For Trumpism, the Universities Are the Enemy. Just Ask JD Vance.

Going far beyond the stated purpose of fighting anti-Semitism in American universities, Donald Trump is using the power of the federal government to try to crush Harvard University, the nation’s oldest
school, founded in 1636, older that the United States by a century and a half.

When the University’s president, Alan Garber, rejected a long list of reform demands, Trump lashed out like a spoiled child who doesn’t get his way. Withholding $2.26 billion in research grants was not enough to make Harvard buckle, so he has moved to have its tax exempt status revoked, and when that wasn’t enough, threatens to block foreign students from enrolling – an important source of revenue. Our embarrassing president is in the grip of tantrum, tweeting on his Truth Social…

“Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called ‘future leaders’”

Harvard was the first to fight back against the administration, which has posted a list of 60 colleges and universities the administration is investigating under the rubric of its anti-Semitic crusade. Which begs the question, are there really that many universities across the country that have exhibited anti-Semitic outcroppings?

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” University President Dr. Alan Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community.

America won’t shed too many tears over Trump having taken particular aim at the Ivy League, perceived as bastions of white privilege, however mistaken. But these institutions use the federal funds to conduct vital research for the advancement of human knowledge in medicine and science. This administration evidently considers the production of knowledge worthless.

Columbia University had been struck with a denial of $400 million in funding, but in its case the school opted to accommodate the Trump demands, earning it scalding criticism for appeasement. Most
Columbia University.

odious, the university said it would appoint a senior vice provost to review the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, and Center for Palestine Studies, caving in to the administration’s support of Israel and its willful blindness to Gaza atrocities. Princeton was told by the Education Department that is is being investigated, which says $210 million in research grants is at risk. Brown stands to lose $510 million. Cornell at least $1 billion. And as indication that anti-Semitism acts as a surrogate for wider aims, the reason that the University of Pennsylvania was docked $175 million was because it had allowed a biological male transgender to compete on its women’s swim team in 2022.

do this or else

To go through the stunning demands made by the Trump administration in its letter to Harvard’s president and Penny Pritzker, Lead Member of the Harvard Corporation, is to come away with the realization that not only did Harvard have no other choice than to refuse, but that the authoritarian intrusion into a private educational institution needs to be actively combatted. And, indeed, Harvard has sued the administration.

One needs to do a deeper dive than the quick summaries the media provides to get why Harvard took the virtuous course. We urge you to plow through this:

Looking for an “agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government”, the letter makes the following demands:

Under “Governance and leadership reforms”, Harvard must empower “among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most …committed to the changes indicated in this letter”. The power of all others, including students, must be reduced.

The government requires under “Merit-based Hiring Reform” that by this August Harvard “cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership.”

And all hiring data “shall be shared with the federal government” subject to audit until the end of 2028, which is the end of Trump’s second term, should he choose not to end-run the Constitution and go for a third term.

And then, in an outlandish overreach way beyond the government’s purview, the letter then insists that “all existing and prospective faculty be reviewed for plagiarism”.

Also to begin by August and persisting to end-2028, the same banned preferences of race, color, etc. are to be replaced by “Merit-based Admissions Reform…throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.” Admissions data, too, are to be “shared” with the federal government, and made public, “including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” The government does have under civil rights law the oversight role of seeing to it that schools adhere to anti-discrimination law, but here we have oversight that goes well beyond, even to grades on tests.

Under “International Admissions Reform”, international students “hostile to the American values” inscribed in our founding documents or “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism” must be turned away.

By August, to satisfy “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring”, the University must commission a federally-approved…

”external party…to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse… department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit”.

To defeat Harvard’s liberal bias – and presumably replicated in the demands made to all other educational institutions in the administration’s purge — the government will install thought police. What is the “viewpoint” that qualifies? Will a teaching or student applicant be asked if he or she supports President Trump? Will disagreeing that the 2020 election was stolen be disqualifying, as has been reported by applicants for government jobs who were asked this question?

