Pentagon to end $5.1 billion in contracts with Accenture, Deloitte, others
Reuters – April 10, 2025
A logo of Deloitte sits at the WEF in Davos
(Reuters) -U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the termination of several information technology services contracts valued at $5.1 billion, including companies such as Accenture and Deloitte, according to a Pentagon memo.
The pacts “represent non-essential spending on third party consultants” for services Pentagon employees can perform, Hegseth said in the memo released late on Thursday.
“These terminations represent $5.1 billion in wasteful spending” Hegseth said, adding that their termination would result in “nearly $4 billion in estimated savings.”
Representatives for Accenture and Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton, also among those with contracts, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The contracts appeared to be wide-ranging cuts to consulting services for the Navy, the Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Health Agency.
In a video posted on X, Hegseth said the contracts were for “ancillary things like consulting and other non-essential services.” He said the services would be brought in-house.
In the memo Hegseth said he was directing the Pentagon’s chief information officer to work over the next 30 days with tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to prepare a plan to cut and in-source the Defense Department’s information technology consulting and management services.
Additionally, the memo said the Pentagon would negotiate the “most favorable rates” for cloud computing services.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Howard Goller)
Elon Musk’s DOGE Gives Tesla Massive Helping Hand With Newest Purge
Hafiz Rashid – April 10, 2025
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fired car safety experts in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who directly regulated Tesla.
The Financial Timesreports that DOGE fired 30 employees from the agency back in February, including several from the office of vehicle automation safety, which is in charge of regulating self-driving vehicles, a key part of Musk’s car company.
The layoffs made up 4 percent of the agency’s 800-person staff, including employees who were due for promotions and workers who had just been hired. The automation safety staff were disproportionately affected because the office had only been formed in 2023 and was predominately made up of probationary hires.
In a Valentine’s Day email announcing the firings, poor performance was cited as the reason, although this was rejected by an unnamed senior employee still at NHTSA who spoke to the Times.
The NHTSA has eight active investigations against Tesla, including five focusing on Musk’s claims about the company’s Autopilot system and Full Self-Driving software, and has published over 10,000 complaints about the company from the public. The agency has also ordered multiple recalls of Tesla cars and delayed the rollout of the company’s self-driving and driver-assistance software.
Musk has promised to launch a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, in June, and to start building a fleet of autonomous “cybercabs” next year, which would require an NHTSA exception because the cybercabs don’t have a steering wheel or pedals.
“Letting DOGE fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness—we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” one Tesla manager told the Times. They “need to be developing a national framework for [autonomous vehicles], otherwise Tesla doesn’t have a prayer for scale in FSD or robotaxis.”
And, much like DOGE’s other firings at agencies across the government that regulate or deal with Musk’s companies, the NHTSA layoffs have major ethical implications.
“There is a clear conflict of interest in allowing someone with a business interest influence over appointments and policy at the agency regulating them,” a former NHTSA employee told the Times.
China, North Korea and Russia military cooperation raises threats in the Pacific, US official warns
Lolita C. Baldor – April 10, 2025
FILE – U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander, Admiral Samuel Paparo, gestures during a press conference at the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio, northern Philippines, Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File)FILE – Army Gen. Xavier Brunson testifies during an Armed Services hearing on Capitol Hill, Sept. 17, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top U.S. commander in the Pacific warned senators Thursday that the military support China and North Korea are giving Russia in its war on Ukraine is creating a security risk in his region as Moscow provides critical military assistance to both in return.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that China has provided 70% of the machine tools and 90% of the legacy chips to Russia to help Moscow “rebuild its war machine.”
In exchange, he said, China is potentially getting help in technologies to make its submarines move more quietly, along with other assistance.
Senators pressed Paparo and Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, on China’s advances in the region, including threats to Taiwan. And they also questioned both on the U.S. military presence in South Korea, and whether it should be shielded from personnel cuts..
Both said the current U.S. force there and across the Indo-Pacific is critical for both diplomacy in the region and America’s national security, as ties between Russia and China grow. The U.S. has 28,500 forces in South Korea.
