March 16, 2025
"DOGE is a disaster of incompetence."
That's how one political scientist responded to Saturday reporting about a Washington state man fighting for his Social Security benefits as U.S. President Donald Trump and the head of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk, attack the federal bureaucracy, including the agency that administers payements to seniors like Leonard "Ned" Johnson.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat shared the story of 82-year-old Johnson. In February, his wife received a notification from their bank that the Social Security Administration (SSA) requested a return for benefits paid out after the supposed death of her husband. She figured it was a scam—as Johnson was alive—but the request was real and $5,201 was pulled from their account.
As Westneat detailed, after making multiple calls to SSA, during which Johnson was "put on hold and then eventually disconnected," and securing an appointment that was ultimately rescheduled for next week, "he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown," one of several sites across the United States that DOGE wants to shut down.
According to the columnist:
After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: "I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention."
Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn't received February or March's benefits payments.
"When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now," he said.
Author Jeff Nesbit, the public affairs chief for five federal agencies or departments—including SSA—under four presidents, shared the article on the Musk-owned social media site X, saying: "So incredibly sad that Musk/DOGE are now preying on people like this. I hope older Americans understand the assault underway against Social Security right now."
Progressive political consultant Matt Herdman similarly said: "Elon Musk and Donald Trump are stealing seniors' hard-earned benefits. It's already happening, and it'll get worse if they go through with closing branch offices and cutting staff."
Johnson isn't the only senior who has had to fight for his Social Security since Trump returned to office in January and installed various billionaires to key positions in the federal government. James McCaffrey, a 66-year-old retiree in Oklahoma City, told his story to NBC affiliate KFOR earlier this week.
McCaffrey learned that his Social Security benefits were suspended when he received a notice saying that he needed to pay $740 or he was going to lose Medicare, health insurance for seniors. After multiple phone calls and hours on hold, he finally got through. He then quickly received the missing payment, but never got an explanation—and SSA refused to give one to the news station.
However, McCaffrey believes his trouble may stem from the fact that he was born on a U.S. military base in Germany—and Musk's recent Fox Business appearance, during which he claimed that undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits. That came shortly after a podcast interview, during which a billionaire called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme."
McCaffrey is now concerned about other seniors facing similar issues. As KFOR reported:
He worries about people who may not have the time and resources he had to get to the bottom of what happened and get his benefits back.
"I’ve been a diligent Boy Scout type, I prepared," he said. "But, no, I shouldn't have to."
He also worries about people who may not share the same savings or the same financial cushion [that] he had to fall back on. "And you interrupt that for seven days, two weeks or even longer, and they're in bad trouble," he said. "They could be out of the house. They could be out of food. I don't know."
In response McCaffrey's experience, Ashley Schapitl, a public relations professional who previously worked for Senate Democrats and the U.S. Treasury Department, said, "Picture thousands of Social Security beneficiaries having their benefits canceled with no explanation and limited recourse to get them reinstated."Trump and Musk's recent moves and remarks have fueled fears that they are working to privatize Social Security.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) laid out a potential GOP "attack plan" for the program on X Friday:
One: Trump and his vassals tell lies that there's no plan to cut Social Security.
Two: Trump and Musk lie loudly about imaginary Social Security "fraud" to lower public confidence in the program.
Three: Musk sends his nasty Musk-rats in to Social Security to damage administration of the fund, leading to "interruption in benefits."
Four: Trump then declares emergency and hands administration of Social Security to private equity and tech bros to fix problem they created.
Five: Republicans declare victory that they "saved Social Security" by handing it to private equity/tech bros, and put Trump's name on checks.
The advocacy group Social Security Works took note of Whitehouse's thread and said: "Everyone needs to read this. Musk and Trump are breaking Social Security so they can turn it over to Wall Street."
"DOGE is a disaster of incompetence."
