Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives to the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force quietly tried to delete its so-called “wall of receipts” after reporters identified major mistakes and falsehoods in their claimed monetary savings to the government from canceling various federal contracts.
But in doing so, they actually “added new errors” in the process, according to a new video report published by The New York Times on Monday.
“Elon Musk’s DOGE cost-cutting effort has published what it calls the “wall of receipts,” basically a long list of government contracts, and then the savings it’s achieved by canceling each of those,” said investigative reporter David Fahrenthold. “When DOGE first posted its list, we found problems with all five of the five largest contracts” — the biggest being a supposed $8 billion savings from a Homeland Security contract on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually just $8 million, and the next three being a triple count of a single contract on foreign aid, most of which had been spent already.
The problem, Fahrenthold continued, is that even as DOGE scrambled to correct its errors and eliminate those five erroneous claimed savings it continued to introduce new ones.
“The new largest savings was a $1.9 billion savings,” said Fahrenthold, specifically for a contract with the Treasury Department. “But when we looked into that, we realized the contract they were talking about had actually been canceled last year under President Biden. And when you look further down the list, you see that DOGE is claiming credit for contracts that expired even before Joe Biden was president. In one case, the Department of Homeland Security is claiming it saved tens of millions of dollars by canceling a contract that actually ended in 2005, when George W. Bush was president.”
DOGE acknowledges it has some inaccuracies and invites public fact-checking of its published work, Fahrenthold noted — however, “these errors are important because they give us an insight into the way DOGE works.”
“Much of what DOGE is doing is secret,” he continued. “It’s in all these different agencies, making decisions, gathering data, and we can see so little of it. And if they are this wrong about the work that we can see, if they showed this much sloppiness, this much misunderstanding of the machinery of government, what does that mean about the work we can’t see in all these other agencies with all this other data that’s being done in secret?”
House budget calls for $2T in cuts. Could Bucks County SNAP, other programs see impacts?
Chris Ullery and Riley Beggin – March 3, 2025
The Republican-led House passed a federal budget resolution Tuesday night as the GOP seeks to pass one “big, beautiful bill” rolling President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda into the spending plan.
The proposal passed by a near party-line vote of 217-215 sets up a reconciliation bill that includes extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while implementing new ones at a cost of $4.5 trillion, but also requires lawmakers to find $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.
House Democrats, like Pennsylvania’s 4th District Rep. Madeleine Dean, of Lower Merion, have called the tax cuts a “betrayal of the middle class” and will be offset by programs that millions rely on, including Medicaid and SNAP, the food assistance program formerly known as food stamps.
U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks with press while walking into the House Chambers to vote on February 25, 2025 in Washington, DC.
“In Pennsylvania, nearly three million people rely on Medicaid’s Medical Assistance and CHIP for healthcare — including 39% of all the Commonwealth’s children, 47% of adults with disabilities, and 64% of people living in nursing homes,” Dean wrote in a Facebook post explaining her vote against the resolution Tuesday.
Republican leadership have pushed back on that notion, saying that enough savings can be found through implementing work requirements and rooting out waste.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that Republicans are “committed to preserving Medicare benefits for those who desperately need it, deserve it, and quality for it. What we’re talking about is rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse.”
Locally, U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-1, of Middletown, seemed to echo Johnson’s comments in a statement on his website saying the “procedural” vote is one of many steps in developing the budget.
“The word Medicaid is not mentioned or addressed anywhere in this procedural bill. We will continue to keep a close eye on these deliberations as they continue, to ensure that the interests of our PA-1 community are protected,” Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick’s office did not return request for comment on if he would oppose a bill that cut Medicaid or how much of the $2 trillion in spending cuts could be covered by alleged “fraud, waste and abuse” cited by Johnson.
Does the resolution cut Medicaid and SNAP?
While the resolution doesn’t specifically mention Medicaid, SNAP or student loan assistance programs, groups like the nonprofit Tax Foundation say those programs are likely to face some reductions in the face of massive spending cuts.
The proposed spending plan directs multiple committees to cut billions of dollars, including an $880 billion reduction from the Energy and Commerce Committee — which has broad jurisdiction over numerous programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Trump has already ruled out signing off on cuts to Medicare and Social Security, which makes Medicaid likely to see cuts, according to a report from the foundation.
The Education and Workforce Committee, which has jurisdiction over education programs, school lunch programs and work requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, would be directed to cut $330 billion. The Agriculture Committee, which has oversight over farm programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, would be required to cut $230 billion from programs under its jurisdiction.
The cuts were added to the resolution as a last-minute effort to bring members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus on board with a plan that raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, increased defense and border security spending by $300 billion and would add almost $3 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years.
Republicans hold a narrow 218-215 majority in the House, which meant that the GOP could lose support from just one of its members for the vote to pass.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. was the lone GOP no vote.
SNAP and Medicaid recipients in Pennsylvania
If Republicans can’t find all of their spending cuts in alleged wasteful spending, changes to SNAP and Medicaid could affect millions of Pennsylvanians, according to data from the state’s Department of Human Resources.
The number of SNAP recipients in Pennsylvania has held steady at about 2 million people each month since October 2023 and as of last month’s reported totals. About 1.97 million people used SNAP in January 2023.
Over that same period, the total benefits sent out to people in eligible low-income households have decreased by about $5.3 million, from $367 million to $362 million in January.
