Supreme Court votes 6-3 to allow DOGE access to Social Security data as litigation in the case continues

 

Supreme Court allows DOGE to access Social Security data

 

... The unsigned order said that members of the DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration should have “access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.” ...

U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander had ruled that DOGE had no need to access the specific data at issue. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, declined to block Hollander’s decision, leading to the Trump administration to file its emergency request at the Supreme Court. ...

HHS Poverty Guidelines for 2025

 The current average Social Security check is $1,999.97, minus $185 for the Medicare premium, equals $1,814.97 monthly, times 12 equals $21,779.64 annually.

 

Howard Gleckman of Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center likes House GOP $4,000 senior citizen deduction better than Trump's elimination of taxes on Social Security benefits

 How House GOP bill’s $4,000 senior ‘bonus’ compares to eliminating tax on Social Security benefits

... A median income retiree who brings in up to about $50,000 annually may see their taxes cut by a little less than $500 per year with this change, noted Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“It’s not nothing, but it’s also not life changing,” Gleckman said.

The $4,000 senior “bonus” deduction would help lower-income people and would not help higher-income individuals who are above the phase outs, Gleckman said.

In contrast, the proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits would have been a “big windfall” for high-income taxpayers, he said.

“If you feel like you need to provide an extra benefit to retirees, this is clearly a better way to do it than the original Social Security proposal that Trump had,” Gleckman said. ...

 

Speaking of the dearth of proportional thinking, today is April 15th, when the tax code obscures the fact that the cost of government is about 24%

It shouldn't be this hard, or this costly, to pay taxes.

My TurboTax bill this year came to $278, and my time came to about nine hours collecting the data and preparing the return. It saved me oodles of more time than that, as well as the fear and the frustration, but still, it's a giant pain in the butt, and an annual expense which just seems to get larger every year.

Average American Spends 13 Hours and $290 to File Taxes

Meanwhile the income tax code is not proportional, which is to say it is not fair.

If the tax code were proportional, everyone would pay the same rate.

Instead it is progressive, which means you pay at higher rates the more you make, and some people pay nothing at all.

The rich are not equal to the poor . . . by law. And in between the rich and the poor are all those people who are arguably the least equal of all, because they don't ever get the privilege of paying nothing at all. Something close to one third of filers pay nothing, and they are mostly rich and poor, even though everyone who works does pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, which incidentally almost everyone pays equally because they pay at the same rate.

Shouldn't that be the case with income taxes, too?

Consider that grand total federal outlays in 2022 were $6.27 trillion, which includes the Social Security and Medicare programs in addition to all other federal spending, on defense, interest on the debt, etc. 

That year gross national income came to $26.23 trillion.

The implied tax rate for almost everything is therefore 23.9%.

Collect that right off the top when you earn it or receive it and no one would need to go through the hassle of filing a return, and the budget would have balanced too. And individual income tax filers wouldn't have to spend $464 billion or whatever it is, using TurboTax or a CPA or some other tax preparer, or paper, pencil, and untold hours of time.

Instead we collected taxes in 2022 which were $1.37 trillion short of the $6.27 trillion in outlays, which we had to borrow and which got added to the national debt and increased the interest expense which we must cover out of current tax receipts.

Of course I would be upset if I had to pay 24% on all income as I earned it because I don't pay anywhere close to that. But that is the true cost of government, which is one reason why we don't pay that way. It's more prudent to hide the truth, and pit one group against another instead of treating people as we would wish to be treated. The rich are a small minority, which is why they can be bullied to pay more equally than others.

Another reason we don't pay the way I have described is because people would demand we spend a lot less if we did.

And we can't have that, now can we?

LOL Stefanik stays in the House even though Democrats are down two seats due to recent sudden deaths

Whipping the vote for Trump in the GOP-led House must be getting harder and harder given all the mayhem he's causing for Republican voters in Republican districts, who are losing their government jobs and are becoming afraid for their Social Security among other things.

