As he pushes to destroy Social Security Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is calling the program that keeps millions of seniors out of poverty a Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, the massive cuts the Trump-Musk team have already made to the program are likely to cause major delays in delivery of checks that have been on time since the 1930’s.
Contrary to right-wing slander, Social Security is the most efficient program in the United States and would be solvent for at least 75 more years if its wealthiest recipients paid a fair share of their taxes.
The collapse of the program, however, is what Musk really wants. He told right-wing talk shows on March 2 that Social Security is “the world’s largest Ponzi scheme.”
The labor-backed Alliance for Retired Americans is warning everyone, but especially Social Security recipients, about “reckless” Trump regime cuts in Social Security staffing.
The cuts come on the heels of musing by Republican President Donald Trump’s puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk, that the Social Security Administration staff—which is already below par—should be reduced. Trump’s acting Social Security administrator favors forced firings.
Before that, Musk’s mob of 22-year-old computer nerds, from his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) raided Social Security’s headquarters in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn, Md. They seized personal and private financial and medical records of millions of people.
A huge staff cut, warns former Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley, a prior Mayor of Baltimore and Maryland governor, would devastate SSA so much that the remaining staff wouldn’t be able to get all the monthly checks out, process claims or resolve disputes over disability benefits.
That would leave the system, which 72.5 million people rely on for income, on the verge of collapse, O’Malley told The Hill and CNBC. O’Malley ran the SSA during Democratic President Joseph Biden’s final year.
Unlike Musk, the criminal class of Wall Street financiers has long wanted to get its hands on Social Security’s massive income stream from payroll taxes. One try at that goal came in the George W. Bush administration in 2005 and unions rallied massive opposition which killed the scheme.
“All Americans should be appalled by the reckless actions of the Trump administration and its DOGE minions,” Alliance for Retired Americans Executive Director Richard Fiesta e-mailed to Press Associates Union News Service after being notified of O’Malley’s analysis.
“We pay for Social Security from our first paycheck and expect that the benefits we earned will be there when we need them. The Alliance is calling on Congress to step up now and stop these outrageous actions.”
O’Malley said the DOGE-mandated mass firings at Social Security means “ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days…People should start saving now.”
Before the intended firings, the Alliance, AFSCME and the Teachers/AFT sued in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on February 26 to stop the theft of Social Security’s records, order them returned to Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn, Md., and the info erased from DOGE’s database.
Want temporary restraining order
The unions and the Alliance want a temporary restraining order and a permanent injunction against Privacy Act violations, against breaking the Internal Revenue Code’s individual taxpayer privacy sections, and other law-breaking by Musk, DOGE and Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek.
Dudek was leaking Social Security data to Musk and DOGE even before Trump’s inauguration, the suit says. He recently told workers there would be “significant workforce reductions” in an “agency-wide organizational restructuring” amid reports that thousands of workers could be let go.
The agency, the suit said, stated offices that perform functions that aren’t “mandated by statute may be prioritized for reduction-in-force actions that could include abolishment of organizations and positions, directed reassignments, and reductions in staffing.” “Reductions-in-force” is governmentese for firing.
The Alliance, AFSCME and AFT went to court to try to halt the carnage. And they’re asking for a jury trial in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
“This is not just an unprecedented data grab. It is an unprecedented power grab,” the unions and the Alliance say in their suit. “Only once before has a White House sought to gain access to such personally sensitive information.” That was during Watergate.
“It was met with a swift and decisive response from Congress: The Tax Reform Act of 1976 and the Privacy Act, putting broad and decisive protections into place to prevent presidential misuse of sensitive, personal information.
“We are again faced with executive branch overreach, threatening to review and expose the personal data of millions of Americans, without any express authority, and in violation of the many protections Congress and the executive branch erected to protect against such data mining and misuse.
“While the government continues to insist that this is just business as usual, it is anything but. Never before has a group of unelected, unappointed, and unvetted individuals…sought or gained access to such sensitive information from agencies across the executive branch.
“Never before has an industry mogul“—Musk—”been allowed to shield from public inspection any record of conflicts of interest while at the same time seeking access to, and reviewing, not only the confidential data of business competitors but, perhaps even more concerningly, privileged information about government investigations into his own businesses.”
As for Trump, Musk’s lapdog, the suit quotes him as telling CNBC a year ago, during the presidential campaign: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management.”
The alliance and the unions also demand all DOGE-installed software be uninstalled from Social Security’s computers and that Trump, Musk, DOGE and Dudek be barred from trying to reinstall it.
National Public Radio reported last month that workers at another agency, the General Services Administration—the government’s property manager—”were told this [software] would include monitoring of when employees logged in and out of their devices, when employees swipe in and out of their workspaces and monitoring of all their work chats. They were also told ‘keylogger’ software that would keep track of everything the employees typed on their work machines would be installed on their work computers.”
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