In Bucks County, an estimated 48,710 individuals received more than $8.7 million in SNAP assistance in January, an increase of about 2,000 people and $244,000 compared to October 2023.
Medicaid data from the human services department, which includes TANF, General Assistance and aid for people with disabilities, only provides a breakdown of total recipients and how many were under 21.
About 3 million Pennsylvanians received some form of assistance in the Medicaid data in January, down from about 3.6 million people two years ago.
While the total amount of people have dropped, the percentage of underage recipients has increased statewide, from almost 40% in 2023 to 42% last month.
Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city, has more people using Medicaid than any other county, but only 39% of the 673,869 people enrolled are under 21.
Bucks County has followed the same trend as the state since 2023. About 42% of the 112,121 recipients reported in January 2023 were under 21 compared to 44% of 90,778 recipients last month.
In January, Bucks County ranked 10th for most residents receiving Medicaid and the 13th highest percentage of recipients under 21.
About 46% of the 120,926 people receiving Medicaid in Montgomery County were under 21, the third highest county in the state for percent of under 21 recipients and the fourth highest for total recipients.
Almost half of the 59,712 people enrolled in Medicaid in Chester County are under 21, the highest percentage in the state and 14th highest for total enrolled.
GOP Budget Cuts Stand to Deal Tremendous Damage to Rural Economies
Grace Segers – March 3, 2025
As congressional Republicans mull ways to slash federal spending while offsetting trillions of dollars in tax breaks, key social safety net programs may be on the chopping block. A massive budget proposal approved in the House last week directs the committees that oversee health care spending to cut $880 billion over the next decade, and the Agriculture Committee to cut $230 billion—a blueprint that Democrats warn will kneecap programs relied upon by low-income Americans, namely Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, also known as food stamps.
Nearly 43 million people receive such program benefits annually. Around 80 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly adult, or an adult with a disability. Because of its widespread use, any potential future cuts to SNAP would affect constituents of every ideological leaning, including rural Americans who live in Republican areas.
“SNAP is important everywhere. In every state, in every congressional district, it’s really important for our nation,” said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University who studies policies aimed at alleviating childhood poverty.
Strictly by the numbers, there are more SNAP recipients in metropolitan areas than rural ones; however, rural Americans experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity and nonmetro areas have higher participation rates in SNAP. A 2022 report by Schanzenbach found that SNAP helped lessen rural childhood poverty, reducing the poverty rate by 2.6 percentage points for children in 2020, a greater impact than for children living in SNAP households in metro areas.
Conducting additional research for this story, and using data from states that provide county-level information, Schanzenbach reported that—by the 2023 definitions of “metro” and “nonmetro” counties—SNAP participation rates were consistently slightly higher in nonmetro counties than in metro ones from 2019 through 2023. In January 2023, for example, the SNAP participation rate in nonmetro counties hovered above 15 percent, compared to roughly 12 percent in metro counties.
Salaam Bhatti, the SNAP director at the Food Research and Action Center, noted that “accessibility and affordability” are two of the greatest challenges facing rural Americans. “Grocery stores and convenience stores are few and far between” in rural areas, said Bhatti, “and that’s if you even have transportation.” Public transportation is either unreliable or nonexistent in many parts of the country. Once a SNAP recipient makes it to the grocery store, their tight budget—program benefits amount to roughly $6.20 per day—makes it difficult to buy the most expensive items at the supermarket, such as fresh produce and meat.
“If any part of that benefit is decreased, then that has a ripple effect across the entire supply chain,” said Bhatti.
Representative Glenn “GT” Thompson, the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, has insisted that he does not want to make cuts to SNAP. This message was repeated by a committee staffer, who said that “neither the chairman nor our conference are interested in cutting SNAP benefits.” According to the Republican committee staffer, Thompson’s priorities for SNAP include cutting down on fraud, tightening work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, and reevaluating the Thrifty Food Plan, the method by which SNAP benefits are calculated, which was revised by the Biden administration in 2021.
However, analysis by the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, predicts that changes to the Thrifty Food Plan would amount to future cuts to SNAP benefits for recipients. This same report found that efforts to limit states’ abilities to request waivers for the three-month time limit for able-bodied adults without dependents to seek employment could cut hundreds of thousands of people from the SNAP rolls.
Another recent policy brief by CBPP argued that “rural unemployment is often higher, work can be more variable, and work opportunities are often farther away and harder to reach,” which could make it more difficult to meet those work requirements. (House Republicans note that work requirements can be met through volunteering and job training, in addition to direct employment.)
Tightening requirements would not necessarily decrease the number of hungry people in the country—just the number that actually received benefits. “The way to really reduce spending is to reduce the number of people in the program,” said Jonathan Coppess, director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “That doesn’t mean that people aren’t hungry. It doesn’t mean they’re still not trying to put food on the table and struggling to make ends meet. They just can’t get into the program, or they give up because it’s too onerous.”
Then there is the potential impact that cuts to SNAP could have on the local economy. For example, in West Virginia—where a large percentage of the population lives in a rural area—one in five rural households received SNAP benefits, according to a fact sheet by the Food Research and Action Center. The report also found that SNAP supported more than 2,000 retailers in West Virginia, including grocery stores and farmers markets. In Texas, the state with the largest rural population by numbers, one in eight rural households rely on SNAP.