Paparo said North Korea is sending “thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of artillery shells” and hundreds of short-range missiles to Russia. The expectation, he said, is that Pyongyang will get air defense and surface-to-air missile support.
“It’s a transactional symbiosis where each state fulfills the other state’s weakness to mutual benefit of each state,” Paparo said.
In his opening comments, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican committee chairman, said the greater alignment of Russia, China and North Korea “should be of great concern to all in the West. This concern should then lead to action. If we are to maintain global peace and stability, we must continue taking steps now to rebuild our military and reestablish deterrence.”
Brunson said North Korea has shown the ability to send munitions and troops to Russia while advancing development of its own military capabilities, including hypersonics. Pyongrang, he said, “boasts a Russian-equipped, augmented, modernized military force of over 1.3 million personnel.”
North Korea’s efforts to develop advanced nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles ”pose a direct threat to our homeland and our allies,” Paparo added.
North Korea also has sent thousands of soldiers to fight with the Russians against Ukraine. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that Russia is actively recruiting Chinese citizens to fight alongside its forces in the Ukraine war. He said more than 150 such mercenaries are already active in the battle with Beijing’s knowledge.ADVERTISEMENTAdvertisement
Trump and his MAGA movement are conspiring with oligarchs to turn the U.S. into a rightwing authoritarian state. The labor movement can play a key role in fighting back.
Bill Fletcher Jr. – April 8, 2025
Letter carriers across the country rally to stop the Trump administration from stripping the U.S. Postal Service of its independence and possibly privatizing it.(PHOTO BY: JIM WEST/UCG/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
One of the principal difficulties facing the Democratic Party establishment and most leaders of organized labor is a failure to accept a fundamental reality: there is no normality. The failure to grasp this state of affairs has led to strategic paralysis and a tendency to believe that by being the “adults in the room,” the Democrats — or the trade union leadership — can embarrass the Republicans and force them to engage in good faith behavior. That is not the case.
The rise of President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement has represented the morphing of a broad, rightwing populist movement into a fascist movement that seeks to destroy constitutional democracy. The current purging of the federal government, through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), aims at both opening the doors to a kleptocracy as well as ensuring loyalty to the MAGA vision and its retrograde goals.
Yet while MAGA can be defined as fascist (or postfascist), what we do not yet see is full fascism in power. Rather what we are now witnessing appears to be something along the lines of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary and, ultimately, a Putinesque regime, i.e., increased rightwing authoritarianism. Still, the aim of the Trump regime remains to destabilize all real and potential opposition.
MAGA, as a movement, has converged with the objectives of that segment of the capitalist class often referenced as “oligarchs.” Particularly situated in high tech, this group of capitalists has become very influential through their control over critical online and communications systems. Initially aligned, for the most part, with Democrats, the oligarchs appear to have decided that they are nothing short of superior beings that must seize the reins of government in order to operate it much like a business, and for their own ends. This includes expanding their wealth, but also for those, such as Musk, who have a quasi-science fiction vision of a future where the elite abandon Earth and settle Mars or some artificial satellite, there is the need for direct governmental involvement in such projects. Along with the oligarchs are those in the business class who simply wish to ravage the federal kitty, leading to the emergence of kleptocracy.
In earlier eras the expression “offensive of capital” would be used for moments when the capitalist class would move to reverse the victories that working people had won. We are now experiencing something more dramatic than that. This is a ‘blitzkrieg’ of segments of capital in alignment with a mass rightwing movement, making the current attack especially dangerous. To put it another way, the millions of diehard MAGA supporters are not just observers but have become the foot-soldiers for Trump even when they may have an ambivalence about the objectives of the oligarchs.
Organized labor has been divided over whether and how to respond to this offensive. Roughly speaking, there are three general categories: the collaborators, the ostriches and the resisters. The “collaborators” are those unions that are going along with Trump’s agenda. The “ostriches” are those that are attempting to avoid conflict and hoping to simply last out the next four years. The “resisters” are those that seek to reject MAGA and the current offensive. Each of these categories are quite uneven and their approaches have their own limits. The resisters, for instance, are prepared to ally with other groups to a certain extent, but have a tendency to work on their own. The federal sector unions that are being forced to resist are mainly relying on litigation and lobbying, for instance, appearing to be largely uncomfortable with, or unprepared for, more mass actions, such as work stoppages. This dynamic may soon shift as a result of Trump attempting to obliterate collective bargaining for nearly one million federal workers.