Moreover, every year wherever a unit is found lacking in viewpoint diversity, it must hire “a critical mass of new faculty” or admit “a critical mass of students” to reach that diversity. And if that proves not viable, another compliant unit must be found for the derelict unit to merge into so as to effect the desired diversity.

“Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias” says that by August the University must commission yet another external party “to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture”. The inclusion of “ideological capture” makes clear that the administration is out to destroy any vestiges of what it would call “woke” practices and indeed this section calls for – in a long list of the schools that make up Harvard’s university – the elimination of every vestige of diversity-equity-inclusion – the DEI that Trump is eradicating throughout the government:

”The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name.”

The administration then calls for “immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming” in the letter’s section on “Student Discipline Reform and Accountability”. That at least should invite no disagreement given how out of hand the student demonstrations were allowed to go unchecked, with tent encampments, building takeovers, and vandalism.

Under “Transparency and Monitoring”, the letter – in addition to all the commissions and reporting and audits that have been mandated to this point — orders the University to submit every calendar quarter a report – “certified for accuracy—that documents its progress on the implementation of the reforms detailed in this letter.”

Beyond that, Harvard must disclose all foreign funds received, their purpose, and how used.

Trump apparently wants to run Harvard. One expects at the close of the letter’s five pages that he has named himself the university’s president, much as he declared himself the chairman of Kennedy Center. Short of that, but with breathtaking temerity, the letter concludes with…

“We expect your immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms that will enable Harvard to return to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”

…effrontery that on its own must have been enough to cause the Harvard leadership to tell the government to bugger off.

his new world order

Trump’s master plan calls for destruction of the federal government, upending the world’s trading system, shattering international alliances, and doing maximum damage to the power structure of the nation’s universities. Beginning almost four centuries ago, the United States has built up an unparalleled universe of higher education institutions that has won the respect and envy of the world. Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton University’s president, says,

“The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security.”

Trump’s attack on America’s universities puts that at risk. The world sends its sons and daughters to these shores for their undergraduate and graduate educations. About 30% of the Harvard student body is from abroad. There are three quarters of a million foreign students in our universities in any year, a third of those from China, although this is declining in reaction to the threats of the Trump regime. They gain an understanding of our country and an appreciation for our freedom of inquiry, at least until recently. Their education here often wins them high status in their home countries. If you’ve ever wondered how it is that so many foreign heads of state, foreign ministers, etc. speak such good English when interviewed on television when visiting here, this is why.

go home

None of this is appreciated by Trump, who has threatened to cancel the visas of foreign students if Harvard does not capitulate to his demands. He has head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem demanding the names and records of all foreign students who participated in what the administration considers illegal campus protests. Failure to comply will result in revocation of their visas. The Trump administration has cancelled the visas of some 1,500 students, although, as with so many of their blunders, this has just been temporarily rescinded. Foreign students are now afraid to come here, worried that they may be snatched off the street and sent to foreign prisons like others, which newscasts in home countries are reporting happening in America.

”enemies from within”

Trump and his following harbor a pronounced animus against American universities. We have a vice-president in JD Vance, who earned a BA on the G.I. Bill at Ohio State And a JD from Yale Law, saying “the universities are the enemy”. In a 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Conference, he said:

“I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

The objective is to drive out the liberal bias that characterizes the great majority of our institutions of higher learning. To be sure, that is a sizeable problem. It is perhaps the natural state of those who hold idealistic wishes for society but shielded by the cloister of universities have not “been mugged by reality”, to borrow from Irving Kristol’s famous phrase. Universities should work to right this imbalance, but cutting off their funding is decidedly not how to go about it.