Haley Kottler, who serves as a voter engagement director at the anti-hunger organization Kansas Appleseed, recalled speaking with a grocer in a rural part of Kansas. “I spent around 45 minutes talking to a grocer about how important SNAP is to her community,” said Kottler, adding that “it really highlighted for me how important SNAP is both to folks who need access” and to the producers providing them with food—and benefiting from their business. Kansas is in some ways unique because of limits the state legislature imposed a decade ago restricting access to SNAP; Kottler noted that cuts on the federal level would compound the squeeze felt on the state level.
“The need has always been there, and the need continues to rise,” Kottler said.
Rural communities would also be hit particularly hard by cuts to SNAP because of potential impact on farm producers. Coppess identified three nodes of connection between farmers and SNAP recipients: the political intersection, as major agriculture programs and nutrition benefits are both governed by the massive legislation known as the farm bill; the symbiotic relationship between food consumers and producers, as giving low-income Americans the means to purchase vegetables or meat indirectly helps farmers; and the impact that SNAP recipients and farmers alike have on their local communities.
One report found that, during the recovery period from the Great Recession, SNAP expenditures had a greater impact on rural economies than urban ones, increasing rural output and employment by more than 1 percent between 2009 and 2014.
“Cutting $230 billion from SNAP hurts the farmers who grow our food, the truckers who haul it, the manufacturers that produce its packaging and the grocery stores that sell it,” Representative Angie Craig, the Democratic ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement. “These cuts endanger hundreds of thousands of jobs along a food supply chain that starts in rural America and ends at dinner tables in every community across the country.”
Republicans note that the $230 billion set out in the budget resolution is still a guideline, rather than a directive: Republicans in both the House and the Senate still need to agree on a budget resolution that satisfies both chambers as well as President Donald Trump, and the final numbers of that measure are still to be determined. Senate Republicans passed their own “skinny” budget resolution last week and have expressed serious doubts about the blueprint approved by their colleagues in the House, although the source of those complaints does not necessarily appear to be related to potential cuts to nutrition programs.
Regardless, experts warn that it would be impossible to reduce the cost of SNAP without affecting benefits. “We are going to quickly see that this just can’t all come from waste, fraud, and abuse,” Schanzenbach said. “And so we’re going to cut into muscle, not just fat.”
Medicaid cuts: How many millions could your Monmouth or Ocean County hospital lose?
Michael L. Diamond, Asbury Park Press – March 3, 2025
LONG BRANCH — The Jersey Shore’s health care providers could see millions of dollars in cuts — and thousands of its residents could lose insurance coverage — under a plan by Republican lawmakers to scale back Medicaid, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone and advocates argued Friday.
The proposed cuts of at least $880 billion nationwide over the next decade would ripple through the Shore’s hospitals, nursing homes and home health programs — just as the giant baby boomer population continues to retire and is expected to need more care, they said.
“This is simply unacceptable,” Pallone said. “We can’t have this level of cuts.”
Pallone, speaking Friday at a press conference at the Long Branch Senior Center, is the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid.
President Donald Trump has ruled out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, leaving policymakers few places to turn for savings other than Medicaid.
It shines a spotlight on a program that in New Jersey is known as NJ Family Care, which provides health insurance for 1.8 million New Jerseyans, or 18% of the population. They include: low- and moderate-income adults and children; people with disabilities; and seniors in long-term care facilities.
Ocean County has the state’s second-highest Medicaid population, with 168,437 adults and children covered by the program. Monmouth County has 83,117 Medicaid recipients, according to state data.
U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., holds as a news conference at the Long Branch Senior Center in Long Branch to call attention to the impact of potential cuts to Medicaid. Friday, February 28, 2025.
Dr. Kate Aberger, medical director for Visiting Physician Services at VNA Health Group, said Medicaid has been invaluable. The program covers more than half of New Jerseyans who are in long-term care facilities. And it pays for medicine, equipment and home health care aides for the aging population.
“Medicaid makes it possible to deliver this high-quality health care to patients in their homes, helping them manage their chronic conditions, avoid hospitalization and maintain their independence,” Aberger said. “Without this funding, many would have no choice but to enter a nursing home or go without care altogether.”
Dr. Kate Aberger, medical director of Visiting Physician Services, Parker Advanced Care Institute, of VNA Health Group speaks at a news conference at the Long Branch Senior Center in Long Branch to call attention to the impact of potential cuts to Medicaid. Friday, February 28, 2025.More
Signed into law 60 years ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Medicaid is funded by both the federal and state governments. The program in New Jersey has a $24 billion budget this fiscal year, with $14 billion coming from the federal government and $10 billion coming from the state’s $56.6 billion budget.
Republican lawmakers have said they can reach the savings they need by stamping out waste, fraud and abuse and adding a requirement that recipients work. In 2023, Medicaid fraud units secured more than 1,100 convictions and recovered $1.2 billion, according to a Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General report issued last March, USA TODAY reported.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican whose district includes parts of Monmouth and Ocean counties, voted for the House budget resolution, which essentially set out a blueprint for the mix of tax and spending cuts, but leaving it to committees to hash out the details. He didn’t respond to requests for an interview.
Smith bucked his party in 2017 when he voted against its bid to repeal the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. He cited the $880 billion in proposed cuts to Medicaid that would hurt people with disabilities — a group he has been known to support during his career.