That's how one political scientist responded to Saturday reporting about a Washington state man fighting for his Social Security benefits as U.S. President Donald Trump and the head of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk, attack the federal bureaucracy, including the agency that administers payements to seniors like Leonard "Ned" Johnson.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat shared the story of 82-year-old Johnson. In February, his wife received a notification from their bank that the Social Security Administration (SSA) requested a return for benefits paid out after the supposed death of her husband. She figured it was a scam—as Johnson was alive—but the request was real and $5,201 was pulled from their account.
As Westneat detailed, after making multiple calls to SSA, during which Johnson was "put on hold and then eventually disconnected," and securing an appointment that was ultimately rescheduled for next week, "he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown," one of several sites across the United States that DOGE wants to shut down.
According to the columnist:
After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: "I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention."
Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn't received February or March's benefits payments.
"When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now," he said.
Author Jeff Nesbit, the public affairs chief for five federal agencies or departments—including SSA—under four presidents, shared the article on the Musk-owned social media site X, saying: "So incredibly sad that Musk/DOGE are now preying on people like this. I hope older Americans understand the assault underway against Social Security right now."
Progressive political consultant Matt Herdman similarly said: "Elon Musk and Donald Trump are stealing seniors' hard-earned benefits. It's already happening, and it'll get worse if they go through with closing branch offices and cutting staff."
Johnson isn't the only senior who has had to fight for his Social Security since Trump returned to office in January and installed various billionaires to key positions in the federal government. James McCaffrey, a 66-year-old retiree in Oklahoma City, told his story to NBC affiliate KFOR earlier this week.
McCaffrey learned that his Social Security benefits were suspended when he received a notice saying that he needed to pay $740 or he was going to lose Medicare, health insurance for seniors. After multiple phone calls and hours on hold, he finally got through. He then quickly received the missing payment, but never got an explanation—and SSA refused to give one to the news station.
However, McCaffrey believes his trouble may stem from the fact that he was born on a U.S. military base in Germany—and Musk's recent Fox Business appearance, during which he claimed that undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits. That came shortly after a podcast interview, during which a billionaire called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme."
McCaffrey is now concerned about other seniors facing similar issues. As KFOR reported:
He worries about people who may not have the time and resources he had to get to the bottom of what happened and get his benefits back.
"I’ve been a diligent Boy Scout type, I prepared," he said. "But, no, I shouldn't have to."
He also worries about people who may not share the same savings or the same financial cushion [that] he had to fall back on. "And you interrupt that for seven days, two weeks or even longer, and they're in bad trouble," he said. "They could be out of the house. They could be out of food. I don't know."
In response McCaffrey's experience, Ashley Schapitl, a public relations professional who previously worked for Senate Democrats and the U.S. Treasury Department, said, "Picture thousands of Social Security beneficiaries having their benefits canceled with no explanation and limited recourse to get them reinstated."Trump and Musk's recent moves and remarks have fueled fears that they are working to privatize Social Security.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) laid out a potential GOP "attack plan" for the program on X Friday:
One: Trump and his vassals tell lies that there's no plan to cut Social Security.
Two: Trump and Musk lie loudly about imaginary Social Security "fraud" to lower public confidence in the program.
Three: Musk sends his nasty Musk-rats in to Social Security to damage administration of the fund, leading to "interruption in benefits."
Four: Trump then declares emergency and hands administration of Social Security to private equity and tech bros to fix problem they created.
Five: Republicans declare victory that they "saved Social Security" by handing it to private equity/tech bros, and put Trump's name on checks.
The advocacy group Social Security Works took note of Whitehouse's thread and said: "Everyone needs to read this. Musk and Trump are breaking Social Security so they can turn it over to Wall Street."
As DOGE Mauls Social Security, Profit-Hungry Private Equity Is Swooping In
Three private equity veterans are weaseling their way in, reportedly on the orders of the presumptive SSA commissioner.
By Tyler Walicek ,
March 16, 2025
The Social Security Administration (SSA), an irreplaceable lifeline for 73 million people, is only the latest venerable U.S. institution to be hit with a campaign of media falsehoods and startling internal sabotage efforts, all on the orders of Trump and the reactionary right. This has taken its most visibly outrageous form in the bureaucratic pillaging committed by Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), the widely loathed advisory body with a meme-derived name as juvenile as its staffers.