The difference in approach among sections of organized labor is not, primarily, a disagreement over tactics. Rather, it reflects differences over how to understand the nature of the moment and, as a result, the question of what is the necessary strategy. The reality is that we are living through a time when forces of fascism are on the march. This means that confronting MAGA solely on the grounds of deteriorating working (or living) conditions is insufficient. The Trump regime is aiming to roll back all of the progress made throughout the 20th century, and is targeting political opposition wherever it arises. This requires an all-hands-on-deck response. This is not a moment for faux bipartisanship; it is a moment for resistance and obstruction to block the Trump administration from carrying out its far-right objectives.
Rank-and-file members of our unions should be won over to fully appreciate the nature of the danger facing us, and all that it implies. This begins with a major education effort among the membership coinciding with mobilizing against the specific attacks workers are facing, be they loss of jobs, loss of union recognition, moves against migrants, further attacks on the social safety net, failure to respond to increasing natural disasters or a dragnet on political speech. The job of working-class leaders is to link these threats together into a story about how Trump’s allies and the oligarchs are conspiring to steal from the majority, and institute a white, Christian nationalist authoritarian state, i.e., minority rule. Workers must be convinced of the possibility of beating back the darkness and winning.
Taking on MAGA will need to involve, but not be limited to, labor militancy. Accompanying shrewd and creative tactical actions must be a proactive vision regarding an alternative to rightwing authoritarianism, an alternative many of us summarize as the fight for a “Third Reconstruction” — a political realignment carried out through a multiracial democratic movement from below. This is a challenging but essential task since many in this country have not only lost faith in constitutional democracy, but they have lost faith in the ability to bring about lasting progressive change.
Reversing this sense of pessimism is key to the survival of the labor movement, both among established trade unions as well as more nontraditional forms of labor organizing. Workers must be convinced of the possibility of beating back the darkness and winning. Indeed, our work must be guided by the notion that we are fighting for a future without fear.
BILL FLETCHER, JR. is a talk show host, writer, activist, and trade unionist. The Man Who Changed Colors is his latest novel. His first novel is The Man Who Fell From the Sky. He is also co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of Solitary Divided, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” — Twenty Other Myths about Unions. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.
US warns China intelligence targeting fired federal workers
Lauren Irwin – April 9, 2025
The Trump administration is warning federal workers about efforts by Chinese intelligence to target current and former U.S. officials for recruitment.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) warned that current and former workers are being targeted by Chinese intelligence officials posing as “consulting firms, corporate headhunters, think tanks, and other entities on social and professional networking sites.”
The center warned that contact could come via email or messaging platforms, and federal workers should not accept online invitations to connect with strangers.
The NCSC warned that deceptive practices have become “more sophisticated” and have targeted individuals with a federal government background who are seeking new employment.
“Current and former federal employees should beware of these approaches and understand the consequences of engaging,” the center said in its warning.
The Chinese foreign ministry said it was not aware of the situation and accused the U.S. of spying on China, Reuters reported.
The warning comes as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under the Trump administration, has pushed to lay off hundreds of thousands of employees, leaving many former federal workers looking for a job.
Some fund managers worry Trump ‘might be insane,’ analyst says
Kevin Williams – April 9, 2025
Photo: Anna Moneymaker (Getty Images)
The worldwide ripple effects from President Donald Trump’s tariffs have been so widespread that one analyst says some in the business world fear the issue may go beyond Trump simply taking a political stand.
Thomas Lee, a managing partner and the head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, sent a memo Wednesday that painted a picture of the fallout from the president’s trade war. Lee wrote that he has had “many conversations” with macro fund managers who are expressing concern that those in the White House aren’t acting rationally — and who worry the tariffs go beyond politics and policy.
