Dem
47
GOP
53
The war that Elon Musk and DOGE are waging against Americans' data privacy has opened two new fronts: the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.
Keep in mind that DOGE operates in secret, and so it is very hard to know exactly how much "progress" Musk & Co. have made in breaching the various systems they want to breach. However, there is general agreement that the IRS' systems have already fallen to Elon and the Muskrats. If so, that would give DOGE a vast amount of information about Americans' assets, tax liabilities, bank accounts, and the like.
Inasmuch as Co-Presidents Musk and Donald Trump do not bother to explain themselves, even when they hold the occasional bizarro Oval Office press conference, it's not entirely clear why the two men want this information. Maybe it's just a case of "the more information we collect, the better." Perhaps they want to use the information to blackmail or punish political enemies. Perhaps they want to alter their own records, so as to reduce their personal tax bills. Or it could be chaos and "breaking things" for the sake of chaos and "breaking things." Any or all of these things are possible.
On the other hand, with the Social Security Administration, things are at least a little bit clearer. Once Musk turned his greedy little eyes on the SSA, interim administrator Michelle King, a nonpolitical appointee with 30 years of public service, resisted as long as she could, and then was compelled to resign. Not unlike the search for a government lawyer who would actually file a dismissal request in the Eric Adams case, it took some time to find someone in the SSA hierarchy willing to be a loyal lackey. The administration finally found that person by searching—wait for it—eX-Twitter, looking for a user who was both an SSA staffer and had written pro-DOGE tweets. The new interim administrator is a fellow named Leland Dudek. In an e-mail announcing his new (if temporary) promotion, Dudek promised "transparency." It is not clear if he's already given Musk the keys to the kingdom, or if that will happen sometime later this week.
Musk's play here is pretty obvious. If he's actually going to cut government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars (say, to allow for tax cuts for billionaires), he has to take a hatchet to either military spending or to spending on social welfare programs. Since cutting the military budget is a non-starter for Republicans, that means social welfare, and the two biggest outlays in that area are Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is currently at work on the latter, and Musk is now working on the former. All of his talk about fraud and inefficiency in Social Security payments (like the ridiculous claim that some people are being paid benefits until their 150th birthday) is clearly meant to give him cover to start hacking away.
Whether Musk is actually able to slash Social Security spending, or Johnson is able to cut spending on Medicare/Medicaid, remain up in the air. There is the possibility of lawsuits, of course, particularly in terms of anything Musk might do with the SSA. Meanwhile, it may eventually occur to someone in a position of power that if the Republicans take an axe to the most popular federal program (Social Security) or the second most popular federal program (Medicare/Medicaid), the GOP will reap the whirlwind. We'll see. (Z)