But this week, a still-more ominous threat appears to be circling. Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns — firms in an insidious financial industry intent on harvesting anything that can rake in a profit for the ultrarich — have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.
This should be of grave concern to all, but the public at large is not widely aware of these threats. Private equity is just that: private, and opaque by design. These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy; estimates vary, but the industry’s combined assets run, at minimum, into the several trillions.
Predatory firms have made startling headway at acquiring, exploiting and flipping companies “across every imaginable sector, from housing and hospitals, to fossil fuels and retail, to pet shops and music catalogs,” as Derek Seidman writes for Truthout. “Private equity has a reputation for being perhaps the most ruthless arm of Wall Street.”
Most infamous are its firms’ parasitic takeovers: buying out a corporation, saddling it with debt to enrich themselves, then brutally cutting costs, often starting by firing many workers and squeezing the rest for every cent and second. Eventually, they strip the whole thing to a husk and sell off whatever assets remain. Despite the astonishing extent of private equity’s incursions into civil society, our sense of the scale, and the damage involved, has lagged behind this industry’s aggressive pace.
Trump’s Choice for Social Security Admin Leads to Fears of Austerity and Cuts
The Social Security Administration’s incoming head is a Wall Street insider who may help the right slash benefits. By Tyler Walicek , Truthout December 22, 2024
And now, private equity’s sights are turning to the Social Security Administration. Privatization of the retirement market has been a long-standing goal of capital. If the SSA really were dismantled, a vast retirement market — over a trillion dollars — would open up, into which could be shoved all sorts of new corporate profit models and plans. Yet the social results, at least for those who aren’t wealthy investors, are easy to imagine if you’ve had the essential U.S. experience of grappling with health insurance. There would be the familiar labyrinths of complexity, deception and usurious charges — but the harms inflicted could easily multiply, as the market for retirement programs is, of course, retirees: older people, disabled people and those in deepest need. Privatization for profit would target the savings and last hopes of all these communities.
Storming the Bastion of the New Deal
Social Security, everyone likes to say, is the political “third rail.” Millions depend on it, and so targeting it is career-ending, according to conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, upending conventional wisdom and conventional decency alike come naturally to the current president and his allies, and they have a particular talent for goading people to vote against their own interests.
This Trump administration’s increasingly brazen seizures of power, civil rights violations and sprees of civic destruction have been streaming forth at what has felt like an impossible rate. The SSA was more or less raided; it was an invasion of the self-appointed “fraud investigators” of DOGE. Turmoil followed. Already understaffed and overworked, the SSA has now been beset by mass firings, funding cuts and the invasive and capricious changes dictated by DOGE.
Meanwhile, a media smear campaign against SSA has been taken up eagerly by the president himself, aided by unctuous crony Musk. Despite promising that SSA won’t be cut, Trump has declared the Social Security Administration riddled with fraud. Musk, too, has touted several falsehoods, including that the SSA is essentially “a Ponzi scheme,” in need of rescue from the world’s richest government handout recipient.
Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.
The frontline work of Musk’s DOGE is to press for ways to tear apart public systems from within their own offices. At the SSA, DOGE, trying to get in through a side door of sorts, found an ally in a mid-level anti-fraud manager, Leland Dudek, who corresponded with them officially — an inappropriate assumption of authority that won Dudek an investigation and administrative leave. However, soon after that, the acting interim commissioner, Michelle King, refused to disseminate citizen data to DOGE and resigned. Then Dudek would experience quite the reversal of fortune. To reward his unthinking loyalty, Trump named the bumbling Dudek the interim head of the entire Social Security Administration. In turn, under Dudek’s watch, DOGE has been entrusted, inexplicably, with some extremely valuable data.
Nancy Altman, a policy and legal expert and president of the major SSA advocacy nonprofit Social Security Works, spoke with Truthout and shared her expert insights into what she feels are some extraordinary and outrageous developments.
