Trump and Musk are dismantling Social Security

It's part of a game plan to handicap government — and secure the remains for corporations and the wealthy.

Good Friday morning from sunny Savannah, GA. A source with knowledge of work within the Social Security Administration and by federal contractors there has blown the whistle on the Trump administration’s ongoing dismantling of the agency—which will leave millions of poor, elderly and disabled Americans with fewer resources to access their benefits.

You can read my full report at Rolling Stone, which includes insights from the whistleblower who reached out to me. For years, President Donald Trump has promised not to touch social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But that line is now being exposed as a lie with the help of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Republicans in Congress. As I lay out in today’s story, the Social Security Administration is being kneecapped by Musk’s crew of unelected, unaccountable techno-goons. First, they closed at least 10 Social Security offices around the country. Now, they’ve eliminated offices within the agency that provide technical and customer support to Americans seeking access to their benefits.

So, if you can’t go to a physical office to navigate the Social Security system, and you can’t contact anyone online, how will Americans access their benefits? It will be very difficult, obviously, but that’s the whole point of all of this DOGE, Trumpian madness. They are breaking government to the point of ineffectiveness. There’s probably some behind-the-scenes plan to privatize much of government so that people like the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet can get even more rich off the services Americans rely upon from federal agencies. There’s probably also a never-mentioned angle of all this DOGE dismantling that seeks to save money—even if Americans who rightfully qualify for benefits are left out in the cold—so that Trump can use the funds for his sovereign wealth fund, which from all appearances simply looks like a way for him and his family to make some cash off the government by funding projects like Trump’s Gaza development plan that will be made possible by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have proposed $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid in their budget package. Supposedly, these cuts will simply be to fraudulent or wasteful Medicaid spending. The only problem is, as I reported at Public Notice earlier this week, DOGE hasn’t found a single instance of fraud. It would be one thing if Trump and Republicans had run on an explicit platform of drastically reducing spending on overwhelmingly popular programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But they didn’t. They said they were going to find “fraud, waste and abuse.”

Instead, all they’ve cut is spending they simply don’t like. That spending includes social safety net programs that millions of Americans—many of them older Trump voters—rely upon.

Americans asked for this when they voted for Trump. They thought it was the government that was screwing them—or DEI, or the deep state, or transgendered people. But it turns out it’s Trump that’s screwing them, as he always has, and now he’s brought Musk along for the ride. Maybe Trump voters will understand all of this when their Social Security payments and Medicare and Medicaid benefits disappear. Or maybe they won’t. I can’t tell other people when they’ve reached bottom. They have to figure that out for themselves.

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