In recent weeks I’ve had considerable dealings with my local Social Security office in Los Angeles. I’ll spare you the details, except to say the matter involved a technology issue that’s exceedingly rare and not easily resolved. It was yet another instance of the tech gods singling me out for punishment because of my aversion to technology.
To my surprise, the experience wasn’t as awful as I expected. Admittedly, it didn’t come close to the responsive customer service satisfaction I enjoy from Fidelity, but it was a lot less painful than dealing with GoDaddy’s reps in India when I needed some tech support. The Social Security office’s wait times were considerably better as well, and in one instance there was no wait at all.
It would be unreasonable to expect the Social Security office to provide Fidelity’s caliber of service. Fidelity no doubt pays its customer support people considerably more than government customer service folks receive and they get to work for Abby Johnson, one of America’s best chief executives. Federal workers are paid about 25% less than private sector employees and I’m comfortable speculating there isn’t one government agency overseen by anyone remotely of the caliber of Abby Johnson. (Admittedly, most U.S. corporations aren’t overseen by CEOs of the caliber of Johnson).
Financial survival
The Office of Social Security distributes $1.6 trillion in payments each year, making up 20 percent of all federal spending. More than 73 million Americans, roughly one in five U.S. residents, receive social security benefits, and many rely on the payments for their financial survival. One might expect the Trump administration to be sensitive to this reality, but that’s not the case.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested last week that only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a monthly Social Security payment, and that most people wouldn’t mind if the government simply skipped one.
“Let’s say social security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain,” Lutnick said during an appearance on the “All-In” podcast. “She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”
Lutnick is a billionaire, and one might assume that if his mother relied on Social Security and didn’t receive her benefit payment, Howie would spot her a few coins. I wouldn’t bet on that, and I’m certain that those familiar with Lutnick wouldn’t as well. Ask any Wall Street veteran to name the biggest a-holes of all time to have ever worked in the securities industry and I’m confident Lutnick would appear on virtually everyone’s list.
Bias against government workers
Americans understandably are biased against government workers, a negativity shaped by our visits to the post office and motor vehicles. That said, not all postal workers are rude, indifferent, and move slower than molasses. My mail carrier is a cheery young African American woman who waves to me when I pass her in the morning carrying a heavy bag that no doubt will cause her serious shoulder problems later in life. I often see her in the early evening while walking my dog in another neighborhood. She seemingly works very long hours and walks considerable distances.
In Elon Musk’s utopian tech world, I imagine my carrier would be replaced by a robot, no doubt provided by one of his companies and subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.
Trump and Musk understand the negative views Americans have of government workers, and they’ve done masterful jobs exploiting them. Musk has charged the Social Security Administration is plagued by “immense waste” and vows to root out “the extreme levels of fraud.” Trump hailed Musk’s DOGEs in his recent joint address to Congress, crediting them for “identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” at the agency.
Neither Trump nor Musk has backed up their damning allegations with credible evidence. Even some thought leaders at conservative organizations dispute Trump’s and Musk’s allegations.
One of them is Mark Warshawsky, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who spends his working hours studying Social Security and retirement issues, pensions, long-term care, disability insurance, and the federal budget. In an earlier life Warshawsky, who holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard, held various government positions, including assistant secretary for economic policy at the US Department of the Treasury, where he played a key role in the development of the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
Warshawsky says there are indeed some serious government record-keeping issues that need to be addressed, but insists Musk’s claims of widespread social security payments fraud isn’t true.
From a blog post Warshawsky published last week:
According to the Inspector General (IG) at SSA, in December 2020, there were about 19 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier who did not have death information on their SSA data record. Only 44 thousand of these individuals, however, are receiving retirement benefits, broadly consistent with Census Bureau data that then there were about 86 thousand people age 100 or older alive in the US. Of the 19 million without death information, about 11 million are recorded with years of birth in 1899 or earlier.
In particular, many are apparently coded with the birth year, 1875 (supporting Musk’s claim of 150 year-olds in the SSA database), but this seems to be just a common reference point in the COBOL coding when a birth date is missing or incomplete. Again, though, this is not evidence of fraud – SSA’s own rules and procedures since September 2015 have automatically stopped benefit payments if the beneficiary is age 115, with certain unusual exceptions.
Until this past weekend, I paid scant attention to DOGE initiatives, as there aren’t any news sources I trust to give me an honest assessment. But reading about FOX News’ interview with DOGE software executive Sam Corcos and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent I became skeptical of DOGE claims and of Musk and his warriors’ ability and commitment to resolve them.”
Corcos said he was retained to investigate the IRS’s modernization program, as well as the operations and maintenance budget, which he said is “already 30 years behind schedule and $15 billion over budget.” Coros said many major banks ran on similar systems used by the IRS have already been modernized.
I’m guessing that Bank of America is among the banks that have “modernized” and yet has been subject to multiple IT breaches including this one in 2023 when more than 57,000 customer accounts were publicly exposed, this one that exposed the personal information of more than 30,000 customers, and this one last year when 414 customers in Maine had their personal information exposed.
Capital One in 2019 had a massive security breach, involving the public release of more than 100 million customers’ personal information in the U.S. and six million Canadian customers.
Equifax had a catastrophic breach in 2017, compromising the personal information of more than 147 million Americans.
While the IRS had a massive IT breach in 2015 exposing the personal information of some 724,000 taxpayers, its subsequent breach involved an IRS contractor. Compared to most major banks and other U.S. corporations, the IRS’s cybersecurity measures strike me as more effective.
It’s easy for Corcos to trash the IRS’s information technology but he offered no solutions as to how the government might attract the best and brightest IT professionals when it offers significantly lower compensation and no meaningful incentive programs. There are more than 457,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions across the country, and typically youthful IT professionals aren’t clamoring to work for Uncle Sam.
Given that Corcos prefaced his FOX interview saying, “I really care a lot about this country,” I instantly became suspicious of him. As I judge a person by the company they keep, my instincts proved correct.
Corcos is a successful software executive who faces potential conflicts of interest arising from his associations with Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as well as certain Russian connections.
According to this Rolling Stone report, Corcos is the CEO of the health care start-up Levels, which he founded in 2019 with a former SpaceX lead engineer and holistic physician Casey Means, who has ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Corcos’ brother interned at SpaceX.
Levels received initial funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm led by Trump billionaire donor Marc Andreessen, who along with his wife protested the construction of multimillion condos in their tony Northern California Atherton enclave because they would “MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” Andreessen previously decried San Francisco’s “crazy skyrocketing housing prices” and called for more housing construction in that city and elsewhere.
Corcos’ wife, Varvara Russkova Corcos, spent three years at the VC firm GVA Capital, which was previously identified as a vehicle through which one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, Suleyman Kerimov, funneled money into U.S. investments.
The corporate media, particularly the New York Times and Washington Post, are doing an excellent job identifying the myriad conflicts of Musk and his DOGE warriors and how they can potentially profit from their feigned altruism. Sadly, the corporate media is no longer perceived as credible so much of the reporting seems like background noise.
Still, I’m heartened that some members of Gen Z, like twentysomething Julia Sirois, understand what Musk and his DOGEs are potentially up to.
“It’s someone putting their hand in a cookie jar they don’t belong in,” Sirois told the New York Times.