Since World War II, the government has chosen to fund the many universities across the land in the pursuit of medical and scientific advances. Repeat: the government elected to make national progress this way. To suddenly destroy that, ending the work of thousands of the best minds in the country as a means to force change, ostensibly to expunge anti-Semitism or a despised ideology, is blind idiocy. Consider the harm in this very partial list:

 With funding principally from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard funds research at a long list of Cambridge area hospitals, such as Boston Children’s, Brigham and Women’s, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — that are now cut off. What does that accomplish? Harvard is engaged in research aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease, A.L.S. Research in newly-rising tuberculosis has stopped.

 Cornell says the Trump administration’s freeze of $1 billion affects research into “new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, and space and satellite communications, as well as cancer research.”

 Northwestern says the freeze would hinder its research on robotics, nanotechnology, foreign military training and Parkinson’s disease.

 The transgender offense in 2022 caused suspension of $175 million in federal funding affecting seven different schools at the University of Pennsylvania, impacting research on preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, and protections against chemical warfare. Where’s the relevance and common sense in that, or any of this?

Whistleblower Says DOGE Stole Government Data – and Handed It to Russia?

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A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) says that DOGE team members appear to have stolen reams of data from the agency; someone with an IP (Internet protocol) address in Russia simultaneously tried to gain access to the NLRB; and whistleblower, Daniel Berulis, has received threats tacked to his front door.

Mr. Berulis says he’s also heard rumblings from IT employees at other agencies with similar worries that DOGE is secretly exfiltrating sensitive data. And found that another DOGE coder is busy with a product that creates a secret back door into data structures.

Berulis and his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

NPR (National Public Radio) broke the story which has been picked up by other news reporting sources but is curiously absent so far from the major newspapers.

guarded data

The NLRB receives complaints from workers of illegal employer treatment, holds sensitive information on unions, Social Security numbers, home addresses, proprietary corporate data, documentation of ongoing legal cases that contain corporate secrets — Musk’s SpaceX among them. Data that…

”four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.”

ENTER DOGE

A DOGE team arrived at the NLRB in the first days of March and demanded the highest access level, which gave them unencumbered permission to read, copy, and alter data. In addition, the DOGE team curiously asked that their activities not be logged. All computer system usage by staff at any government agency or corporation of any size is routinely recorded – logged – for security to alert staff to intruders and for troubleshooting should there be system failures. The log enables tracing the path of an intruder’s wanderings through a system. As well, the DOGE crew seemed to try to cover any other tracks by turning off monitoring tools and erasing behind them as they went. These breaches of protocol, Berulis told NPR, were…

“a huge red flag. That’s something that you just don’t do. It violates every core concept of security and best practice.”

No sooner had the Doge team been given full access than came in “near real-time”, according to Berulis, repeated attempts to log into NLRB systems from an IP address – the string of numbers that uniquely identifies a computer — in Russia. The interloper was trying to log into an account just set up by a DOGE team member and even knew the user ID and password. The attempts failed, however, owing to the NLRB’s block against all foreign entry regardless of correct ID and password.

Whether this was a state actor could not be known. Russian hackers are renowned for selling address on the dark Internet, but they in turn might sell their purloined trove to any of a number of our state adversaries – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.

backdoor man

Berulis made another discovery while DOGE was embedded. GitHub is a site (now owned by Microsoft) where developers can create, solely or in collaboration, open source software, meaning creations freely available for use by all. Browsing over a weekend Berulis saw posts on X by MIT graduate and DOGE engineer Jordan Wick about a project he was working on at GitHub that he called “NxGenBdoorExtract.”

NxGen is the name of a system at NLRB. “Bdoor” unmistakably alludes to “backdoor”, jargon for secret code hidden in a software system that permits illicit entry without user identification or password and known to as few people as only its creator, or in this case suspiciously only DOGE. Perhaps chastised for gabbing in the open, Wick made the posts private, preventing Berulis from probing further. “So when I saw this tool, I immediately panicked, just for lack of a better term”, he said.

