noting that her order “expressly applies
only to SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda.” In response, Dudek walked
back his threats to close down SSA.
Weaponizing
Social Security
Dudek has also
helped Trump weaponize Social Security. In late February, SSA abruptly
cancelled two contracts for the collection and maintenance of data on births
and deaths in Maine, a move that would have forced parents to register their
newborns at a Social Security office instead of the hospital. When a senior SSA
official warned that the cancellations would increase fraud, Dudek emailed
back: “Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and
fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to
a petulant child.”
That “petulant
child” 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 follow state and federal law, and would not ban
transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. While the data contract
cancellations were rolled back, Trump has continued other retaliatory attacks
on the state.
The Trump
administration is also using SSA to attack immigrants. In April, SSA added
thousands of migrants to the agency’s “death master file,” with the intention
of cutting them off from banks, credit cards and government benefits.
And in March,
it was reported that SSA has frozen a process called Enumeration-Beyond-Entry,
in which immigrants who are granted work authorization are automatically issued
and mailed Social Security cards. This change will create more work and costs
for SSA, while adding hurdles for immigrant workers.
Are We at Risk
of Running Out of Funds?
Despite being
enormously popular, SSA has long weathered attacks from the right — often
through claims the program is unsustainable. From the mid-1980s through 2020,
Social Security collected more each year than it paid out, allowing it to build
trust funds worth $2.8 trillion. But as the American population ages, the
latest Social Security Trustees’ Report indicates that by 2033, the agency may
no longer be able to pay out full benefits.
But there are
solutions to shore up the program. Currently, wages above $176,100 are not
taxed for Social Security. Altman’s organization, Social Security Works,
supports bills from Democratic congressmembers that would lift or eliminate
this so-called “wage cap.” In addition, the payroll tax could be increased, and
promoting and expanding legal immigration would increase the size of the
workforce.
Despite
Republican attacks, Social Security has remained extremely popular over the
years. And so far, public anger over the current problems seems to be directed
at Trump, Musk and DOGE. Voters have berated Republican Congressmembers at town
halls, demanding they protect Social Security and sharing their horror stories
and fears. Trump’s approval rating dropped in mid-March, including a drop among
older people from 49 to 45 percent.
While Democrats
have never attempted to destroy the Social Security system, many Democratic
presidents have signed legislation reducing or cutting benefits for certain
groups. In 1994, Bill Clinton supported cutting people off disability SSA
benefits after 36 months if their disability was based on drug or alcohol use.
And in a 2011 effort to compromise with Tea Party congressmembers obsessed with
lowering the national debt, Barack Obama supported an ultimately failed “grand
bargain” agreement that would have raised taxes on the rich while cutting
social safety net programs, including Social Security. (In the final month of
his presidency, Joe Biden signed legislation that boosted some recipients’
benefits, by ending provisions that limit benefits for some public service
retirees.)
Although SSA
has long faced attacks, Altman said this time is “qualitatively different.”
“It strikes me
what they’re trying to do is convince everybody there’s an enormous amount of
fraud. Then they can say, ‘Hey, we’re not cutting legitimate benefits. We’re
cutting fraud.’ And also, perhaps make the whole thing collapse, and privatize
the administration. And then beyond that — who knows.”
No comments:
Post a Comment