Assuming Republicans keep FL-1 and FL-6, they'll be back to 220 since Stefanik isn't leaving for the UN, but apparently a temporary seven-vote majority is needed because for some legislation the GOP still doesn't have the votes.

 

 

 

 White House withdrawing Stefanik nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to UN 

... House Republicans had expressed concern that if Stefanik was confirmed, it would have made it tougher to get Trump’s agenda through the lower chamber because Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would have lost a vote in his conference and didn’t have a clear idea how long it would take New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to schedule a special election to fill the seat.

 

 

Trump and Musk are crashing Social Security and its elderly customers are panicking

 

 The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. ...

The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants and legal immigrants who need Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems. ...

Leland Dudek — the accidental leader elevated to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs — has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust. ...

Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions from angry constituents in their districts. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. The AARP announced on Monday that more than 2,000 retirees per week have called the organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans. 

Trump has said repeatedly that the administration “won’t touch” Social Security, a promise that aides say applies to benefit levels that can only be adjusted by Congress. But in just six weeks, the cuts to staffing and offices have already taken a toll on access to benefits, officials and advocates say. ...

More.

This should be good for election turnout in November 2026.

Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January

But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.

Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.

Republicans are angry, too.

Has Ed been living under a rock?

Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":

... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in. 

The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.

I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.

The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.

No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.

Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.

And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.

461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.

Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.

People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.

Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.

American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.

Who knows what's next?

Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.

 

Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek is a lying sack of shit typical of the Trump administration who should be fired immediately

Dudek's reasoning below is the same level of ridiculous we saw when Trump said he wouldn't recall the deportation flights ordered by Judge Boasberg because they were already in international airspace and were therefore not subject to the order. Trump ordered the flights in the dead of a Friday night/Saturday morning a week ago to avoid detection and court intervention.

Republicans playing chicken with the lifeline for over 73 million Americans wasn't what people voted for last November, but that's what they are getting.

 

... Dudek said the court order [from Judge Hollander] is so broad that it could apply to any Social Security employee, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek told Bloomberg. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”

However, in a March 18 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Dudek said there are only 11 DOGE-affiliated individuals at the Social Security Administration. ...

Dudek assumed the role of acting commissioner in February when then acting commissioner Michelle King stepped down due to DOGE privacy concerns. ...

Reported here.

This greaseball billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick thinks missing a Social Security check, something that never happens, would be no big deal

Howard is otherwise busy firing people and disbanding volunteer industry groups who help the government create important statistics and guidance about things like gross domestic product, population, trade, etc. which people rely on every month to forecast the economy.

 

Absolutely stunning: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatens to shut down Social Security last night, takes it all back this afternoon

 

What a shit show. This guy needs to be fired stat.

This is America under Mad King Ludwig.

Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

Less than 24 hours later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”...

“[The White House] called me and let me know it’s important to reaffirm to the public that we’re open for business,” he said. “The White House did remind me that I was out of line and so did the judge. And I appreciate that.”...

Dudek first made his threat to close down the agency during a Bloomberg News interview Thursday night. ...

Such a dramatic move to effectively shut down the agency would have been unprecedented in the agency’s history and would immediately begin halting benefit payments for millions of Americans.

“For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. “Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”     

More.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander rebukes DOGE for hiding their own identities while scouring Social Security for ours, stops Elon Musk's fishing expedition for immigrants

Judge bars Musk’s DOGE team from Social Security records in scathing ruling

A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order barring Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team from having access to personally identifiable information from the Social Security Administration.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of Americans’ personal and private data. ...

The judge also ordered the DOGE team members and affiliates to delete all non-anonymized personally identifiable information in their possession or control that they have accessed “directly or indirectly” since Jan. 20. ...

Hollander, noting the affiliates of DOGE have kept their identities hidden, wrote, “ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even  their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy.”

“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent,” the judge wrote. ...