Democrats and health care advocates, however, said the GOP’s new plan calls for extending tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthy and partially offsetting them with cuts to a health care program that benefits lower-income Americans. Among the options: reduce federal matching grants, and restrict eligibility.
Health providers worry that the state couldn’t make up for losses in federal funding, leaving hospitals, for example, facing steep cuts. The New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services said Monmouth and Ocean County hospitals could lose a total of $104.7 million to $332.3 million, depending on the scenario.
(Scroll down to see the potential impact on each hospital).
It isn’t clear what percentage of overall revenue is at risk. But the New Jersey Hospital Association, a trade group, said one in four patients in the state are covered by Medicaid.
“The proposed Medicaid cuts would have a catastrophic impact not only on New Jersey families, but for the hospitals and long term care residences that we all count on,” Cathy Bennett, president and chief executive officer of the New Jersey Hospital Association, said in a statement.
Potential Medicaid cuts to Monmouth and Ocean county hospitals
Bayshore Community Hospital, Holmdel: $5.2 million to $16.4 million
CentraState Medical Center, Freehold Township: $6.7 million to $21.3 million
Community Medical Center, Toms River: $13.8 million to $43.7 million
Jersey Shore University Medical Center, Neptune: $27.6 million to $87.5 million
Monmouth Medical Center, Long Branch: $22.3 million to $70.9 million
Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus, Lakewood: $8.3 million to $26.5 million
Ocean University Medical Center, Brick: $9.2 million to $29.3 million
Riverview Medical Center, Red Bank: $5.6 million to $17.7 million
Southern Ocean County Medical Center, Stafford: $6 million to $19 million
Source: New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services
Staff writer Scott Fallon contributed to this story.
Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter at the Asbury Park Press. He has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry since 1999.
Who does Medicaid cover? How Congress’ proposed budget cuts could be felt
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. – March 2, 2025
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on CNN that lawmakers were going to cut “fraud, waste and abuse” out of the Medicaid program.
A budget resolution adopted Tuesday by House Republicans could jeopardize the health insurance coverage of millions of low-income and disabled people who rely on Medicaid if lawmakers follow through with their proposed spending cuts, experts warn.
While the resolution doesn’t specifically mention Medicaid, experts say it would be unfeasible for Republicans to hit that target without significant cuts to the health program, since it’s one of the largest sources of federal spending, costing more than $600 billion per year, according to government data.
“The way the math would work is that those cuts would largely need to come out of Medicaid,” said Robin Rudowitz, director of the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at KFF, a nonprofit group that focuses on health policy. “Medicare is off the table, and there just aren’t any other sources of funding for the Energy Commerce to look at.” (During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to preserve Medicare.)
The possible cuts are expected to extend beyond those who benefited from the 2014 Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, potentially affecting nearly all of the people in the program.
“Everyone who relies on Medicaid would be at risk,” said Edwin Park, a research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “Specifics of the proposal will matter — each state will be hit, and how hard they’ll be hit will vary — but certainly they’re all at risk.”
Who does Medicaid cover?
Medicaid provides health insurance primarily to people with low incomes, although it covers other groups including some older adults, pregnant women and people with disabilities. That includes about 72 million people.
In 2023, Medicaid covered nearly 4 in 10 children, including over 8 in 10 children in poverty, 1 in 6 adults, and almost half of adults in poverty, according to KFF. The program covers more than 1 in 4 adults with disabilities and provides coverage for 41% of all births in the U.S.
“There’s a sense that Medicare and Social Security are sort of these sacrosanct programs and Medicaid is often not lumped into the category,” said Allison Orris, the director of Medicaid policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank. “Polling over the last few years shows that two- thirds of adults in the U.S. have some connection to Medicaid, and almost three- quarters of the population have a generally favorable view of the program. And that’s because Medicaid really touches people and provides health care at all stages of life.”
The program is jointly funded by states and the federal government. States cover the upfront cost of care and then are reimbursed by the federal government for at least 50%.
When the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to more people, the federal government committed to paying at least 90% of the total costs for the people who enrolled due to the expansion in each state.
The share of people on Medicaid varies by state, but the states with the highest number of enrollees include California, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and New York, according to KFF. The program covers nearly half of Puerto Rico residents, the largest share among states and territories. Only 10 states, including Florida and Texas, don’t participate in Medicaid’s expansion.
With fewer dollars coming from the federal government, states would bear a larger share of Medicaid costs, which many would likely struggle to afford, Orris said.
“Capping federal spending doesn’t make health care needs go away,” Orris said. “It just shifts the risk of higher spending to states and makes states make choices about: do they cut coverage, do they cut eligibility, do they cut provider rates?”
What about fraud in Medicaid?
The GOP House budget plan is only the first step in a series of negotiations between House and Senate lawmakers before a bill can reach Trump’s desk.
Republican leaders have argued that the proposed budget cuts would eliminate fraud in Medicaid, but Park, of Georgetown, said there’s no data to support the claim that fraud is more prevalent in Medicaid than in other parts of the health care system, including Medicare and private insurance.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on CNN that lawmakers were not going to make cuts to Medicaid benefits. “We’re going to take care of those who are rightful beneficiaries of the program,” Johnson said. “We’re going to cut the fraud, waste and abuse and that’s where we’re going to get the savings to accomplish this mission.”
