During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to protect Social Security and Medicare if he won the election. And now that he’s back in the White House, Trump is still insisting that Social Security and Medicare — as well as Medicaid — are not on the chopping block.
But MSNBC’s Paul Waldman, in an opinion column published on February 19, warns that there is no way Social Security will be left unscathed by the mass layoffs of federal government workers being pushed by the second Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump and Musk are targeting a wide range of federal agencies for mass downsizing. And according to the Washington Post, as many as 200,000 federal works may lose their jobs.
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“Standing next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office,” Waldman explains, “Elon Musk conjured an image of a Social Security system riddled with fraud that was as vivid as it was make-believe. For example, Musk said that large numbers of 150-year-olds are receiving Social Security benefits. But, as Wired noted, when recipients’ birth dates are default or incomplete, the programming language that Social Security’s benefits system was written in defaults to 1875. What Musk came across was a programming quirk, not fraud.”
Waldman continues, “But since Musk is now one of the key nodes of the right’s ever-mightier misinformation machine, his falsehood was quickly spread to untold millions as more fake evidence that the federal government is a mess. And it gets worse: The Social Security Administration’s top official, Michelle King, a civil servant with decades of experience, resigned in protest after a confrontation in which she refused to give the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the incredibly sensitive information about every American stored in Social Security’s databases.”
The MSNBC columnist linked to a February 17 article by Wired’s David Gilbert, who debunked the Musk/DOGE claims about Social Security payments and Americans who are 150.
Waldman laments that by damaging federal agencies, Trump and Musk will increase distrust in government.
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“A genuine, good-faith effort to improve government efficiency could save money, help Americans by improving the delivery of services and boost people’s faith in government,” Waldman argues. “It would be an extremely worthwhile undertaking; there is plenty of room for improvement in how the federal government operates. This administration, however, is not operating in good faith, and it seems determined to give people more reasons to believe that government can’t do anything right…. Long after Trump and Musk are done slashing and burning their way through Washington, their suspicions will remain.”
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Paul Waldman’s full MSNBC column is available at this link.