“Some even fear that this may not even be ideology,” Lee wrote. “A few have quietly wondered if the President might be insane.”
Lee’s report came before Trump issued an unexpected 90-day pause on tariffs Wednesday afternoon that sent markets rallying after a days of losses and volatility.
In his report, Lee said the tariffs could still go one of two ways. The first possibility is that everyone tires of a grinding trade war, sues for peace, and reaches new bilateral agreements. But Lee said that, while he still thinks this is the likely outcome, with each passing day the tariffs remain in place, the odds decrease.
The second way the trade war could go, Lee said, is that tariffs stay in place for an extended period, which results in the government effectively “freezing” the economy. Then, companies would be so pummeled by the tariffs that the “shock” to the economy would ripple, leading to a cascade of slowing economic activity and the very real risk of a recession.
Ultimately, though, Lee said there is one variable — and only one — that will determine these tariffs’ endgame:
“This path is determined by a single person, President Donald Trump.”
J.P. Donleavy clocks the absurdities of human conduct in his satirical advice guide, “The Unexpurgated Code.”
By Dwight Garner – April 7, 2025
Turn to J.P. Donleavy for tips on everything from social climbing to assassination.Credit…Derek Speirs for The New York Times
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Books of advice come in many forms: financial, spiritual, physical, philosophical. Novels too are books of advice, if read in a certain light. Eve Babitz understood, for example, that part of Colette’s greatness is that you can open her novels anywhere and “brush up on what to do.”
There are only two advice books I’ve read more than once. One is Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to Be Idle” (2004). Its title is self-explanatory. The other is J.P. Donleavy’s “The Unexpurgated Code” (1975). Its title is less so. Donleavy’s book is a sendup of the form that happens to be, possibly, the funniest book ever written.
“The Unexpurgated Code” turns 50 this year. It has dropped from sight, and yet here we are at a moment when the world could use it. It’s a book to turn to when you need a little pick-me-up. It is Bolivian marching powder for the spirit. The table of contents alone is more happily anarchic than most books in their entireties. Here are a few of Donleavy’s 270 topics:
“Upon Placing the Blame for Venereal Infection,” “Upon Embellishing Your Background,” “Upon Being Unflatteringly Dressed in an Emergency,” “Upon Your Spit Landing on Another,” “Upon Fouling the Footpath,” “Upon Heaping Abuse on the High and Mighty,” “Upon Being Exorcised” and “Upon the Nearby Arrival of a Flying Saucer.”
Donleavy is best known as the author of “The Ginger Man,” his tumultuous 1955 comic novel about Sebastian Dangerfield, an American student living in Dublin. (Sample sentence: “All I want is one break which is not my neck.”) He is also the author of many other novels, plays and books of stories. His novel “A Fairy Tale of New York” (1973) inspired the title of the song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl that helps make Christmastime bearable.
Donleavy was born in Brooklyn, to Irish immigrants, and grew up in the Bronx. He was the son of a firefighter. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he spent the rest of his life in Ireland. He was rarely photographed in anything other than layers of tweeds, so that he resembled a walking advertisement for 18-year-old Tullamore Dew.
Battered copies of “The Unexpurgated Code” pass among admirers like samizdat. The reason isn’t merely that it’s funny. The book clocks the absurdities of human conduct like few others. It takes note of the chutes and trapdoors and ladders and ejection seats involved in all human discourse. It says: We’re all miserable bipeds struggling for a bit of breathing room, so you might as well have a sense of humor about it all.
If you have been excluded from parties you wish you’d had the chance to boycott, if you lack long shanks, if you dine too often at low tables at bad addresses, if you feel as dented as a discarded ping pong ball, if you are not a member of the dividend-drawing classes, well, recall that Philip Larkin advised in a 1941 letter that “stupid ills need stupid remedies,” and turn to Donleavy.
A few weeks ago, in a restaurant, I was snubbed — in front of my family! I found out later that it was an entirely accidental snubbing, and all is well, but it stung at the time. When I got home that night, still smarting, I consulted Donleavy. Here is a bit of his advice in “Upon Being Snubbed,” which cheered me up instantly: “Take solace from the fact that it is unlikely that you will ever be kidnapped.” You will not find such counsel in Miss Manners.
