Donald Trump Is Launching an Assault on Social Security
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Despite his previous rhetoric to the contrary, it’s clear that Donald Trump is
trying to finally be the one to successfully carry out the long-standing GOP
goal: destroying Social Security.
President Donald Trump, accompanied by commerce secretary Howard
Lutnick, takes a question from a reporter in the Roosevelt Room of the White
House on March 3, 2025, in Washington, DC. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
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Once upon a time, Donald Trump endeared himself to millions of working-class
voters by telling them he, unlike the rest of the Republican Party, would do
“everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it
is.” While the GOP platform explicitly rejected the idea the program was
untouchable and promised only to keep it unchanged for “current retirees and
those close to retirement,” Trump told voters he “want[ed] to keep Social
Security intact” while “they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans.”
Fast-forward nine years, and Trump has become just another Republican
president launching an assault on Social Security. Not even two months into his
presidency, Trump is not only constantly verbally attacking the program in a
way meant to justify debilitating cuts but is already actively making those cuts.
After weeks of charging that Social Security payments were going to tens of
millions of dead people, Trump made the claim a major part of his address to
Congress this past week, where he said there were “shocking levels of
incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program.” This was no
offhand mention: the claim took up more than two-and-a-half minutes in the
speech, or four full four paragraphs, with Trump listing in tedious detail the
millions of Americans in various age groups over one-hundred years old still in
the Social Security databases.
This claim is such nonsense that it’s been repeatedly and widely debunked,
including by Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy. In reality, the program has not
been paying benefits out to anyone over the age of 115 since 2015, and the
incongruous age listings are likely a quirk of antiquated coding.
But Trump’s emphasis on the supposed rampant fraud in Social Security — as
well as claims by people close to him, like billionaire Elon Musk, that the
program is a “Ponzi scheme” — is part of a long tradition in US politics: of
Republican and Democratic politicians hellbent on cutting Social Security using
claims like these as a fig leaf to justify taking apart it and other entitlement
programs.
Take former president Ronald Reagan, a lifelong foe of the program who for
decades backed privatizing it. Upon winning the presidency, Reagan put
together a task force that recommended raising the retirement age and other
cuts to Social Security over the course of his presidency.
Reagan laid the groundwork for these attacks on the program by incessantly
claiming that “waste, fraud, and abuse” were rife in government programs,
especially those that older Americans relied on; that he would “look at every
program” to achieve savings by targeting this fraud and waste, while insisting
he would protect entitlements like Social Security and Medicare — though he
couldn’t guarantee it.
At one point, he falsely named a sheet-metal worker who had been disabled at
his job and left unable to work for seven years as an example of the kind of
rampant fraud he was talking about, before quickly walking it back, the man and
his wife complaining that he had been “kicked around like a political yo-yo” and
that Reagan was “looking down on us.”
Reagan was far from the only one. Here’s Bill Clinton talking about the “fraud
and abuse” in Social Security by prison inmates, a crackdown he predicted
would save a paltry $2.5 billion over five years (at a time the national debt stood
at more than $5 trillion), which he launched at the same time he was planning a
bipartisan deal to privatize the program. Or look at the various budgets of
lifelong Social Security hater (and massive hypocrite) Paul Ryan, gesturing
vaguely at “fraud, waste, and abuse” in entitlement programs as he plotted out
how to brutally slash them. Or Rand Paul, who has made dismantling the
program his life’s goal, claiming that everyone “knows someone who’s gaming
the system.” Many of them have used the same “Ponzi scheme” talking point as
Trump’s billionaire lackey, or words to that effect.
But Trump’s rhetoric isn’t just setting the stage for hypothetical, future cuts to
Social Security that aren’t politically possible yet — though Russell Vought,
Trump’s right-hand man and the architect of his presidential agenda, has said
this is the exact plan. No, Trump and his people are cutting Social Security as
we speak, only doing it in a way that is less obvious, headline-grabbing, and
likely to draw pushback.
As reported by the American Prospect, the Trump administration initially
pushed to halve the workforce of the Social Security Administration (SSA), but
has settled — at least publicly, after the news demanded an urgent round of
damage control — for downsizing it “merely” by 12 percent, or seven thousand
workers. Together with ending government leases on office buildings used by
the SSA, one plan is reportedly to simply redirect more people to call centers
instead.
Musk, Trump, and the people around him are launching an attack on Social
Security by stealth, to not just cut its benefits but set the stage for its
privatization.
The end result will be to make the nuts-and-bolts system that administers the
program less functional and convenient, increasing wait times at the reduced
number of offices, forcing people to travel vastly longer distances for in-person
needs, or making them sit on the phone on hold for an interminable amount of
time. But it will also wreak havoc on program benefits themselves, with a study
finding that Reagan’s very similar workforce reduction in the 1980s led to nearly
80,000 eligible people not getting the benefits they were entitled to (out of a
beneficiary population nearly half the size of today’s).
A recent Washington Post report, based on the testimony of SSA employees,
painted a picture of the chaos that Trump’s cuts have already created for those
who rely on the program: phone wait times increasing by hours, delays in
processing retirement and disability claims, and SSA offices unable to pay bills,
hire interpreters and medical experts, or fix mold, among other things. Its acting
administrator has now told staff the plan is to outsource certain work to
“industry experts” — putting some of the SSA’s functions in the hands of
private contractors, in other words.
What really gives the game away is the fact that these reductions are, by the
accounting of even a right-wing think tank that supports cutting the program,
“miniscule”: the SSA’s administrative budget that this is all meant to trim was
meant to be a mere $15 billion for this fiscal year, roughly 1 percent of the $1.6
trillion the program is set to pay out, and a basically nonexistent fraction of the
$31 trillion debt that Musk and his cost-cutters are meant to be going after.
But that’s not their goal. Instead, Musk, Trump, and the people around him are
launching an attack on Social Security by stealth, to not just cut its benefits but
set the stage for its privatization, just as George W. Bush and once tried and
failed to do through Congress — only this time, their method is to plunge the
program into artificially induced dysfunction, before pointing to the problems
they created as proof that government isn’t fit to administer retirement benefits,
and that the whole thing should be handed over to a corporation that can make
money off it.
This is the same plan to dismantle Social Security and the same rhetoric used
to justify it as we’ve seen for decades, whether from Paul Ryan, Bill Clinton, or
Ronald Reagan. The only thing exceptional is how brazen and aggressive
Trump’s version of it is.
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