Waste Of Scarce Resources

      From  “Fact Sheet” issued by the White House yesterday:

Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum aimed at stopping illegal aliens and other ineligible people from obtaining Social Security Act benefits.

• The Memorandum directs the administration to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from Social Security Act programs.
  • This includes promulgating guidance and prioritizing enforcement actions against grantees or subgrantees that do not: verify eligibility, stop payments to deceased or ineligible payees, or otherwise prevent ineligible aliens from receiving funds.
• It expands the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) fraud prosecutor program to at least 50 U.S. Attorney Offices and establishes a Medicare and Medicaid fraud-prosecution program in 15 U.S. Attorney Offices.
• The Memorandum requires the SSA Inspector General to investigate earnings reports for individuals aged 100 or older with mismatched SSA records, to combat identity theft.
• It also directs the SSA to consider whether to reinstate the use of civil monetary penalties against individuals who engage in Social Security fraud, an effort that has been paused for several years.

PROTECTING TAXPAYER DOLLARS: President Trump believes that taxpayer-funded benefits should be provided only to eligible persons and must not encourage or reward illegal immigration to the United States.

• Policing Social Security Act fraud is critical because the Act contains not only traditional Social Security provided to older Americans, but also unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, and other programs.
• The surge in illegal immigration caused by the previous Administration is siphoning dollars and essential services from American citizens while state and local budgets grow increasingly strained.
  • Biden oversaw a sharp increase in the number of immigrants given Social Security Numbers (SSNs), with more than 2 million illegal aliens assigned SSNs in fiscal year 2024 alone.
• The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) calculated that American taxpayers spend at least $182 billion annually to cover the costs incurred by the presence of 20 million illegal aliens and their children, which includes $66.4 billion in Federal expenses plus an additional $115.6 billion in state and local expenses.
  • FAIR estimated that nearly a million illegal aliens hold stolen identifications or fraudulent SSNs.
  • Although some illegal aliens do pay taxes, those tax contributions come nowhere near covering the costs they impose on the populace; FAIR estimates illegal aliens are still a $150.7 billion net fiscal burden.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Biden Administration’s open borders agenda, which sought to provide Medicaid-funded emergency services to illegal aliens, has cost Federal and state taxpayers more than $16.2 billion. Joe Biden also tried to make illegal aliens eligible for Obamacare until he was stopped in a lawsuit. 

I Thought Social Security Was Supposed To Be Apolitical

      A thread of tweets from the Social Security Administration this evening:

Former President Joe Biden [who is expected to make a speech on Social Security this evening] is lying to Americans. 

Here are the facts:

1️⃣President Trump has repeatedly promised to protect Social Security and ensure higher-take home pay for seniors by ending taxation on Social Security benefits.

2️⃣The SSA has not permanently closed any field offices and 50% of the technology department has not been laid off.

3️⃣SSA is taking commonsense steps to transform how we serve the public - last month, we spent $16.5 million to modernize telephone services nationwide. We’re developing cutting-edge, AI-powered tools to streamline simple tasks.

4️⃣A SSA Inspector General report released while Joe Biden was President found $72 billion in improper payments from fiscal years 2015 through 2022.

5️⃣Over 2 million illegal aliens were assigned SSNs in fiscal year 2024 alone.

Good Lord!

      This is from a Washington Post article. You really need to read the whole thing. This is most disturbing.

Representatives of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have sought for weeks to get around a court order barring their access to sensitive data and internal systems at the Social Security Administration, prompting career staff to repeatedly resist their efforts, according to a half dozen people familiar with the DOGE team’s actions and records obtained by The Washington Post.
The battle inside the agency led the Justice Department to intervene to deny DOGE access to the data, even as the Trump administration installed and promoted DOGE-friendly leaders to dramatically cut back services at Social Security. It involved staff, from rank-and-file employees to senior leaders, including acting commissioner Leland Dudek, who was appointed to his position after displaying public loyalty to DOGE. …

At the same time, Dudek mistakenly let one of the DOGE representatives into a Social Security database last week, violating the court order, according to a person familiar with events who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. That error led a federal judge to summon Dudek for a hearing Tuesday at federal court in Baltimore, but the Trump administration said in a filing late Monday that he would no longer appear. …