DOGE, Altman said, demanded “total access to everything, including the source codes.” The SSA’s collaborating experts had never been granted “the kind of access [DOGE] wanted.” SSA data, she explained, is very securely protected — it contains the Social Security numbers, identities, financial and personal information, immigration status, etc. for 70 million people. It is the ultimate scammer’s treasure trove. Yet DOGE staffers insisted on being allowed to freely view and copy this data and take it off-site. The neophytes of the “anti-fraud” task force have quickly become the most likely vectors of SSA data theft, scams and fraud. And they’ve now had every chance to tamper with or copy data themselves.
DOGE can certainly report that it has successfully “disrupted” the SSA. According to a transcript of sworn testimony by a 30-year veteran who was forced out, DOGE’s ignorance about the most basic functions of the SSA was immediately apparent.
After the first culling of senior leaders (who took with them “literally … a thousand years of collective leadership and knowledge,” Altman said with chagrin), the understaffed SSA now intends to fire another 7,000 of its 57,000 workers — as the thinning workforce reached a 50-year low.
DOGE staffers “created complete chaos,” Altman said. “In the guise of efficiency, they’ve created so much inefficiency. They got rid of probationary workers who had just been trained for 11 and a half months.… They’ve been closing field offices, they’ve been getting rid of regional offices.”
“People are out of a job — goodbye, you’re gone — and told they were fired for performance, which is a lie,” she went on. “But [an employer citing that cause] keeps [an employee] from being able to get employment insurance.”
Since the mass firings, the arms of the SSA that now answer to the Trump administration’s whims have helped the president explore even lower lows of cruelty and pettiness — though, at least in these two cases, they immediately backtracked when challenged.
Bad Omens
The presumptive incoming SSA commissioner, pending Senate confirmation, is Frank Bisignano, on whose appointment Truthout previously reported. He is known as a Wall Street “fixer” — a cost-cutter, profit-booster and workforce-slimmer. His inexperience in the field, his pugnacious style and his billion dollars made him a baffling pick, unless slashing everything is the goal. It seems that the SSA is receiving unsolicited help from quite a few such “fixers,” who are so intent on “fixing” things that are not broken.
Dudek will remain a largely disempowered figurehead until Bisignano’s appointment. Then, during his tenure, Bisignano may well usher in private equity in full force. Altman also said she knows him to be receptive to dubious ongoing proposals to replace workers with AI chatbots — another looming threat to SSA employees, many of whom staff roles that are premised on the nuanced use of human communication and understanding, claims adjusters chief among them.
Again, per Bloomberg, private equity has just gained a “beachhead” in the SSA. An infiltrating “team of veterans” — for now, limited to Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital; and Michael Russo, formerly of Shift4 — will execute their mission. Russo has stepped right up into the role of agency chief information officer. According to Altman, Russo is operating on the direct orders of Bisignano. Apart from that, it’s not yet clear what the trio’s full roles will entail — but it’s certainly worth noting that Gracias was an early investor and close collaborator in Tesla and SpaceX, as well as a private equity resource whom Musk has called upon: another “fixer.”
These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy.
Altman, citing knowledge of the matter, remarked that Bisignano may be jumping the gun more than a little when it comes to giving orders in advance of his prospective appointment. She said Dudek has admitted as much in a private meeting: He takes all his marching orders from the not-yet-commissioner.
As Altman said, “They’re trying to make it look like [Bisignano’s] got clean hands, but he’s conferring with the acting commissioner [Dudek] five times a day.… [Bisignano’s] the guy calling the shots.” A commendable start to a new job: sent in a goon squad to ransack his own agency, then hid from responsibility — a “fixer” indeed.
A Monstrous Entity
Private equity, in addition to swallowing up and digesting the aforementioned family homes, hospitals, daycares, beloved publications and cultural institutions, and plenty more of the decent things in life — is, of course, just as happy to profit from the nefarious ones too. The industry invests heavily in private prisons, prison services and police (including Atlanta’s Cop City), alongside defense, oil and gas, and other extractive and exploitative systems. Private equity firms are certainly not above finding ways to help themselves to the public coffers, either: siphoning profit, to give just one quite recent example, from affordable housing assistance funds.
