US Institute of Peace says DOGE has broken into its building
Matthew Lee – March 17, 2025
The United State Institute of Peace building is seen, Monday, March 17, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)ASSOCIATED PRESSThe United State Institute of Peace building is seen, Monday, March 17, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have entered the U.S. Institute of Peace despite protests from the nonprofit that it is not part of the executive branch and is instead an independent agency.
The organization’s CEO, George Moose, said, “DOGE has broken into our building.”
The DOGE workers gained access to the building after several unsuccessful attempts Monday and after having been turned away on Friday, a senior U.S. Institute of Peace official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
It was not immediately clear what the DOGE staffers were doing or looking for in the nonprofit’s building, which is across the street from the State Department in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood.
DOGE has expressed interest in the nonprofit for weeks but has been rebuffed by lawyers who argued that the institute’s status protected it from the kind of reorganization that is occurring in other federal agencies.
The U.S. Institute of Peace says on its website that it’s a nonpartisan, independent organization “dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad.”
The nonprofit says it was created by Congress in 1984 as an “independent nonprofit corporation,“ and it does not meet U.S. Code definitions of “government corporation,” “government-controlled corporation” or “independent establishment.”
Trump Memo Reveals Plan to Throw Social Security Into Chaos
Hafiz Rashid – March 17, 2025
The Trump administration plans to upend and cripple the Social Security claims process, according to a memo obtained by Popular Information.
An internal Social Security Administration memo, sent on March 13, outlines changes to the agency that would cause processing delays and prevent Americans from applying for as well as receiving benefits, ostensibly to reduce “fraud risks” according to its author, acting Deputy Commissioner Doris Diaz.
The changes include requiring that people seeking benefits provide proof of identity over the internet for benefit claims made over the phone. If someone is “unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation.”
Right now, Social Security claims and identity verification can be done over the phone thanks to staffers answering calls on its toll-free number. Actual fraud is rare, because people have to provide multiple pieces of personal information, checked against medical records, bank statements, pay stubs, and tax returns, depending on the type of claim.
Beyond that, if there are any discrepancies, an applicant might have to mail their birth certificate to the agency. This entire process allows people who are elderly or disabled, and thus have difficulty accessing the internet or visiting a physical office, to apply for and collect Social Security benefits.
Introducing internet verification would be a significant hardship to the 40 percent of Social Security beneficiaries who depend on the phone service. If they can’t use the internet system, they would also have to visit a physical location. Diaz’s own memo estimates that 75,000 to 85,000 people would have to visit Social Security offices under the new policy.
But even before the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive cuts to the agency, the SSA’s physical offices had an average wait time of more than a month. They don’t accept walk-ins and would not be able to accommodate such a large increase in foot traffic.
The Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, recently announced further cuts of 7,000 employees, or about 12 percent of the agency. Physical offices around the country are being closed, and some people are more than 100 miles away from the nearest location. On top of that, one day before the memo was issued, the agency was reportedly considering ending its phone service altogether due to misguided concerns from DOGE over widespread fraud.
After an outcry over ending the phone service, the SSA denied that it was being eliminated, with this memo appearing to be a workaround. Even still, if these changes go through, many disabled and elderly people will have major difficulties in getting their benefits and may end up losing them altogether. The memo foresees this, stating there will be “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls.” All of that is a euphemism for causing irreparable damage to Social Security.
For So Many Children, This Is What Reading Feels Like
By James Robinson – March 16, 2025
CreditCredit…
Mr. Robinson is a video producer for Times Opinion and the author of the forthcoming memoir “Whale Eyes,” from which this article is adapted.
When you’re a struggling reader, there’s no amount of motivation that can power you through the sludge of an opening paragraph. Because no matter how intrigued you may be by the topic, when you get to around here, the words begin to fa l t e r.
T h e s e n t e n c e s s l o w d o w n.
Y o u ha ve t o co n cen trat e s o h a r d t o e n s u r e t h a tyo u ca n r em em ber th e b eg inn i n g o f th e sen t e n ce b y t h et i m e
y o um a k e i t t o t h e en d.
And you wonder: What would it be like to make it to the bottom of an article?
Your mind twists around a question: How is it possible that some people can do this so easily? Yet you can’t.
It’s a visceral experience. Of frustration. And raw insecurity.
It feels like the words have given up on you.
It’s tempting to skip to a short paragraph. You should be able to make your way through that. But without context, even a short paragraph doesn’t make sense; you’re confused.
How is it that so many people use these forms to gain a grasp of the world? When you can hardly grasp each word.
I know this experience of reading because for much of my childhood it was my own. For me, the cause was alternating exotropia. I see out of one eye at a time, and every few seconds the words jump back and forth on the page. For others it is dyslexia or ADHD, or simply a lack of resources.