Park said that’s misleading.
“The fraud argument is being used as a frame to justify Medicaid cuts, but the major proposals that are under consideration today to achieve this $880 billion target are the same major Medicaid cuts that were included in the [2017] Affordable Care Act repeal and replace bills that ultimately failed,” Park said. “Back then, there was no talk about combating fraud or waste or abuse.”
“Republicans are saying, ‘We’re not going to hurt enrollees, we’re not going to hurt people, we’re just going to deal with waste, fraud and abuse,’” Orris said. “But I think we need to unpack that and understand that just like any health care program, there are some improper payments in Medicaid, which generally result from paperwork not being filled out. That happens across all programs.”
The argument, experts say, shifts the focus away from the harms that would come to people across age and income spectrum if Medicaid gets cuts.
“Congress is very unlikely to say, ‘Dear states, you need to cut coverage for people with disabilities,’” Orris said. “All of those hard decisions are going to be left for states to make and it’s hard to say that any population would be spared, especially if you get into the realms of cuts that are big enough that lead to hospitals closing and impacting access to care.”
Without Medicaid coverage, people often don’t have any other options.
“Medicaid is such a complicated program, and it covers so many different facets of the health care system, many of which people don’t fully appreciate,” Rudowitz said. “We know that most people who lose Medicaid would likely become uninsured and then would still need health care services, and may still show up to clinics, and those providers would likely not be reimbursed.”
Sanders Eviscerates Musk for Calling Social Security a ‘Ponzi Scheme’
Will Neal – March 3, 2025
NBC / NBC
The nation’s second-oldest senator tore chunks out of Elon Musk after hearing how the world’s richest man thinks welfare payments for the elderly are basically just fraud.
NBC’s Kristen Welker was joined by veteran left-winger Bernie Sanders when the topic came up on Sunday’s broadcast of Meet the Press, with the host asking the Vermont senator what he thought of Musk describing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” during a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.
Sanders, for his part, was having none of it. “What Musk, the wealthiest guy in the world, just said is totally outrageous,” the 83-year-old erupted. “That’s a hell of a Ponzi scheme when for the last 80 years, Social Security has paid out every nickel owed to every eligible American.”
The Tesla founder’s recent comments put him at odds with the position taken by President Donald Trump, who repeatedly assured elderly voters on last year’s campaign trail he had no desire whatsoever to interfere with Social Security payments.
During his interview with Rogan, Musk, who just welcomed his 14th known child, also lamented that “people are living way longer than expected [while] there are fewer babies being born,” suggesting that an aging U.S. population has threatened to create an unmanageable financial burden for the federal government in future.
Visibly seething at the SpaceX CEO’s perceived hypocrisy, Sanders went on to dismantle Musk’s argument by pointing out that support for senior U.S. citizens would potentially only prove unmanageable if the state was opposed to actually tapping all available financial resources.
“Right now, Musk, worth $400 billion, contributes the same amount into the Social Security trust fund as somebody making $170 million,” he said, proposing that a lift to taxable thresholds for the nation’s wealthiest would enable the government to “extend the solvency of Social Security for 75 years.”
CNN Poll: Public remains negative on Trump ahead of address to Congress
Jennifer Agiesta, CNN – March 2, 2025
CNN Poll: Public remains negative on Trump ahead of address to Congress
The American public’s view of Donald Trump’s presidency and the direction he’s leading the country is more negative than positive just ahead of his first formal address to Congress since returning to office, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The survey finds that across three basic measures of Trump’s performance on the job – his approval rating, whether he has the right priorities and whether his policies are taking the country in the right direction – the negative side outpaces the positive.
Overall, 52% disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, with 48% approving, about the same as in a CNN poll in mid-February. The poll was completed before Friday’s angry exchange in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and does not reflect public opinion on that event.
Trump continues to be broadly popular with Republicans (90% of whom approve of his handling of the job) and unpopular among Democrats (90% disapprove), while disapproval among independents is approaching 6 in 10: 41% approve and 59% disapprove. Earlier in February, a similar 43% of independents approved and 56% disapproved.
Trump’s 48% approval rating ahead of his initial address to Congress is higher than it was in 2017 before that year’s speech at the Capitol. Trump’s appearances before Congress during his first term did little to move the needle on his approval rating: None of his four speeches resulted in a change to his approval rating of more than 3 percentage points. Trump will be addressing a country that is largely greeting his policy proposals with skepticism. More Americans see Trump’s policy proposals as taking the country in the wrong direction (45%) than the right one (39%), with 15% expressing no opinion on the question. In early March of 2017, just after that first-term initial address to Congress, Americans split about evenly over whether Trump’s policies would lead the right way or the wrong one, but by the following January, they said by a 12-point margin that his policies were pointing the nation in the wrong direction.
A majority also say Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems (52% feel that way), with 40% saying he has had the right priorities and another 8% unsure. Doubts about the president’s priorities extend to a small but notable share of those who express support for the president on other measures in the poll: 12% of those who approve of the way Trump has handled the presidency and 9% of those who say his policies move the country in the right direction say his priorities haven’t yet been in the right place. And among his own partisans, 18% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say he hasn’t yet focused on the most important issues. Fewer than 1 in 10 who align with the Democratic Party see him as focused on the right things.