It looked that DOGE’s plan might be to leave behind back doors into data systems throughout the government for Musk and his acolytes, returned to private life, to always be able to hack into government systems and extract data.

warranted search

Once the DOGE engineers left, Berulis tred to put together what pieces he could find to learn what had gone on. In one of his steps, he looked for tracings of data leaving the agency’s various datasets. He saw a chunk of data that had exited NxGen. But then found the motherload — a steep spike leaving the network itself (see screenshot), all of it looking
to be text files and totaling some 10 gigabytes. It was not possible to identify any specifics of the data, or whether it had been filtered to extract only files of a sort DOGE might have been looking for, nor could it be ruled out that the data might have been compressed and amount to far more than 10 gigabytes once expanded. In any case, the exfiltration of a vast amount of data was more than unusual because this was data that was never to leave the agency. And, as said, there were no logs to record where the data went.

Berulis and colleagues documented the breach and applied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for assistance. NPR says, “those efforts were disrupted without an explanation”. At this point, evidently, Berulis decided to go it alone as a whistleblower and submitted an official whistleblower disclosure in a detailed report to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. This was subsequently provided to NPR.

threat

He had made the breach known to the NLRB but no further when he went home one night to find a threatening note taped to his front door that contained personal information and an overhead drone photo of him walking his dog. Few knew that address. He had only moved there two months prior and, as he said in an interview, hadn’t yet even reported the address change to his credit card accounts. Clearly it was someone in the NLRB.

vetting

NPR says they had Berulis’s report reviewed by 11 technical experts at other government agencies as well as in the private sector, and spoke to over 30 contacts “across the government, the private sector, the labor movement, cybersecurity and law enforcement”.

A knee injury had prevented Berulis from joining the military. He was a volunteer firefighter for a time, then worked for a rape victim hotline, but was a computer savant from an early age and had done work on corporate systems, when the NLRB opportunity opened up. He had immediately set about reinforcing “zero trust” safeguards in the agency’s cloud-based data which sees to it that only those who-need-to-know have access, which indicates that Berulis is no ordinary coder.

NLRB was a dream job, he said. “I had an interest in serving my country”. Accordingly, Berulis has gone public despite the threat with at least two interviews (PBS NewsHour and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC). He is doing so hopefully to inspire those other IT workers that he had communicated with who had reported suspicious DOGE activity at their agencies.

But with Pam Bondi as attorney general, she who took no action against the reckless incompetence by Defense Secretary Hegseth disclosing in advance on Signal the attack plans against Yemen, it is a safe bet she will not initiate any investigation nor will a Republican-controlled Congress terrified of Trump.

Trump’s Tariffs Reveal They’d Threaten a U.S. Meltdown

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After Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of staggering “reciprocal” tariffs triggered days of steep stock market plunges, the President painted a picture of a world groveling at his feet, saying on Tuesday:

“These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are, they are dying to make a deal. Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything.
President Trump displays his by-country list of “reciprocal” tariffs.

I’ll do anything, sir.”

At a Republican dinner that evening he said:

“They’re all coming here. Japan is coming here as we speak. They’re in a plane, flying, lots of them”.

But after yet another day of stock index collapse, on Wednesday the President could only weakly urge everyone to buy stocks, posting at 9:37 that morning on Truth Social, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

That was before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that morning instilled in him what must have been a fear bordering on panic, enough to induce him to announce at 1:18 that afternoon his 90-day pause in the steep tariff imposition penalizing countries around the world.

Bessent undoubtedly schooled him in what it meant that both the bond markets and the dollar were in sharp declines of their own other than just the stock markets. Trump evidently took fright from the tariff chaos he had created when he was made to understand that the sell-off of U.S. Treasury bonds — normally regarded as the safest refuge from world turmoil — was signaling a loss of confidence in America’s future. The U.S. operates on borrowed money — witness our huge national debt — and if the world decides to pull its funds because the U.S. looks to become unstable, the government would need to offer exorbitant interest rates to lure them back, if they return at all. The spiraling cost of interest, already higher than what we spend on defense, could send the nation spiraling into bankruptcy.