Since the onset of the Covid pandemic, America’s reading scores have plummeted. Students at the top are still succeeding. But a record percentage of eighth graders failed to meet even the lowest “basic” benchmark.
These students are soon to be victims of America’s great reading absurdity: Precisely at the moment when reading scores have reached an all-time low, the Trump administration and the Republican Party are stripping away the protections and resources that help children who struggle to read.
On the federal level, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has already taken an ax to critical research initiatives. This includes canceling Education Department contracts with organizations such as the Regional Educational Laboratories, one of which played a major role in the “Mississippi Miracle,” helping the state jump from 49th to 29th in fourth-grade reading scores between 2013 and 2019. (The department has said it will enter into new contracts.) On Tuesday, more than 1,300 Education Department workers were fired, including almost half of the office responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination protections for students with disabilities.
At the state level, school voucher programs are siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars away from public school systems into private schools, which are not required to offer the same level of support to disabled students.
Meanwhile, 17 states sued the Department of Health and Human Services last year in response to updated Biden administration regulations, asking the courts to declare Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — the bedrock of disability rights legislation in the United States — unconstitutional. The suit poses a threat to the roughly 1.6 million children in America who depend on the law for accommodations like assistive technology and modifications to testing procedures. (While many of the attorneys general on the lawsuit have since said they are not seeking to overturn Section 504 entirely, some legal experts are skeptical.)
Collectively, these measures amount to an attack on those struggling to read — those who, at this point, would not be able to identify the position of this article, its core argument, or what is at stake.
F o r ast r u ggli ng r e ade r, r ea c hin g t h e b ot tom o f the pa ge ca n fe el like a dre am.
You wonder if there will ever be a time when your eyes reach this point on the page and you’ll carry with you an understanding of all the words stacked above.
For decades, Republicans and Democrats have agreed that no matter where you grew up or how your brain sees and processes these shapes, our public school system should help you to understand the words on this page. Reading is a basic right.
But as long as our answer to low scores is to slash support for struggling readers, we risk turning this right into a privilege.
The tech billionaire has repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Social Security is rife with fraud, even as President Trump denies plans to cut those benefits.
By Jess Bidgood – March 14, 2025
Elon Musk at the White House last week.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Elon Musk keeps talking about Social Security.
Two weeks ago, he called it a Ponzi scheme. This week, he suggested that his Department of Government Efficiency would scrutinize the agency’s spending. And he has repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Social Security payments are flowing to undocumented immigrants and dead people.
The latest sign of his interest in the agency came today, when my colleagues Theodore Schleifer, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac reported that one of Musk’s closest advisers had taken a position there.
The adviser is Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who lent Musk $1 million during Tesla’s early days and has vacationed with his family in places like Jackson Hole, Wyo. Gracias’ involvement may be the clearest sign yet that Musk considers the agency a key priority. He is one of nine members of the Department of Government Efficiency who have arrived there in recent days, my colleagues wrote. Two others work at Gracias’ investment firm.
We don’t know exactly what Gracias’ role is. But a court filing last week offered one glimpse of DOGE’s early activities in the agency. In the filing, which The Washington Post covered in detail, Tiffany Flick, a career agency official who retired in mid-February, said the group’s representatives appeared to be seeking sensitive information and data that fell into three categories: allegations about benefits being paid out to deceased people; concerns about multiple benefits going to a single Social Security number; and payments going to people without a Social Security number.
Flick said all of those concerns were “invalid.” But they do align with the false allegations about fraud that Musk and President Trump have been making in public — which Democrats say Republicans intend to use as a pretense for scrutiny and cuts.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly denied that they have plans to cut Social Security benefits, which Republicans have long avoided doing for fear of political blowback.
“They’re not going to cut Social Security. They’re not going to cut Medicare. They’re not — that’s just fearmongering from the left,” said Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s 2024 campaign managers, in an interview with Politico published this morning.
LaCivita didn’t claim that Musk wasn’t interested in cuts to those programs. Instead, he argued that Musk wasn’t as influential as Democrats have suggested.
“He’s not president, he’s not president” LaCivita said, referring to Musk. “He doesn’t get to make those decisions.”
John Hanno: trump, musk, vance and their billionaire cabinet are rewarding the ultra rich, and predatory investors and corporations who elected them and who are pushing for a deep recession so they can buy up homes and businesses for pennies on the dollar. Protect your homes and savings. Curtail spending to the very basics. Pay down credit cards. Start a victory garden this spring. And protest, protest, protest, when they try to turn our National Parks and public lands, over to fossil fuel interests and when they allow them to pollute our air and water. WTFU America. www.tarbabys.com
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.
Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).
And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.
Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.
The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)
Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.
In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.
In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.
The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journalop-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.