It’s not for nothing that the private equity acquisitions are often considered hostile takeovers. One example (also noted by Derek Seidman in Truthout), is the infamous dissection of Toys “R” Us by top firms KKR and Bain Capital. A rapacious and ethics-optional seeker of profit above all, private equity can seem like one of the purest distillations of the inhumane logic of capital.
Right now, sensing favorable conditions, private equity interests are making plans to further enter 401(k)s and get into defined contribution pension plans. “How can we not give investors more access to that asset class?” one CEO mused aloud at a conference. That arrangement has already been a disaster for retirement — many public pension funds were pressed to bet on risky assets and lost. But the firms collect their massive fees either way.
To capital, perhaps Social Security appears like nothing but wastefulness, wasted opportunity. In truth it’s not wasteful — far from it. In fact, Altman noted, not only is real fraud so rare as to be totally negligible (0.00002 percent), the SSA is also exceptional in that “less than a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. You can’t find that level of efficiency in the private sector.”
In the U.S., facing a retirement without Social Security would resemble the experience of our current health insurance system: paying top dollar for inferior outcomes, all while contesting with frustrating, indifferent or outright malicious corporations.
We’ve seen what vulture capitalists have done to hospice, retail, medicine and nursing homes — in the latter, brutal cost-cutting under private equity ownership has resulted in 20,000 premature deaths. Figures like this — which would ultimately be far, far more numerous if Social Security were lost, to say nothing of the poverty and homelessness that would ensue — help drive home the true stakes of this struggle. Our present condition is one of class warfare — as unsubtly literalized by the pawns of billionaires, swarming the major bulwark of U.S. social welfare.
“These people are really destroying everything that’s been built — that is there to support all of us.… This is the reason we have a government,” Altman said. “It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.”
Presumptive incoming Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano speaks at the BCNY Annual Awards Dinner on May 20, 2019, in New York City.
Owen Hoffmann / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
The Social Security Administration (SSA), an irreplaceable lifeline for 73 million people, is only the latest venerable U.S. institution to be hit with a campaign of media falsehoods and startling internal sabotage efforts, all on the orders of Trump and the reactionary right. This has taken its most visibly outrageous form in the bureaucratic pillaging committed by Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), the widely loathed advisory body with a meme-derived name as juvenile as its staffers.
But this week, a still-more ominous threat appears to be circling. Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns — firms in an insidious financial industry intent on harvesting anything that can rake in a profit for the ultrarich — have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.
This should be of grave concern to all, but the public at large is not widely aware of these threats. Private equity is just that: private, and opaque by design. These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy; estimates vary, but the industry’s combined assets run, at minimum, into the several trillions.
Predatory firms have made startling headway at acquiring, exploiting and flipping companies “across every imaginable sector, from housing and hospitals, to fossil fuels and retail, to pet shops and music catalogs,” as Derek Seidman writes for Truthout. “Private equity has a reputation for being perhaps the most ruthless arm of Wall Street.”
Most infamous are its firms’ parasitic takeovers: buying out a corporation, saddling it with debt to enrich themselves, then brutally cutting costs, often starting by firing many workers and squeezing the rest for every cent and second. Eventually, they strip the whole thing to a husk and sell off whatever assets remain. Despite the astonishing extent of private equity’s incursions into civil society, our sense of the scale, and the damage involved, has lagged behind this industry’s aggressive pace.
Trump’s Choice for Social Security Admin Leads to Fears of Austerity and Cuts
The Social Security Administration’s incoming head is a Wall Street insider who may help the right slash benefits. By Tyler Walicek , Truthout December 22, 2024
And now, private equity’s sights are turning to the Social Security Administration. Privatization of the retirement market has been a long-standing goal of capital. If the SSA really were dismantled, a vast retirement market — over a trillion dollars — would open up, into which could be shoved all sorts of new corporate profit models and plans. Yet the social results, at least for those who aren’t wealthy investors, are easy to imagine if you’ve had the essential U.S. experience of grappling with health insurance. There would be the familiar labyrinths of complexity, deception and usurious charges — but the harms inflicted could easily multiply, as the market for retirement programs is, of course, retirees: older people, disabled people and those in deepest need. Privatization for profit would target the savings and last hopes of all these communities.