At first, officials obeyed the courts.
Immediately after Hollander issued her order, the agency cut off DOGE staffers from all systems, according to employees and records obtained by The Post. The compliance came at the direction of Michael Russo, then the chief information officer, who was recommended for the job by Frank Bisignano, President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the permanent leader of Social Security. …

But Russo’s swift action did not go over well with the Trump administration. He was reassigned in late March to a “senior adviser” position focused on “IT Modernization” in the office of the commissioner, according to a memo obtained by The Post. He was replaced as chief information officer by Scott Coulter, a New York-based hedge fund manager and a member of Musk’s DOGE team, according to the memo and court filings. …

Meanwhile, Mark Steffensen — another Trump appointee and DOGE ally serving as acting general counsel — was tasked with determining whether DOGE representatives should be allowed to access Social Security data. Steffensen, a former top financial executive, had assumed his role as a senior adviser at Social Security at Bisignano’s recommendation on Feb. 24, according to another memo obtained by The Post. …  

Soon, Steffensen was fighting with career lawyers at Social Security.
Attorneys in the office of general counsel wanted to draft agencywide guidance that would comply with the judge’s order, setting strict rules for how staff could interact with DOGE representatives, according to a person briefed on the events. But Steffensen initially wanted the lawyers to issue a memo giving DOGE access to Social Security data, the person said.
None of the career employees would agree to Steffensen’s plan, the person said. So he began circumventing the lawyers by telling DOGE representatives to keep working on their projects anyway, according to the person and records obtained by The Post. …  

 Near the end of March, the office of general counsel issued its guidance on DOGE’s data access at Social Security, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Post. The final version appeared to align with career lawyers’ viewpoint. It said that “DOGE team members are restricted … from accessing, viewing, or otherwise working with” any “information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity,” including “any nonpublic datasets that are aggregated or deidentified but could be used to identify a person.” … 

  In early April, lawyers with the Justice Department were called in to give their opinion, too, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Department lawyers told Steffensen that under no circumstances should DOGE be allowed inside the agency’s data and that Social Security must follow the judge’s order, one of the people said. …

 But DOGE kept up the pressure and, according to current and former officials, tried unsuccessfully to get Steffensen fired for failing to get them access. Members of the DOGE team also sought an exemption from the judge for several projects, the officials said. It is unclear if the judge agreed.
In recent weeks, Social Security hired a new DOGE team member, but Dudek — not realizing this staffer was a member of the DOGE team — granted him access to some of the agency’s data, violating the judge’s order, according to records and a person familiar with the matter.
Once Dudek realized his mistake, he removed the DOGE staffer from the agency’s systems, the person said.

     As I have said before, I salute those who have fought the good fight to protect Social Security’s records. You deserve gold medals when these evil times are past. 

A New Affidavit From Tiffany Flick And I Don’t Understand It

      Social Security has posted an affidavit from Tiffany Flick in the case concerning DOGE access to agency databases. I don’t understand it. It seems to be saying that no names of living people have been intentionally added to the Death Master File. Maybe she’s hinting that Social Security didn’t do it; the Department of Commerce did it.

I Wonder What Happened

 

Deep Thoughts

      If a live man is listed as dead in the Death Master File, are dependent benefits payable to his “widow” and children? Sounds like a case for estoppel to me.

A Salute To Those Who Resist Weaponizing The Death Master File

      From the Washington Post:

Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.
But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave. …

Staffers at Social Security began raising the alarm about the urgent need to address a flaw in the agency’s deaths database in February, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Post.
Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records.
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said. …

A staff of fewer than a dozen career employees was assigned to work with Musk’s team on the project, according to a senior official who left the agency around that time. Career employees were concerned that they might be facilitating something illegal, asking themselves if they were at risk of going to jail for the work they were doing, the official said. …

One official chose to resign rather than remain involved in what he saw as an illegal attempt to repurpose the agency for immigration enforcement. …

Within Social Security, the general counsel’s office is preparing an opinion that will find the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the death database a violation of privacy law, according to one person with knowledge of the upcoming declaration. The opinion will take issue with the agency knowingly and falsely declaring that living people are dead, the person said. …

What Should Banks Do?

      Banks have a clear legal obligation to freeze the accounts of people who have died. What obligation or even right do they have to freeze the account of some living person whom the President wishes to declare a nonperson? Can banks and other financial institutions continue to rely upon the Death Master File or whatever they want to call it now? They know it’s being deliberately manipulated to deceive them into doing things they shouldn’t do.