Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Tracey Gronniger: Thank you for having me.
Gronniger: Yes, I think it’s really scary to imagine that we have in the Social Security Administration people who don’t understand how it works. This is a really popular program. Social Security is important and vital to over 70 million beneficiaries, and it has strong support around the country. People know that Social Security is how you survive. It’s income for people who have been working all their lives and are now retired, for survivors of deceased workers, for children of workers, and for people with disabilities who are unable to continue working.
Gronniger: Yes, that’s the scary part.
Gronniger: We’re really concerned because they’re talking about cutting thousands of jobs within the Social Security Administration. These are people who are working in the field offices that people go to to get help with benefits, and in the regional offices that are also helping to process these benefits. These are the places that people go. And in particular, for our demographic group of older adults who are unable sometimes to go online and process benefits and get information that way, they need to be able to go into an office, they need to be able to call on a phone. When you’re cutting these staffing positions, you’re creating barriers to accessing benefits because people then aren’t able to apply or fix mistakes, and their benefits are affected.
Sargent: Musk regards this kind of stuff as a big joke, right? He just thinks he can bring in his efficiency whiz kids and just remake everything really easily. But these are older people who maybe aren’t that good online, as you say, and they’re going to be relying pretty heavily on these types of federal workers, right?
Sargent: Right. Musk and Trump and Republicans and DOGE know that these are real people, so this is where the fraud canard comes in. They say, OK, we’re just coming in to find fraud in Social Security. And The Washington Post reports that DOGE tech engineers are now rummaging through Social Security for exactly this purpose—finding this fraud. We already saw that Musk ridiculously claimed that huge numbers of people aged 150 years old, or dead, are getting fraudulent checks; that blew up in his face. But then during his speech to Congress, Trump picked this up and said they’re finding huge amounts of fraud. Tracey, Social Security is efficient and well-run. Isn’t that the story? Are they going to be able to find anything real here?
Sargent: And these are government service cuts that people are going to feel. That’s dangerous, right? The National Academy of Social Insurance had a poll recently which found large majorities opposed cutting Social Security benefits, large majorities support raising the payroll tax to replenish its funding, including taxing themselves—not just the rich but everybody. There’s also strong support for Social Security disability benefits, which I find important because that’s a frequent target for Republicans. That’s a place where they like to say fraud has crept into, disability. It’s clearly not an argument people buy. Isn’t the big story here that this is an area where people really, really like government? Can you talk about that a bit?
Sargent: I think they have a problem on their hands. It seems like there’s some real tensions here among Republicans who often want to cut the safety net. Musk recently described government beneficiaries as the “parasite class.” But Trump, whatever his true intentions, does seem sensitive to voter perceptions of Republicans as being out to decimate the safety net. Trump positions himself sometimes as being different in that regard. He used Paul Ryan as a foil during his first run and so forth. He knows a lot of aging working-class voters are his own, and he knows the new GOP coalition that elected him the second time has a lot of those people in it. Now, I don’t know what Trump’s true intentions are, but Musk really does want to cut Social Security and, I guess, get rid of all those parasites who are benefiting from it or something. How are they going to navigate that tension? It’s a real thing, right?
Sargent: And the other thing is that Donald Trump really wants Musk to deliver, in a general sense, with DOGE. I think Donald Trump recently said to Elon Musk something like, You’re doing a great job, but get even more aggressive, which is really code for saying, Where the hell are the goods, man? You got to come up with some real cuts here. Come on. Find some real fraud. Come on. So this is going to be an area where Musk is under pretty heavy pressure, oddly enough from Trump himself, to find big cuts and big examples of fraud but without cutting into the program actually—and that seems like it’s an impossible straddle to pull off.
Sargent: The name of the game right now is really finding ways to drive a wedge between Republicans and Congress on one side and Trump and Musk on the other. You’re seeing Republicans already getting pretty damn antsy about what Musk is up to. They’re getting hammered at town halls and stuff. The cuts to Social Security that they’re going to try to attempt are a really, really right place to drive that wedge, right? Because that’s going to be a place where congressional Republicans will come under extreme pressure from their own voters.
Sargent: They may be calculating that they can get away with those types of cuts— things that put older people in a more difficult, practical position in terms of getting their benefits—as long as they don’t touch the benefits themselves. And as far as I can tell, Trump is adopting the usual Republican playbook of essentially saying that the program is riddled with fraud and so forth. But it seems harder to get away with with Social Security.
Sargent: It’s probably worth reminding people that we were in a very similar situation after George W. Bush was reelected in early 2005. He seemed unstoppable, totally dominant; if anything, [he was] in a stronger position than Trump is now. Then came the Social Security privatization scheme. That plus things like the Iraq War going south and Katrina, which was a disaster, revealed the GOP to be corrupt and incompetent. Democrats then were able to unite in defense of Social Security against Bush. Then came the 2006 midterm victory for Dems, and then 2008 the Obama coalition emerging. I wonder if we can see something similar now. Are you confident in Democrats ability to prosecute this case as effectively as they did at that time?
If you are on the side of protecting Social Security and making sure that people can access benefits, that’s going to help you. There’s an opportunity for members of Congress to really increase their own popularity, to make popular changes that everyone agrees are important—and I think they should take it. This is the time and place for them to do it.
Gronniger: Yeah. I think that people think there’s no mandate for someone to come in unelected and unappointed to make these changes to really basic programs that have been around for decades. Social Security is 90 this year; it is not something that people think someone can walk in and dismantle in a month. I think that is causing a lot of concern, and people are afraid. I think that is definitely part of the mix, and it’s going to be something that will affect how people react to all of the things that are happening right now.
Gronniger: It seems like there’s a message there (laughs).
Gronniger: Definitely. The thing that we always bring it back to is that the people who depend on these programs have elected these members of Congress to stand up for them. They want to have those members of Congress doing what needs to be done to make sure that these programs are effective, that they operate. When you have these large majorities of people saying that this program is critical to them and to their families, that’s the mandate that you need to then say, OK, we’re going to do more. We’re going to make sure that these programs are protected. We’re going to make sure that our parents and our grandparents and our children who are Social Security beneficiaries are getting the benefits that they’re entitled to. And they have the support of Americans around the country. There’s no majority that’s saying, No, don’t do this, we don’t care about Social Security. Instead, it’s the exact opposite.
Gronniger: It’s not popular. It’s not popular at all. If there’s one thing we can say, it’s that Social Security is a program that Americans believe in and rely on.
Gronniger: Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m really happy to have the chance to talk about this.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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