Storming the Bastion of the New Deal
Social Security, everyone likes to say, is the political “third rail.” Millions depend on it, and so targeting it is career-ending, according to conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, upending conventional wisdom and conventional decency alike come naturally to the current president and his allies, and they have a particular talent for goading people to vote against their own interests.
This Trump administration’s increasingly brazen seizures of power, civil rights violations and sprees of civic destruction have been streaming forth at what has felt like an impossible rate. The SSA was more or less raided; it was an invasion of the self-appointed “fraud investigators” of DOGE. Turmoil followed. Already understaffed and overworked, the SSA has now been beset by mass firings, funding cuts and the invasive and capricious changes dictated by DOGE.
Meanwhile, a media smear campaign against SSA has been taken up eagerly by the president himself, aided by unctuous crony Musk. Despite promising that SSA won’t be cut, Trump has declared the Social Security Administration riddled with fraud. Musk, too, has touted several falsehoods, including that the SSA is essentially “a Ponzi scheme,” in need of rescue from the world’s richest government handout recipient.
Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.
The frontline work of Musk’s DOGE is to press for ways to tear apart public systems from within their own offices. At the SSA, DOGE, trying to get in through a side door of sorts, found an ally in a mid-level anti-fraud manager, Leland Dudek, who corresponded with them officially — an inappropriate assumption of authority that won Dudek an investigation and administrative leave. However, soon after that, the acting interim commissioner, Michelle King, refused to disseminate citizen data to DOGE and resigned. Then Dudek would experience quite the reversal of fortune. To reward his unthinking loyalty, Trump named the bumbling Dudek the interim head of the entire Social Security Administration. In turn, under Dudek’s watch, DOGE has been entrusted, inexplicably, with some extremely valuable data.
Nancy Altman, a policy and legal expert and president of the major SSA advocacy nonprofit Social Security Works, spoke with Truthout and shared her expert insights into what she feels are some extraordinary and outrageous developments.
DOGE, Altman said, demanded “total access to everything, including the source codes.” The SSA’s collaborating experts had never been granted “the kind of access [DOGE] wanted.” SSA data, she explained, is very securely protected — it contains the Social Security numbers, identities, financial and personal information, immigration status, etc. for 70 million people. It is the ultimate scammer’s treasure trove. Yet DOGE staffers insisted on being allowed to freely view and copy this data and take it off-site. The neophytes of the “anti-fraud” task force have quickly become the most likely vectors of SSA data theft, scams and fraud. And they’ve now had every chance to tamper with or copy data themselves.
DOGE can certainly report that it has successfully “disrupted” the SSA. According to a transcript of sworn testimony by a 30-year veteran who was forced out, DOGE’s ignorance about the most basic functions of the SSA was immediately apparent.
After the first culling of senior leaders (who took with them “literally … a thousand years of collective leadership and knowledge,” Altman said with chagrin), the understaffed SSA now intends to fire another 7,000 of its 57,000 workers — as the thinning workforce reached a 50-year low.
DOGE staffers “created complete chaos,” Altman said. “In the guise of efficiency, they’ve created so much inefficiency. They got rid of probationary workers who had just been trained for 11 and a half months.… They’ve been closing field offices, they’ve been getting rid of regional offices.”
“People are out of a job — goodbye, you’re gone — and told they were fired for performance, which is a lie,” she went on. “But [an employer citing that cause] keeps [an employee] from being able to get employment insurance.”
Since the mass firings, the arms of the SSA that now answer to the Trump administration’s whims have helped the president explore even lower lows of cruelty and pettiness — though, at least in these two cases, they immediately backtracked when challenged.
