Afraid of public scrutiny, Musk walks back yet another cruel plan
It turns out Elon Musk isn’t quite as powerful as he seems to believe.
On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency was considering no longer allowing millions of disabled and retired Americans to file Social Security claims over the phone, and instead requiring them to do so online or in person.
Not only was this idea excessively cruel—since people ages 65 years and older are the least familiar with the internet—but it also seemed to be an attempt to win favor with Republicans, including President Donald Trump, who have long sought to cut social insurance programs.
“Gramma and Grampa are already waiting too long for answers about their Social Security. Now, Elon Musk and DOGE want to close field offices and take away their option to use the phone. This is outrageous,” Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote on X.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also chimed in about the cruelty of DOGE’s plan.
“Going after 90-year-old grandmas who can’t drive and don’t have a computer? That’s just low,” she wrote on X.
Thankfully, after The Post revealed DOGE’s plan, Musk’s foot soldiers backed off. Instead, the Trump administration will proceed with a much narrower plan: forbidding customers from changing direct deposit routing numbers or other sensitive bank information by phone.
“This is identical to the fraud protections at almost all major banks, where deposit changes are made either online or in person. All other SSA phone services remain unchanged,” a message from the official DOGE X account said.
This follows an apparent grilling of agency officials by DOGE staff on Tuesday regarding “phone fraud.”
But when DOGE workers pressed Social Security officials about reducing “fraud, waste, and abuse,” they were unresponsive to any suggested solutions.
According to The Post, Musk wanted to slash certain phone-related Social Security services to shrink the government, even if many of his ideas have been poorly executed and stubbornly defended.
One of The Post’s sources indicated that DOGE staff “weren’t interested in anything else but defending the decision they had already made.”
While DOGE and Social Security officials concurred that phone fraud is a real problem, career employees and experts informed The Post that identity fraud constitutes a small fraction of the program’s costs, suggesting that it isn’t a significant enough issue to justify Musk’s sweeping changes.
And there are other reasons why this plan was misguided.
Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told The Post that a significant number of Americans lack access to computers, which is particularly true for people over the age of 65.
In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that just 44% of adults older than 65 owned a tablet or computer, compared to 61% of those between the ages of 30 and 49.
“They have a smartphone or they have low levels of education or English proficiency. You’re talking about people with disabilities. The whole idea of serving the people is to give people a choice,” Altman said. “The burden is on DOGE to accurately show, where is all the fraud? They haven’t done that.”
Even if DOGE and Musk are backing away from this plan, it likely won’t be the last we hear of cuts or changes to Social Security. Without providing a shred of evidence, Musk once falsely claimed that “millions of dead people” were receiving Social Security benefits.
And now Musk has the president repeating these claims, even though they have no basis in reality.
What’s actually happening is that certain people in the system’s database don’t have a date of death associated with their record, but there are various systems in place to ensure that they don’t receive federal payments.
Still, Republicans have long attempted to dismantle the program—which Musk has called “entitlement spending”—even though it is extremely popular.
According to a January Navigator Research survey, 79% of Americans said they have favorable views of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, including 70% of Republicans and 78% of independent voters.
Regardless, the Trump administration is likely to treat Social Security like the Department of Education—slowly eroding it until it’s gone. After all, the Social Security agency announced in February plans to reduce its “bloated” workforce.