The Social Security Administration When Trump Was President

     From the Revolving Door Project:

... Former President Trump filled top roles at the SSA with people actively hostile to Social Security beneficiaries, as well as campaign donors with no real experience relevant to the agency.

 For the role of SSA commissioner, Trump nominated Andrew Saul, a GOP mega donor and “one-time handbag king” with tens of millions in assets. Saul was not entirely lacking in public service experience, however. While serving as the vice chairman of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), he ran a short-lived congressional campaign in the run-up to the 2008 presidential cycle, but he dropped out of the race four days after the New York Times revealed he had accepted donations from companies bidding on MTA contracts—potentially a violation of state ethics rules.

Saul’s most relevant experience was as George W. Bush’s Chair of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which manages the retirement savings plan for federal workers, the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). But the TSP is much more similar to a private 401(k) plan than publicly-funded Social Security benefits, which led advocates like Nancy Altman of Social Security Works to point out at the time of his nomination that while Saul’s experience with the TSP “was undoubtedly valuable, it has little value to helping him run the Social Security system, unless he seeks to privatize the program.”

When President Biden fired Saul, an action he should have taken on day one but instead held off for months, Saul embarrassed himself by calling his firing a “palace coup.” He argued that his termination was illegal—despite the Supreme Court clearly ruling that the President has the authority to fire the Commissioner.

Trump appointed Mark Warshawsky to be Deputy Commissioner for Retirement and Disability Policy, despite his record of hostility to Social Security. At the Department of the Treasury, Warshawsky worked on President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, which later earned him a nomination to the Social Security Advisory Board. In 2016, in the midst of stints at various private companies specializing in retirement income, Warshawsky published an article peddling the lie that SSDI is rife with “waste and fraud,” and bloated by people who could be working. (In reality, even the austerity-minded Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget acknowledges that fraud is “less common in the SSDI program than many believe” and “not a major cost driver for the program.”)

Several other papers Warshawsky wrote while at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center expressed skepticism about whether or not the SSA’s extremely stringent standards for assessing disability were in fact too lenient. After his SSA role, Warshawsky joined the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime proponent of cuts to Social Security and privatization.

When SSA’s Inspector General position opened up, Trump nominated Gail Ennis to the role. Inspectors General are supposed to function as independent watchdogs, but seemingly her only qualification was being a campaign donor (including up through August 2017). In her first financial disclosure, she disclosed receiving a salary of over $2 million working for WilmerHale, representing three massive banks and one hedge fund—Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel. ...