Bad Omens
The presumptive incoming SSA commissioner, pending Senate confirmation, is Frank Bisignano, on whose appointment Truthout previously reported. He is known as a Wall Street “fixer” — a cost-cutter, profit-booster and workforce-slimmer. His inexperience in the field, his pugnacious style and his billion dollars made him a baffling pick, unless slashing everything is the goal. It seems that the SSA is receiving unsolicited help from quite a few such “fixers,” who are so intent on “fixing” things that are not broken.
Dudek will remain a largely disempowered figurehead until Bisignano’s appointment. Then, during his tenure, Bisignano may well usher in private equity in full force. Altman also said she knows him to be receptive to dubious ongoing proposals to replace workers with AI chatbots — another looming threat to SSA employees, many of whom staff roles that are premised on the nuanced use of human communication and understanding, claims adjusters chief among them.
Again, per Bloomberg, private equity has just gained a “beachhead” in the SSA. An infiltrating “team of veterans” — for now, limited to Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital; and Michael Russo, formerly of Shift4 — will execute their mission. Russo has stepped right up into the role of agency chief information officer. According to Altman, Russo is operating on the direct orders of Bisignano. Apart from that, it’s not yet clear what the trio’s full roles will entail — but it’s certainly worth noting that Gracias was an early investor and close collaborator in Tesla and SpaceX, as well as a private equity resource whom Musk has called upon: another “fixer.”
These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy.
Altman, citing knowledge of the matter, remarked that Bisignano may be jumping the gun more than a little when it comes to giving orders in advance of his prospective appointment. She said Dudek has admitted as much in a private meeting: He takes all his marching orders from the not-yet-commissioner.
As Altman said, “They’re trying to make it look like [Bisignano’s] got clean hands, but he’s conferring with the acting commissioner [Dudek] five times a day.… [Bisignano’s] the guy calling the shots.” A commendable start to a new job: sent in a goon squad to ransack his own agency, then hid from responsibility — a “fixer” indeed.
A Monstrous Entity
Private equity, in addition to swallowing up and digesting the aforementioned family homes, hospitals, daycares, beloved publications and cultural institutions, and plenty more of the decent things in life — is, of course, just as happy to profit from the nefarious ones too. The industry invests heavily in private prisons, prison services and police (including Atlanta’s Cop City), alongside defense, oil and gas, and other extractive and exploitative systems. Private equity firms are certainly not above finding ways to help themselves to the public coffers, either: siphoning profit, to give just one quite recent example, from affordable housing assistance funds.
It’s not for nothing that the private equity acquisitions are often considered hostile takeovers. One example (also noted by Derek Seidman in Truthout), is the infamous dissection of Toys “R” Us by top firms KKR and Bain Capital. A rapacious and ethics-optional seeker of profit above all, private equity can seem like one of the purest distillations of the inhumane logic of capital.
Right now, sensing favorable conditions, private equity interests are making plans to further enter 401(k)s and get into defined contribution pension plans. “How can we not give investors more access to that asset class?” one CEO mused aloud at a conference. That arrangement has already been a disaster for retirement — many public pension funds were pressed to bet on risky assets and lost. But the firms collect their massive fees either way.
To capital, perhaps Social Security appears like nothing but wastefulness, wasted opportunity. In truth it’s not wasteful — far from it. In fact, Altman noted, not only is real fraud so rare as to be totally negligible (0.00002 percent), the SSA is also exceptional in that “less than a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. You can’t find that level of efficiency in the private sector.”
In the U.S., facing a retirement without Social Security would resemble the experience of our current health insurance system: paying top dollar for inferior outcomes, all while contesting with frustrating, indifferent or outright malicious corporations.
We’ve seen what vulture capitalists have done to hospice, retail, medicine and nursing homes — in the latter, brutal cost-cutting under private equity ownership has resulted in 20,000 premature deaths. Figures like this — which would ultimately be far, far more numerous if Social Security were lost, to say nothing of the poverty and homelessness that would ensue — help drive home the true stakes of this struggle. Our present condition is one of class warfare — as unsubtly literalized by the pawns of billionaires, swarming the major bulwark of U.S. social welfare.
“These people are really destroying everything that’s been built — that is there to support all of us.… This is the reason we have a government,” Altman said. “It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.”
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