Commenting on the gyrations before and after the 90-day walk back, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, having with some misgivings generally supported Trump, showed its disgust:

“It would be hard to find better evidence that markets believe the biggest threat to the world economy is Mr. Trump’s tariffs.”

Following the market rebound from the announcement — the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 2,963 points, or 7.9% — Trump boasted, “It’s the biggest increase in the history of the stock market”, entirely without self-awareness that it was the abandonment (for now) of his own policy that had caused the ecstasy.

When asked by a reporter, “Did the bond market persuade you to reverse course?”, Trump, of course, said “No”, as if he had as usual gone on his infallible (“I am never wrong”) instinct.

I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky. I was watching it. But if you look at it now, it’s beautiful…I saw last night where people were getting a little bit queasy… I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”

Watching helplessly as their savings and investments were taking a terrible beating, of course people were afraid, but that was about stocks. They knew nothing of the disaster a bond market plunge would bring.

At right-wing cable channels, after a difficult week of having to stir support for Trump despite the damage done to their audience, the pause was greeted with euphoria. Gushed Fox host Laura Ingraham,

Trump announced a brilliant move to pause the higher tariffs… but meanwhile to raise China’s tariffs to 125%, to wall off China by boxing them out…It’s genius.”

(A day later, the White House would clarify that the China tariff is 145%; the original base of 20% had been forgotten.)

inside job

Democrats had a different view of the sudden tariff reversal. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said “This could be an enormous scam”:

“The chaotic nature of this tariff policy with Trump’s position changing every single hour gives ample opportunity for any individual who has early access to information about the White House’s change in position to make boatloads of money.”

Senator Adam Schiff of California, questioning fraud, demanded.

”Who knew in advance that the President was going to, once again, flip-flop on tariffs? And, are people cashing in? There is just all too much opportunity for people in the White House and the administration to be insider trading, and you can’t put it past them for a minute.”

After ignoring furious Naval pilots put at risk of life by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blatant disregard of military security, we can be certain that Attorney General Pam Bondi will not initiate any insider trading investigation.

Smoot-Hawley Nonetheless

After the rebound, another stock value plunge resumed Thursday when a new realization set in. During his run for the presidency, candidate Trump had promised a universal 10% tariff with 60% for China. As with his other threats, this was dismissed as campaign puffery, that he wouldn’t actually do it. But now investors awoke to Trump’s fallback position now in place being a 10% universal tariff — and 145% for China. We were not back to normal at all. The markets had come to the startling realization that Trump’s tariffs are, on average, substantially higher than
the infamous Smoot-Hawley imposts that began in 1930 which greatly exacerbated the Great Depression. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs peaked at an averaged 19.8%. The table shows that Trump’s average 27.7%.

lying to his supporters

The President, though, is counting on tariffs to somewhat offset the cost of still further tax cuts. In several mutations he continues to promote the tariff Big Lie. On his “Liberation Day” he said,

“But now it’s our turn to prosper and in so doing use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt.”

Nowhere near trillions will be collected in tariffs; the government collects the tariffs such that only the government will prosper; the tariffs will be paid by Americans through inevitable increased prices; there is not a chance of paying down the national debt in the face of the massive tax cuts Congress plans in subservience to Trump.

He informed us that the period 1870 to 1913, when tariffs funded the government, was the most prosperous in American history,

“Then in 1913 for reasons unknown to mankind they established the income tax so that citizens rather than foreign countries would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

Foreign governments did not pay the tariffs, Americans did. In his inaugural address he said,

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

The tariffs tax our citizens, not foreign countries. He also said,

“It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our Treasury coming from foreign sources.”