Demographic trends in views of the president have largely held steady since earlier in the month. Overall, Trump’s approval rating remains deeply underwater among younger adults (41% of those ages 18 to 34 approve), Hispanic adults (41% approve) and Black adults (28% approve). Women break sharply negative (57% disapprove to 42% approve), while men generally approve (54% approve to 46% disapprove). Trump maintains an approval rating north of 60% among Whites without college degrees (61% approve).
Younger Americans are among those most likely to see Trump as taking the country the wrong way: 51% of those age 18 to 34 feel that way vs. 31% who say he’s taking it in the right direction, and 61% in this group say he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most pressing problems. Just 14% of Black adults and 31% of Hispanic adults see Trump’s policies as going in the right direction, with roughly two-thirds or more in each group saying Trump’s priorities are off (69% among Black adults, 64% among Hispanics). Independents also break negative on Trump’s policies and are 20 points more likely to say Trump is taking the country down the wrong path than the right one.
Opinions of his policies among these groups, though, remain less than fully settled. Roughly one-quarter of independents currently say they don’t have an opinion on how Trump’s proposals will affect the nation, as do 21% of Americans of color and 18% of those younger than 45.
The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from February 24-28 among a random national sample of 2,212 adults drawn from a probability-based panel. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy and Edward Wu contributed to this report.
How America Wasted Its Most Powerful Economic Weapon
Edward Fishman – February 24, 2025
In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.
To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves. The Central Bank of Russia held more than $630 billion in assets, making it the largest sanctions target in modern history. If any entity was too big to sanction, this was it. Maintaining the bank’s teeming coffers was Putin’s attempt to “sanctions-proof” his economy, ensuring that Russia could prop up the ruble and pay for imports even under financial attack. Yet about half of the bank’s reserves were in dollars, euros, and pounds, which in practice left them vulnerable to Western sanctions. At the stroke of a pen, U.S. and European leaders could order their banks to block the accounts of Russia’s central bank, rendering much of Putin’s cash pile inaccessible.
“Big nations don’t bluff”: This mantra, which Biden was fond of reciting, rang in Singh’s ears the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia, Singh believed, would put Biden’s credo into action. The option was so extreme that it had never received thorough vetting on either side of the Atlantic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was concerned that freezing the central-bank reserves would push other countries away from using the dollar as their go-to reserve currency. The dollar’s global dominance allows America to absorb economic shocks, borrow cheaply, and run large deficits. Yellen was uncomfortable risking these privileges for the sake of punishing Putin.
But in Europe, a momentous political shift was under way, with street protests against the Russian invasion drawing out hundreds of thousands of people. Singh’s European counterparts assured him that if the White House was ready to sanction Russia’s central bank, their governments would follow. Yellen was hard to convince until a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, her old colleague from his tenure as head of the European Central Bank, persuaded her to relent. Within hours, the United States was on board.
Just two days after the invasion began, the members of the G7 issued a statement committing to target Russia’s central bank. “You heard about Fortress Russia—the war chest of $630 billion of foreign reserves,” Singh told reporters in a background briefing. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth.”
Three years on, the sanctions against Russia’s central bank stand as both a triumph and a warning. In narrow terms, they worked exactly as Singh hoped: They caught Putin off guard and deprived him of his deepest pool of hard currency. The frozen reserves, valued at nearly $300 billion, have also helped underwrite tens of billions in Western aid to Ukraine. As Donald Trump embarks on his much-anticipated peace negotiations, they will provide important leverage—Putin will be desperate to recover them, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will press to redirect them toward his country’s reconstruction.
But the sanctions failed in one crucial way. The fact that Moscow was blindsided by them suggests it grossly underestimated the severity of the penalties it would face. Although the U.S. and its allies had developed an extensive menu of possible sanctions before the invasion, they never reached consensus on how far they were willing to go. They left Putin to divine the meaning of “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed,” and Putin—as he so often did—read Western ambiguity as weakness.
If Biden and other world leaders had committed ahead of time to the actions they would eventually take, they might have had a much better chance of staving off Putin’s invasion. Deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act. Putin never saw the sanctions coming—and that was precisely the problem.
“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Economic warfare has always offered nations a way to advance their interests without resorting to violence.
For most of history, imposing serious economic pressure required the deployment of military forces: ships blockading ports, armies laying siege to cities. As recently as the 1990s, the United Nations embargo on Iraq relied on warships patrolling the Persian Gulf. But over the past two decades, America has pioneered a more potent and nimble style of economic warfare. In a world where finance and supply chains are deeply globalized, Washington learned to leverage economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar and advanced semiconductor technology—against rivals. Now, by merely signing documents in the Oval Office, the president can impose economic penalties far more severe than the blockades and embargoes of old.
This new age of economic warfare began innocuously enough: with Stuart Levey, a little-known lawyer who led a brand-new division of the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, trying to prove President George W. Bush wrong. Iran’s nuclear program was racing forward in the mid-2000s, and Bush lamented that America had “sanctioned ourselves out of influence” with the country. The only options, seemingly, were to go to war or let Iran join the ranks of nuclear-armed states. Levey set out to show there was another way.