 

Government belt-tightening theatre at CNBC: Social Security new proofing procedures requiring in person visits are a joke, a costly upheaval designed to stop a puny problem

 

Social Security Administration to emphasize in-person office visits to curb identity fraud

As the Social Security Administration seeks to curb identity fraud, more people will now be required to visit an office to prove their identity for new benefit claims and direct deposit changes. ... The changes are aimed at helping to avoid the fraudulent redirection of benefit checks, which the agency has been warning about for years. ... SSA estimates the agency is now losing more than $100 million per year due to direct deposit fraud. ... The change may require foot traffic to Social Security offices nationwide to increase by about 75,000 to 85,000 more in-person visitors per week, according to reports on an internal Social Security Administration memo. ... The AARP, an interest group that represents Americans ages 50 and over, urged the Social Security Administration to reverse the decision.

In fiscal 2024 Social Security paid out $1.35 trillion in benefits. $100 million is 0.0074% of that!

I predict that the costs of this silliness will exceed the savings. 

Imbeciles Trump and Musk claim millions over the age of 100 get Social Security when it is 89,106 people in December 2024 lol

Trump loves Whoppers.

Smell the farts of nothing has changed.

In 2015 Trump used Rush Limbaugh Math and came up with 42% unemployed lol. "Not in labor force" is not a measure of unemployment.

These Social Security claims are loonier than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris saying 200 million and more had already died of COVID in the United States during their campaign for president-vice president in 2020. Joe corrected himself eventually. Trump and Musk WILL NOT.

... The [Social Security] issue has been repeatedly identified by inspectors general at the agency, but the Social Security Administration has argued that updating old records was costly and unnecessary.

Per the agency’s online records, just 89,106 people — not tens of millions — over the age of 99 received retirement benefits in December 2024, out of the more than 70 million people who receive benefits each year.

It’s a “humiliating mistake for anyone else to make, but they’re doubling and tripling down on it,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that addresses government spending. ...

More.

Meanwhile the US population 65 years old and older was only about 59 million in 2023. Hello.

 

Meanwhile Trump's Social Security today also boasts of spending $7.5 billion authorized by Congress and Joe Biden for people who didn't pay taxes, just one day after DOGE saves $800 million lol

 

 Social Security Pays Billions of Dollars in Retroactive Payments

The Social Security Administration (SSA) today shared its significant progress to quickly implement the Social Security Fairness Act. Through March 4, 2025, SSA has already paid 1,127,723 people more than $7.5 billion in retroactive payments. The retroactive payments are the result of the repeal of the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO). The average retroactive payment so far is $6,710.

“President Trump made it very clear he wanted the Social Security Fairness Act to be implemented as quickly as possible,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We met that challenge head on and are proudly delivering for the American people.”

The WEP and GPO provisions reduced or eliminated the Social Security benefits for over 3.2 million people who receive a pension based on work that was not covered by Social Security (a "non-covered pension") because they did not pay Social Security taxes.

The agency continues to pay remaining retroactive payments and is ready to begin paying higher monthly benefit payments beginning in April for people’s March benefit.

The federal government farts through $20 billion a day, Social Security under Trump boasts of finding $800 million in savings for fiscal year 2025

 Not even $1 billion a year. Whoopdeedoo. Don't spend it all in one place, boys.

Social Security Administration says it’s identified $800M+ in savings 

The Social Security Administration (SSA) said in a release that it has identified more than $800 million in savings or “cost avoidance” for fiscal 2025 among information technology, grants, property and payroll. ...

Trump has nothing but little gimmicks up his sleeve, not fundamental lasting transformation

 To help pay for Trump tax cuts, new taxes on worker benefits become GOP target

... House Republicans recently floated a list of potential measures to help compensate for lost revenue from trillions of dollars in tax cuts championed by President Donald Trump. Taxing employees for fringe benefits such as employer-provided transportation, free food and on-site gyms is up for discussion. ...

To be sure, these proposals are still in the early stages and there’s a lot of jockeying by lawmakers to accommodate Trump’s $4 trillion extension of the 2017 tax cuts as well as make good on campaign promises for tax breaks on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits — in all, the tax cut promises made on the campaign trail by Trump could take the total to near $10 trillion. The situation is especially tenuous given the hefty $36 trillion federal deficit. ...