So massive that he would have to create a new agency to collect the loot, an agency he would later name the External Revenue Service, part of his ruse to pretend the money would come from external sources. Outside the White House he stated,

“Last year China made $1 trillion off trade with the United States, and now I’ve reversed it…We made $2 billion, we’re making that, $2 billion a day.”

That’s a lie. Last year we imported $438 billion of products from China; we sold $143 billion to them; the net trade deficit was $295 billion. When he repeated the $2 billion-a-day take before an audience of hardhat workers, they applauded. Evidently, untold millions of Trump’s 77 million voters still do not realize that it is they who will be paying the tariffs through the increased prices that lower-income and middle class Americans can ill afford. Trump is taking in the money from them.

In a post on his social media platform, Trump declared that his tariffs are “a beautiful thing to behold.” “Some day people will realize that Tariffs, for the United States of America, are a very beautiful thing!”

hyper spin

While Americans in the millions watch trillions of dollars evaporate from their investments and 401k accounts as President Trump destroys the global trading system, the right-wing cable channels — charged with supporting Trump no matter what he does — have had to step to the lectern and preach his gospel to soothe the flock.

Rob Finnerty on Newsmax exorted viewers not to cave in to Democrat negativity:

”No one likes seeing the market fall. If you are retired or you’re close to retiring, this is especially nerve-wracking. But do you have buyer’s remorse? Do you regret voting for Donald Trump…after a bad week on Wall Street? I don’t think you do. But that’s what the left wants you to believe…Democrats are actually rooting for the stock market to crash. They want this all to go so bad for Donald Trump and the American people. They don’t care about Main Street. They clearly don’t care about you.”

This has been a consistent theme since Trump returned to the White House — painting a sordid picture of Democrats. Tearing down Democrats leads to some bewildering inversions, as this from Fox host Jesse Watters about Biden:

”And what did he build? Nothing. Build Back Better? Never happened. Bidenomics with open borders and outsourcing with record spending was throttling this country to the brink of a recession. This administration says they’re rescuing this economy from a recession.”

Biden built nothing? Not the $1.1 trillion infrastructure act which prior presidents repeatedly failed to deliver? A booming economy hardly on the brink of a recession? And this new administration, with the enormous disruption of tariffs, is not risking rather than rescuing the economy from a recession?

At the same time the nation’s top banker, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon, interviewed on Fox and asked about the likelihood of a recession, said, “I think probably, that’s a likely outcome.”

Fox Host Sean Hannity every night tried to rally the followers:

“It’s about protecting American industry, it’s about saving you money, it’s about high-paying career jobs for hard-working Americans all across the country, versus allowing the rest of the world to rip you off and restrict our products in their markets.

Greg Kelly at Newsmax about the tariffs:

“It’s so obvious, it’s so apparent. We needed a non-politician to pull this off. Somebody who truly cared about the country and not their own personal power, prestige, perks, and money”.

Does that sound to you like Trump?
Fox host Laura Ingraham asked:

“Now how many times have you heard that a tariff is a tax? But of course that’s facile thinking. Even if foreign manufacturers try to pass on of some of their price hikes to consumers, you’ve gotta consider the broader picture”.

Occasionally someone couldn’t hold it in. Jesse Watters in split-screen seemed blindsided when guest Maria Bartiromo, who hosts her own show on Fox, broke protocol to lament that:

”People are nervous…what President Trump is doing is massive…Right now you’re talking about markets in a tailspin. People are nervous. They are down. People have lost money. We’re talking about a nine trillion dollars in market value lost, wiped out, in about a week and a half. So markets going down is not good.”

Cue Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on “Face the Nation” last Sunday to cheer us up:

“Trillions of dollars of factories are going to be built in America…The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America.”

Sensing a mistake, he then said it would be done by robots, to viewers’ great relief — instead of mind-numbing jobs, no jobs at all.

