There's only one way to save Social Security from Elon Musk's clutches

The Trump administration is lying about Social Security. Elon Musk’s DOGE has infiltrated the Social Security Administration (SSA). The agency’s new commissioner, Wall Street billionaire Frank Bisignano, calls himself “a DOGE person.” His top lieutenants include long-time Musk associates Antonio Gracias and Aram Moghaddassi.

After infiltrating Social Security, the DOGE crew forced out thousands of civil servants, including top leaders with decades of institutional knowledge. No problem, they thought. We’ll replace them with 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine and an AI chatbot.

That plan is going exactly as expected. Mistakes are being made, checks are being delayed, lines are hours long, and field offices are being run by skeleton crews. The 1-800 number has record wait times — if people can get past the chatbot and speak to a human at all.

In the face of an outcry from the press and the public about wait times on the phone, SSA is shifting 1,000 people from the field offices to the phone lines. These people haven’t been trained to work the phone lines, which use a different software. And of course, taking them out of field offices will only make the delays there worse.

Thanks to Trump and the Republicans, Social Security’s customer service is headed for a total collapse. Bisignano is responding by shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic — and telling the passengers not to believe their lying eyes. Except instead of an iceberg, Social Security is collapsing due to a torpedo launched by a Republican U-boat that has blown a hole in it.

SSA recently sent out a press release touting improved customer service. Anyone who has recently been to a Social Security field office, or tried calling the 1-800 number, can tell you that every word in that release is a lie. Bisignano knows it, too. That’s why he pulled down data from SSA’s website tracking wait times.

For people who rely on Social Security benefits, these delays are life and death. Republican DOGE operatives have accidentally declared living people dead, meaning that their benefits stop, and they can lose access to their health insurance and bank account. These people are then stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare, frantically trying to get overwhelmed field office workers to “revive” them.

The delays are also a disaster for people who apply for Social Security’s disability benefits. And everything is getting worse, not better.

That is because a collapse is the goal. The Republicans have wrecked the system so they can rob it. They cause the crisis with cuts and then hope to force a fire sale to private equity, the robber barons of the modern era.

The King of the robber barons is Musk himself. The Department of Defense recently signed a $200 million contract to use Musk’s AI, Grok (or as it calls itself, MechaHitler). With Bisignano constantly talking up the “benefits” of AI, we can guess that Social Security is not far behind. If Musk and Trump get their way, a racist chatbot may soon decide who is eligible to get their earned benefits.

To see what that collapse could look like, we need only look at a different part of the federal government — the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Two days after the disastrous Texas floods, Kristi Noem fired thousands of the workers who answer the agency’s disaster assistance line. As a result, nearly two-thirds of calls went unanswered, leaving people who had just lost everything without the help they desperately needed.

Republican politicians hate effective government programs, because they don’t make any money for their paymasters on Wall Street. Since Social Security is the most popular and effective government program, they hate it most of all — and are doing everything they can to destroy it.

The only way to save Social Security is to make as much noise as possible. Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 and demand they protect Social Security from DOGE destruction. And tell all your family and friends to do the same.

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans

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