You can flip to almost any page in “The Unexpurgated Code” and be reduced to helpless laughter. If you are not to the manor born and feel the need to defend your lineage, Donleavy writes, rummage around in your past: “Someone must have been something once.” He adds: “If you have received a Red Cross Life Saving Certificate, riposte pronto with this information.”
If you are stranded at a party with no one to talk to, “this is a time to laugh lightly for no reason at all. Or for the reason that you have dumped your champagne in a flower pot and the plant keeled over. Ignore any askance looks.”
A section titled “Upon Making the Contract for the Rubout” is a favorite. Here is Donleavy:
Give clear directions to your roughnecks as to the area of your chap’s anatomy you want broken as this directly affects the duration of incapacitation. To stop him writing checks or his memoirs, the wrists can be smashed. In preventing him preparing his own favorite spaghettis, clean break fractures above the elbow keep him away from his chopping board.
One of his imagined heavies is named “One Fingered Legs Apart Vinnie.”
Donleavy covers a good deal of standard etiquette-book topics — how to behave at the table, the hair salon, the theater, the class reunion, the bank and while sick. (“Sneezing is one of the best ways of widely spreading your germs if this is what the people around you deserve.”) But it gets risqué. There are sections on orgies and masturbation and voyeurism and how to behave in a porno theater.
There are also discourses on flatulence, notably as a method of communication between spies, on nose-picking and on the squeezing of pimples and blackheads. The latter maneuvers should be confined to people you know well, he writes, “although it is also one of the fastest ways to get to know someone better.” There are many strange chambers in this nautilus spiral of a book.
Some of the finest sections are on suicide, execution (“Relax and wait. Most things will be taken care of for you”) and death in general. He recommends that, if you learn you have but a short time to live, you “do not rush out to a night club or the latest celebrity joint and scare the hell out of everybody.”
In your grief, do not jump onto coffins that are being lowered because “with some of the cheaper materials they are using these days, your feet could go right through the lid and your possibly muddy shoes land with the most grossly embarrassing results on the corpse.”
Donleavy’s book is a subversive companion piece, of sorts, to Nancy Mitford’s 1955 essay “The English Aristocracy,” which alerted the terrified world to the distinctions between “U” (upper class) and “non-U” language. Donleavy’s book feels Anglocentric, yet he told The Paris Review that Americans are snobbier than Brits.
Donleavy’s book is one for the world’s underdogs, its confirmed pullers of social boners, those who sense they are too often taking a worsting from reality. It might make you indescribably happy. Indeed, there is a section titled “Upon Encountering Happiness.” It reads, in full: “Be wary at such times because most of life’s blows fall then.”
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
Trump Administration Opens More than 50% of Protected U.S. Forest Land for Logging: What That Means
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims that turning trees into timber will help prevent wildfires, though experts have deemed it a harmful and inefficient method
Meredith Kile – April 7, 2025
Robert F. Bukaty/APMilan Lumber Co. in Milan, New Hampshire, on Thursday, March 13, 2025
More than 50% of the United States’ formerly protected national forests are now on-limits for the logging industry.
Following an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at increasing U.S. timber production, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has announced plans to remove environmental protections that will allow logging on millions of acres of national forest land.
In an April 3 memo titled “Increasing Timber Production and Designating an Emergency Situation on National Forest System Lands,” Rollins cites a goal to remove “heavy-handed federal policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security.”
To comply with Trump’s directive to increase U.S. timber production by 25%, the Forest Service’s acting associate chief, Christopher B. French, sent an additional memo to regional National Forest System officials instructing immediate action.
According to the Department of Agriculture, French’s memo directs on-the-ground leadership to “increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, remove National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes, reduce implementation and contracting burdens and to work directly with states, local government, and forest product producers to ensure that the Forest Service delivers a reliable and consistent supply of timber.”
Millions of acres of that timber, Rollins’ Emergency Situation Determination explained, will come from land previously protected by the National Forest System.