Secretary Bessent on “Meet the Press” was equally encouraging:

“One thing that I can tell you as the Treasury Secretary, what I’ve been very impressed with is the market infrastructure, that we had record volume on Friday, and everything is working very smoothly, so the American people, they uh can…take great comfort in that”.

The DOGE Team Is Cluster Bombing Social Security

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Over the last decade or so, the younger generations have expressed increasing resentment that Social Security will not be there for them when they reach retirement age, that the 6.2% deducted from their paychecks – double that for the self-employed who have to pay the employer’s 6.2% as well – would make it what Elon Musk is calling “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.

But their fear of losing out was only that Social Security would run short of funds when their time came and not be able to pay full benefits.

What they nor current retirees hadn’t bargained for is the Trump administration’s multifaceted attempt to finally take great strides toward accomplishing the Republican dream of seeing Social Security destroyed altogether despite candidate Trump repeatedly telling us that he would not “touch” Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. “I will not cut one penny from Social Security”, he said.

What he did not say was that he intended to have Elon Musk lay hands on the agency for him. Musk and his acolytes have been doing so in several ways, starting with having acting commissioner Michele King and her chief of staff fired when they refused access to the agency’s data. Trump’s replacement, Leland Dudek, threw open the doors despite a federal judge blocking access to personal data and accusing Musk of a “fishing expedition”.

squeeze play

 First announced, in February, were 7,000 job cuts at the already understaffed Social Security Administration (SSA) to bring the personnel count down to 50,000. Worse, The Washington Post ran a story that said its management had been told to swiftly produce plans to cut the agency’s staff by half. Neither has happened – yet – but firings are happening all over government, most notably this week the disastrous and mindless layoffs of 20,000 at Health and Human Services.

 The second pincer move by the Musk team was to end telephone support entirely and require individuals to go online or personally visit Social Security offices to ask questions, sign up for benefits, straighten out snags.

 Tactic number three is to shutter a number of those offices to cause long lines and wait times at the offices that remain, hinder access for the elderly and disabled, create delays for the newly eligible trying to sign up for benefits for which they have been paying into the system all their working lives.

There was enough of an outcry to cause DOGE to dial back ending phone support entirely, but the plan is to halt the ability to change by phone one’s bank account for direct deposit as a way to prevent fraud.

we’re all crooks, apparently

Exaggerated claims of fraud have been Musk’s argument that his team must have access to the SSA’s data trove, which holds private information about some 73 million Americans. The SSA left itself open to such claims by not cleaning its database of some 12 million persons whose birthdates make them to be 120 years old and older. Musk could raise the specter of them fraudulently getting monthly checks or bank deposits all these years.

Liberal media airily waived off such notions saying the allegation of ongoing payments to the deceased had been thoroughly debunked but offering no proof. We turned to a midsummer 2023 report by Gail Ennis, the SSA’s inspector general (remember those officers who Trump fired from 18 agencies, and weren’t they there to detect waste, fraud, and abuse? ) had uncovered…

“approximately 18.9 million numberholders who were born in 1920 or earlier but had no death information on their Numident record”

But that doesn’t mean they were getting payments. Her audit did find that 44,000 over age 100 were getting payments, though. That could run to $50 million a month, so hardly trivial. But the IG’s report said that according to the Census Bureau “86,000 individuals residing in the United States were age 100 or older”. That reverses Musk’s fraud claim; it says that instead of the rampant fraud of legions of the dead receiving benefits, there were 42,000 alive at age 100 or older who were in 2023 unaccountably not getting benefits.

Fox News hosts nightly paid no attention to the IG’s report and instead made it a scandal of billions of dollars going to fraudsters, reciting as supposd proof thousands in the data whose birthdates made them 110-119 years old, more thousands who would have to be 120-129, and so on. At least Steve Doocy of “Fox & Friends” undercut them, reporting that on the Social Security website “it says at the age of 115, they stopped getting checks”, an automatic cutoff in the software reported by an SSA official.