In the years that followed, Levey and his colleagues overhauled U.S. sanctions policy. They drew on their legal expertise and their understanding of the financial sector’s risk calculus to conscript multinational banks into a campaign to isolate Iran from the world economy. Prodded by Congress, they tested the limits of their new economic weapons—they even found a way to freeze more than $100 billion of Iran’s oil money in overseas escrow accounts. Over time, this economic pressure helped spur political change in Iran and opened a path to the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had managed to put Iran’s nuclear aspirations on hold—as Barack Obama boasted, “without firing a shot.”
The Iran deal had its critics, but one thing was beyond dispute—sanctions worked. In fact, the deal’s toughest opponents argued that America had traded them away too soon: The pressure was working so well that if the U.S. had just kept it up, the Iranian regime might have permanently relinquished its entire nuclear program or, better yet, collapsed. But a key reason the sanctions were so successful—winning grudging acceptance even from the likes of China, India, and Russia—was that Obama expressly deemed them a means to an end. They were intended to pressure Iran to concede to nuclear constraints and then be lifted. This is just how things played out.
As the Iran deal was being negotiated, Putin shocked the world by sending “little green men” into Crimea and swiftly annexing the territory. Determined to punish Russia for this flagrant imperial land grab, but unwilling to risk war with a fellow nuclear power, U.S. officials again reached into their economic arsenal. Russia was a trickier target than Iran: It was much bigger and more integral to the world economy. European countries depended on Russian oil and gas. If sanctions wreaked too much havoc on Russia, the fallout would quickly reach Europe and then the United States. As a result, the Obama administration stitched together a sanctions coalition with the European Union and the rest of the G7. This alliance imposed sanctions that, surgical though they were, quickly sent Russia’s economy spiraling. The collapse of world oil prices in the second half of 2014 supercharged their impact, and by early the following year, Putin was eager for a truce.
Up until that point, the United States had used its economic arsenal wisely. But then it made a costly error. The unexpected severity of Russia’s economic crisis frightened European leaders, who feared it would spill over into their own countries. Instead of insisting that the West press its advantage, Obama endorsed a European-brokered cease-fire to freeze the Ukraine conflict and refrained from ratcheting up pressure—even after Russia violated the cease-fire and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin drew a lesson from this experience: Western leaders lacked the stomach to sustain real economic pressure on Russia—and even if they proved him wrong, he could just wait them out.
That assumption held up when Trump came to power. Far from strengthening sanctions on Russia, he allowed them to atrophy. Meanwhile, he ripped up the Iran deal and tried to bludgeon Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump’s policies on Russia and Iran gravely undermined the strategic value of American sanctions. Putin had done little to concede to U.S. demands, yet he was rewarded with a reprieve. Iran, by contrast, had complied with a deal to dismantle core parts of its nuclear program—only for the U.S. to reimpose penalties two years later. World leaders drew another troubling lesson: Even if they did exactly what Washington asked of them, they might still face the brunt of America’s economic arsenal.
U.S. sanctions policy grew more arbitrary under Trump. With the exception of Russia, he was as sanctions-happy a president as America has ever had. He levied so many sanctions—against Iran, Venezuela, China—that countries all over the world took steps to shield themselves. The Russian central bank traded most of its dollars for euros and gold. China sought new ways to promote its own currency internationally, releasing a digital version of the renminbi and creating a homegrown financial-messaging-and-settlement platform.
U.S. officials often initiate sanctions campaigns in the heat of a crisis and scramble to react to unfolding events. The latest iteration of American economic warfare, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been different: U.S. officials knew months ahead of time that Russia was gearing up to invade. They had the opportunity to use sanctions to deter Russian aggression rather than punish it after the fact. But following years of deploying economic weapons in an erratic and incoherent manner, the opportunity went to waste.
After the central-bank freeze that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions were a disappointment. If Moscow didn’t foresee the one big sanction that might have deterred the invasion, it certainly did foresee the smaller ones that were coming—and had plenty of time and resources to prepare.
In December 2022, months after the move against the central bank, the United States and its allies made their first serious attempt to target the lifeblood of Russia’s economy: oil sales. Under the new regulations, known as the “price cap,” U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 a barrel.
The price cap was not as extreme as the central-bank freeze, but it packed a punch. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: Its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.
But as with the central-bank sanctions, America and its allies were too worried about economic blowback to act decisively. They took nearly 10 months after the start of the invasion to impose the price cap. As a result, Russia raked in a whopping $220 billion from oil exports in 2022, contributing to the highest single-year energy revenues the Kremlin has ever collected. Perversely, this was almost as much hard currency as the West had frozen when it sanctioned Russia’s central bank. To make matters worse, the West also built loopholes into the policy to avoid even the slightest possibility that it could cause an oil-supply crunch and exacerbate inflation. Russia took full advantage, amassing a “shadow fleet” of secondhand oil tankers and designing state-backed insurance schemes—and the impact of the price cap eroded. Today, with Trump back in the White House, the prospects of strengthening the policy look slim.
The United States uses sanctions a lot, and yet it has hardly perfected the art of economic warfare. Compared with the way the Pentagon prepares for conventional war—including recruiting and training professional troops, devising plans, and rehearsing them repeatedly—the U.S. agencies responsible for economic war are still playing in the minor leagues, using ad hoc processes and a rudimentary policy apparatus.
Sanctions are like antibiotics: They work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. For some purposes, they’re simply the wrong tool; sanctions didn’t change the regimes in Iran or Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the last Trump administration, nor could they be expected to.