Rollins’ office states that 66.9 million acres of NFS land have been designated “very high or high wildfire risk” and 78.8 million acres have been identified as “experiencing declining forest health” from insects, disease, invasive species and more.
Scott Olson/GettyA fire danger sign in Yale, Oklahoma, on March 17. 2025
Allowing for overlap, Rollins has now designated a total of nearly 113 million acres of NFS land — which amounts to 59% of the total forest land — as an emergency situation, making them candidates for logging and other “emergency actions” to supposedly ensure public safety.
“I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by empowering forest managers to reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive,” Rollins, who co-founded the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute think tank, said in a statement.
However, when Trump issued a similar logging directive during his first term — during a federal shutdown — experts warned that clearing trees does not necessarily reduce wildfire risks.
“We can’t log our way out of the fire problem — thinning all the forests is not possible,” University of Colorado Boulder Professor Jennifer Balch told TheWashington Post in January 2019. “And even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently, and will in the future.”
Balch explained that thinning federal forests near homes makes sense, however, only 2% of lands treated by the Forest Service between 2004 and 2013 experienced a wildfire. The more serious issue, she wrote, was a shrinking snowpack in the western U.S. due to steadily rising temperatures.
Rollins’ April 3 memo made no mention of climate change.
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via GettyThe Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center burns during the Eaton fire in Pasadena, California on January 7, 2025.More
During his presidency, Democrat Joe Biden proposed new protections for some of the oldest trees on NFS land. Old growth trees store large amounts of carbon, provide needed animal habitats and are also more likely to survive forest fires.
“Protecting our old growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon,” Randi Spivak, public lands policy director with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement in December 2023. “The Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.”
The 22 Most Clever Signs From The “Hands Off” Protests
Michaela Bramwell – April 6, 2025
This weekend, thousands of people participated in the “Hands Off” protests across all 50 states to express their opposition to the policies of the Trump administration and cuts being made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“Hands Off” event organizers said in a recent statement, “They’re taking everything they can get their hands on — our health care, our data, our jobs, our services — and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.”
Anadolu / Getty Images
Demonstrators got very clever with their protest signs, so here are some of the most memorable ones:
Doge’s attack on social security causing ‘complete, utter chaos’, staff says
Michael Sainato – April 6, 2025
The Arthur J Altmeyer Social Security Administration building in Woodlawn, Maryland, on 19 February.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.
The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.
An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6tn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelminglypopular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.Advertisement
“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”
The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.
The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.Advertisement
Acting commissioner Leland Dudek has acknowledged to staff that Doge are making the decisions at the agency. Musk, Donald Trump and others have claimed action is being taken to tackle widespread fraud at the agency.
Dudek was appointed acting commissioner after he reportedly secretly shared information with Doge staff. He has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court order barring Doge from accessing the data.
“It’s just been a lot of craziness, a lot of foolishness. Until they get rid of Doge and the person in office right now, and the Republicans actually get a backbone and stand up for something for once in their lives, things are just going to be complete chaos. That’s really the best word to describe SSA right now, just complete, utter chaos,” the worker added. “They couldn’t understand the coding, so everything they said SSA was doing illegally, they weren’t. Common sense is something they lack. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Rich Couture, a spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees’ Social Security Administration general committee, the union representing roughly 42,000 social security workers, said Doge’s public targets for cuts make no sense.Advertisement
Why are they cutting 7,000 jobs, asked Couture. “It has never been explained with any degree of clarity how they came up with that figure. What’s being served by that by a loss of 7,000 jobs? How does any of that supposedly makes this operation more efficient? How does it improve service? How does it improve productivity? Our position is that losing 7,000 people doesn’t do any of those things,” he said.
“I don’t think they’re going to stop at 7,000 people lost. If they lose 10,000 or 12,000, they’re running up their high score. They’re able to brag about it.”
Departments at the agency have been closed and reorganized, with workers forced to take reassignments or risk firings, and all workers have been ordered to return to the office five days a week.