Whatever gets passed will happen under reconciliation anyway, and therefore will be . . . temporary, just like Trump.

All of this small thinking is a reflection of the reality of the GOP's narrow majority in the US House, about which Donald Trump seems to care not at all, and will therefore most likely lose in 2026 unless Republicans push back against Trump, do what's right, and maybe save their own skins.

Trump's new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has given Elon Musk control of the payment systems which control everyone's Social Security and Medicare benefits

 

 Billionaire Elon Musk’s deputies have gained access to a sensitive Treasury Department system responsible for trillions of dollars in U.S. government payments after the administration ousted a top career official at the department, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations.  

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent approved access to the Treasury’s payments system for a team led by Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive working in concert with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” the people said. 

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades and had been the acting secretary before Bessent’s confirmation, had refused to turn over access to Musk’s surrogates, people familiar with the situation told The Washington Post. Trump officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave, and then he announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues. 

Spokespeople for Treasury and DOGE declined to comment. 

The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually. Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

More.

These guys are up against the debt ceiling and are obviously looking for other ways than the customary "extraordinary measures" to cut spending under the circumstances of a new administration trying to pass new tax and spending legislation. That's why Trump has offered buyouts to government workers so they quit, among other novel spending gambits like freezing program spending for 90-days.

The Treasury stopped paying into certain accounts from January 17th, before Trump and Musk took over, as part of the extraordinary measures undertaken by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to keep from hitting it.

She's been keeping the national debt at $36 trillion to $36.2 trillion ever since Thanksgiving.

It's all very troubling, as elected officials like to say.

Typically, only a small group of career employees control the payment systems, and former officials have said it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access them. 

Millionaire Tim Walz makes his 90-year old mother feed herself from her Social Security check

 Speech.

 

 

CNBC fact-checks Joe Biden, now that it doesn't matter

 But the article name-checks Donald Trump five times because he's an opponent of Fed decisions.

There's a whole movement out there that wants to End the Fed, composed of Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians, which CNBC is loathe to mention.

Many of them argue that the US 2-year Treasury Note should be the benchmark for the Federal Funds Effective Rate, not the whim of the Fed Chair and the Federal Open Market Committee, who are un-elected, well-connected, and VERY WELL PAID elites who watch out primarily for the interests of the banksters.

For example, despite the disastrous Zero Interest Rate Policy post-Great Recession, DGS2 resisted it and outran DFF throughout the period under Obama and Trump, and anticipated the recent inflationary outburst by starting to rise in the spring of 2021, a full year before the Fed moved to "combat inflation" by raising the funds rate in the spring of 2022. 

Similarly DGS2 also started to fall in November of 2023 despite no change to Fed policy, anticipating the recent decline of inflation rates by almost a year.

The role of the US Treasury Secretary, AS MUCH A CREATURE of the Executive as the Fed Chair, is also huge for interest rates because the Secretary decides how to divvy up the debt securities for auction by duration.

Biden's Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been in the news for driving up the issuance in T-bills to 22% when 15% has been customary, which has contributed to longer rates falling and stocks rising, just in time for the election.

But the costs of this have been dramatic, financing deficit spending at the highest rates and driving interest payments on the debt to the third spot in the budget, behind only Social Security and Medicare.

Next to Whites, employment level increases 2021-2023 have gone mostly to the foreign-born, well ahead of America's Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians

White:                 7.825 million

Foreign born:      5.124 million

Hispanic/Latino: 4.390 million

Black/African American: 2.802 million

Asian:                  1.658 million

 

All figures are from the not-seasonally-adjusted data sets.

 

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, July 2, 2024:

 

Unprecedented U.S. immigration surge boosts job growth, output:

 

The current U.S. immigration surge is unprecedented. ... Recently released 2023 data on immigrant work permits cast doubt on the lower [US Census Bureau and Social Security Administration] immigration estimates in Chart 1 and are broadly supportive of CBO’s higher numbers. ... household survey data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are consistent with CBO estimates of immigration in 2023.