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.”