Couture noted the return to office order occurred a day before a buyout offer was set to expire, in violation of union contract agreements, and the offices were not prepared or equipped to handle it, as many workers had no desks or equipment to work.Advertisement
Phone services for the public have also been cut, and field and regional offices are slated for closure around the US.
“There is no safe office in this country,” added Couture. “It’s a concerted attack on the legitimacy of social security itself. The promise that this country has made to the public with respect to income security is being broken.”
The cuts come as staffing is already at a 50-year low despite the agency serving a record number of recipients as the US population above the age of 65 is growing.
The office of the inspector general at SSA reported in August 2024 that a record backlog of payment actions impacting social security beneficiaries was due to lack of staffing, increased workloads, and decreased funding for the agency, driving improper payments because staff weren’t available to update records.Advertisement
Couture noted the operating overhead of the agency, as a share of benefits paid out, has shrunk by 20% over the last 10 years and is now less than 1%. He disputed any claims of inefficiency or waste at the agency, claiming the agency is already a model of efficiency and as effective as possible under its fiscal and staffing constraints.
He said he was concerned the situation was creating a “negative feedback loop” where, as more employees leave, more work is put on those remaining, depressing morale and inducing more to leave “until the agency ends up in a death spiral with staffing, inducing office closures”.
“You’re going to see a wholesale collapse in the agency’s service structure. Call wait times will skyrocket, wait times for appointments, processing times, all of it going to skyrocket because there won’t be enough people to do the jobs, which opens the door to privatization.”
Musk has called social security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and has consistently pushed false claims and conspiracies about the program.Advertisement
On senator Ted Cruz’s podcast last month, Musk repeated a white supremacist conspiracy theory that Democrats use entitlements to “attract and retain” undocumented immigrants as voters.
This week, Musk shared a chart of immigrants receiving social security numbers, falsely claiming they were receiving benefits, though the program of providing social security numbers to legal immigrants began under Trump’s first term as part of program to facilitate employment. He’s also falsely claimed dead people are receiving benefits, despite the acting commissioner of the SSA has dispelled the claim.
In 2024, social security direct deposit fraud was at a rate of 0.00625% and less than 1% of social security payments had been found to be incorrect.
US commerce secretary and billionaire Howard Lutnick claimed in an interview on a podcast earlier this month that only a “fraudster” would complain about missing a social security benefit check.Advertisement
“I worked there for 32 and a half years, and I rarely saw cases of fraud,” said John Oertel, a retired SSA employee for over 32 years in Redding, California.
“Because the agency is so understaffed that people who report their income, that’s not getting reported into the system. Musk and his group are saying look at all these people who are being overpaid, they must be committing fraud. They’re not committing fraud. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but because there are so few employees, none of that information is getting into the system.”
Oertel also dismissed false claims from Trump and Musk that dead people are getting social security benefits.
“They don’t understand or they don’t care. Those people aren’t collecting benefits, but the numbers are still technically active, because you can’t just erase social security numbers,” he said, noting that the numbers began being issued in the 1930s and are not deleted or reused, so they still remain in the system. “President Trump, Elon Musk and whoever the next commissioner is going to be, I really think their ultimate goal is just to destroy social security.”Advertisement
A spokesperson for the SSA deferred to press releases on the cuts and reorganization of the agency.
“We have listened to our customers, Congress, advocates and others, and we are updating our policy to provide better customer service to the country’s most vulnerable populations,” said Dudek, the SSA’s acting commissioner. “In addition to extending the policy’s effective date by two weeks to ensure our employees have the training they need to help customers, Medicare, Disability and SSI applications will be exempt from in-person identity proofing because multiple opportunities exist during the decision process to verify a person’s identity.”
They said in regard to office closures, that “to use our space more efficiently, we provided [the General Services Administration] a list of leases for termination,” and claimed that the return-to-office mandate was ordered to ensure “maximum staffing is available to support the stronger in-person identity proofing requirement”.
On claims of waste, fraud and abuse, a spokesperson said in an email: “The agency will continue to monitor and, if necessary, make adjustments to ensure it pays the right person the right amount at the right time while safeguarding the benefits and programs it administers.”