In other cases, sanctions have the potential to work, but only if they’re administered in strong enough doses over a long enough period to avoid resistance. This is the problem the United States has faced in confronting Russia: Washington and its allies ratcheted up sanctions incrementally, giving Russia time to adapt and build resistance along the way. As a result, Biden failed to deliver a knockout blow to Russia’s economy—and Putin, yet again, seems confident he can get a reprieve, no matter what he does in Ukraine.
This article has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.
‘Enough is enough’: Europe’s leaders are piling pressure on the EU to release $200 billion of frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine
Ryan Hogg = February 25, 2025
Russia’s central bank reserves could become a key negotiating toold for the West.
Europe’s leaders to the East are piling pressure on the EU to release hundreds of billions of dollars worth of frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort as relations with the U.S. deteriorate.
Leaders from Poland, Estonia, and Finland have in the last week added to growing calls to liquidate Russian central bank reserves, which have been valued between $200 billion and $300 billion.
Russian central bank reserves located in Europe—including currency, gold, and government bonds—were seized as part of wide-ranging sanctions against the country when Russia launched its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
To date, they have stayed put owing to questions over the legality of unlocking the funds, nerves over the ramifications of unlocking them, and their alternative potential as a bargaining tool in peace talks.
In July last year, the G7 nations agreed on a landmark deal to use the proceeds from the profits of Russia’s frozen assets to fund Ukraine’s defense effort, which helped fund a €50 billion loan to the country, but that is where progress has stopped.
European leaders pile on the pressure
The urgency to unlock new avenues for funding has accelerated since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, after the U.S. president excluded Europe and Ukraine from initial peace talks with Russia and gave early verbal concessions to Putin, spooking Europe.
An easy win, as far as the EU’s Eastern and Baltic states are concerned, is to liquidate the central bank reserves assets Russia left behind.
Poland prime minister Donald Tusk posted on X last week: “Enough talking, it’s time to act! Let’s finance our aid for Ukraine from the Russian frozen assets.”
In a televised address to the nation on Monday, Czechia Prime Minister Petr Fiala followed suit.
“For further military support of Ukraine, we must use money from frozen Russian assets from across the entire Europe,” he said, adding that Trump had “decided to completely transform” U.S. foreign policy.
“The speed, thrust, and rhetoric are certainly surprising, but the shift of the United States away from focusing on Europe should not surprise us,” said Fiala.
Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, told Reuters: “The decision to use the windfall profits was a step in the right direction. I see that the time is ripe now to take the next step.”
In February last year, former treasury secretary Janet Yellen marked herself out as an early advocate of liquidating the hundreds of billions of dollars in seized Russian assets.
“I believe there is a strong international law, economic, and moral case for moving forward. This would be a decisive response to Russia’s unprecedented threat to global stability,” Yellen said.
The latest calls have, however, highlighted a divide in the EU.
Germany, France, Italy, and the European Commission have resisted calls to unlock the funds for their own use. The opposition comes from a fear that the seizure of free market assets would alarm international investors and hurt Europe’s legitimacy in the long run.
Instead, these countries prefer to view the frozen reserves as a strong bargaining tool in negotiations with Russia, a point French president Emmanuel Macron repeated during a conversation with Trump this week.
Some in the Russian administration are reportedly ready to part ways with its reserves, provided the territories by the country stay after the war, with some even suggesting the reserves are used towards payment for this territory.
Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Republicans silent after Trump reportedly slashes funds for Alzheimer’s center
Rachel Maddow – February 21, 2025
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK); Rachel Maddow
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This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 20 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
For 26 years, the state of Missouri was represented in Congress by Republican Roy Blunt. He began as Rep. Blunt, serving in House Republican leadership for years, before becoming a senator.
At the dedication ceremony, in 2022, Blunt talked about the importance of NIH funding and Alzheimer’s research funding specifically. A bunch of other Republicans from Congress showed up as well and stressed how important it was to fund that specific program. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma told the crowd, “To be able to do what we’ve done, a fivefold increase in Alzheimer’s and dementia research is a very special thing.”
“This is our most expensive disease,” he continued. “And you can look at the trendline of what it costs to pay for Alzheimer’s and you’ll pretty quickly make the point that it’s cheaper to try and cure it, or at least manage it and delay it, than it is to deal with it. And that has really guided the investments here more than anything else.”
Cole made the point that funding this specific Alzheimer’s center is not just a good thing to do, it also saves the government money in the long run. But, you can probably guess where this is headed.
This week, The New Republic reported that the Trump administration has now slashed funding to that Republican-beloved Alzheimer’s center. Approximately one-tenth of the center’s workers have now been let go, including its incoming director, “a highly regarded scientist credited with important innovations in the field,” people familiar with the situation told The New Republic.
On Wednesday, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, senior member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said senior scientists and the center’s acting director were fired by the Trump administration.
Cole’s office did not respond to a request for comment about these reported cuts, but Michael Greicius, a neurologist at Stanford University, explained to The New Republic the devastating impact closing the center would have on Alzheimer’s research. “[The center] has developed infrastructure and a brain trust that’s really unmatched in the world, in terms of its advances in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” he said. “Weakening [it] will set Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research back substantially.”
If you’re looking for a poster child for something this administration is doing that has no apparent support from anyone — and that can be expected to have not just public opposition and expert opposition but specifically Republican opposition — I think you’ve got your winner.