Musk reported on X (Twitter) “Approximately 9.9 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked deceased. Another ~2 million to go”. Good. A clean-up long overdue. But he never produced any evidence that anyone over the age of 115 is getting social security benefits.

the fraud hotline

So that fraud claim didn’t work out particularly well. Musk needed another for why his crew needed access to the data of just about every adult in the country. So, appearing on Fox News with a few of his tech bros to be interviewed by Bret Baier last week, he had one of his crew, Aram Moghaddassi, unload a preposterous lie for why Social Security recipients can no longer make payment changes by phone:

Moghaddassi: “One of the first things we learned is that [SSA gets] phone calls every day, people trying to change direct deposit information…We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.”

Musk: And they steal peoples’ Social Security, is what happens. They call in, they claim to be the retiree, and they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money’s flowing. It actually goes to some fraudster. This is happening all day, every day.

That went unchallenged by Baier, so it’s up to us. The SSA website says, “We typically get 80 million calls each year to our national 800 phone number”. First, imagine the inefficiency of diverting that overwhelming number to physical visits to agency offices by the original intention fo kill all phone support. But let’s break it down: that’s well over 200,000 phone calls a day and Mr. Moghaddassi is saying over 80,000 (40%) of them phone are from fraud artists trying to steal people’s accounts. Really? Tens of thousands of criminals in the U.S. working their con with SSA agents every day? This is the latest lie DOGE is using to justify taking charge of the inner workings of the agency.

software rewrite

DOGE now says it intends to convert the agency’s software, stranded as kit is in the ancient COBOL language that dates from the 1960s with hardly anyone left who knows how to code in it, to a more modern language. Java has been mentioned. Migrating these hoary government systems, all their bits and pieces a patchwork of routines that typically don’t communicate with each other, and in this case totaling a reported 60 million lines of code, typically takes years and scores of millions of dollars and even then often fails. Nothing to it. The DOGE crew believes it will pull off this feat in just a few months.

Doubtless we’ll hear that A.I. will deliver this miracle. We’d be willing to bet there is no language model out there trained on vast samplings of COBOL code. Training data would have to be assembled with government systems elsewhere that have already been migrated for the model to see the before-and-after of what COBOL became in, say, Java.

But the haste portends an extended period of code breaks and system crashes in which an indefinite number of people will not see their benefits in time, or at all, and will have to go through the agonizing process of straightening out their problem at those reduced number of offices with the hours-long wait lines. This is the Musk definition of efficiency.

The Social Security Administration has an unbroken 85-year record of never missing the monthly payment distribution to what is now some 73 million seniors and those with disabilities. If disruption causes them to miss payments, it will be Musk who has turned Social Security into a Ponzi scheme.

Some 73 million Americans could be at risk. SSA research says that half of Americans over age 65 get the majority of their income from Social Security. It is much more serious for those with low education: nearly 70% of Americans who didn’t complete high school rely on Social Security for more than half their income, and it’s 90% of their income for 40% of that group.

The billionaires now running our government have no sense that people can be so close to the edge, can be so deep in despair. Take the example of Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. After his appearance at the “All-in” podcast a couple of weeks ago, it became difficult to believe that he could have been CEO at the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald or CEO anywhere. He proposed that the easiest way to root out fraud from the Social Security system is to stop paying benefits.

“Anyone who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!”

The 73 million wondering why their monthly benefit payment has not appeared? They wouldn’t mind:

“I describe it to people this way: Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she 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.”

If you don’t think Musk — and his enabler Donald Trump – are out to destroy Social Security, here’s Elon on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow voicing his theory that entitlements such as Society Security pose a threat to Republican control:

Musk: “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. So, that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion maybe 600, 700 hundred billion. That is also the mechanism by which Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.”

Kudlow: “Yes”

Musk: “This is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation, because they’re losing, you know, if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave, and they’ll lose voters.”

We leave you with what Musk said on Joe Rogan’s podcast: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”