Musk terrorizes seniors in cruel SSA blitz

Seven out of ten Americans love Social Security. Maybe that’s why Musk and Trump want to wipe it out.

Mar 14, 2025

The Resistant Grandmother (TRG)

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Picture this: An older woman attempts to cross the street before the traffic changes. There’s a tall, pasty-faced man clad in black impassively watching her on the other side. She struggles, fighting the ticking down of the light. He could help, but does not.

Instead, he scorns her awkward plodding, thinking: “You’re pathetically slow, of no further use or consequence in the world of fast cars and space rockets. Really, your only value now is to make money for the supermen, me being first among them. So, plod away, old gal. I’ll not help you. The sooner you pass on, the better.” And so the baseball-capped observer continues to train his cruel gaze to her plight from his place on the curb.

Soon though, his thinking patterns discover still another path for cruelty. He goes into the street and pulls the elderly woman’s walker out from under her, causing her to fall to the ground and get hurt.

Before he leaves, he bends to the pavement, opens her purse, and pockets her wallet. Boos from either side of the street and angry car honks ring out loudly, but produce no consequences for him. People seem too confused or fearful to confront him more forcibly. Feeling free to act with impunity, the pasty-faced bully laughs and moves on, looking for more people to hurt. We have yet to know what will become of the woman in the street.

Stranger than fiction
This brief allegory is a fictional representation of what Elon Musk and his most recent Tesla customer, Donald Trump, appear to be doing to the elderly women and men of the nation: destroying the financial program they have loved and trusted for decades: Social Security. Combined with the Trump/Musk efforts to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare, they’re terrorizing older Americans and hurting them against their will.

Wishcasting’s consequences
And that’s odd, because taking a chainsaw to federal social safety nets never materialized as a “mandate” in Trump’s narrow 49.9 percent November victory. Yes, Americans who insisted on voting for Trump despite his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, criminal conviction on 34 counts for election fraud in his first run for president, and deadly stewardship of the Covid-19 pandemic wishcasted themselves to returning Trump to office.

But according to polls conducted just before the election and numerous campaign interviews, Trump voters believed he’d bring down inflation, make life more affordable, and somehow force those all-important egg prices to go down.

Yet since Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, he’s done anything but, as prices—especially eggs—have skyrocketed, inflation across the board is rising, the stock market is tanking, and our new allies have become Russia, China, Hungary, and North Korea—the bad guys, making us a bad guy, too—while we abuse old friends like Canada, Mexico, the U.K., France, Denmark, NATO, and others.

To make matters worse, what voters did not sign up for is happening in the dead of the nigbt in blitzkrieg fashion. Focusing again on Social Security, the subject of this posting, in just in the last few weeks Musk and his shock troops of backpacked, 20-somethings have forever changed the beloved Social Security Administration (SSA) with this abbreviated rundown of horrors:

Fired seven thousand workers in D.C. and throughout the country—12 percent of the SSA workforce, including the people who know how Social Security works.
Shuttered 47 local Social Security field offices across the nation. Hardest hit, ironically, are those in Red States that carried Trump into office: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi (March 8 ap.com).
Installed major Trump donor/banker Frank Bisgnano as SSA director, replacing Michelle King who refused to turn the agency’s sensitive data over to Musk and his DOGE team, and so was summarily fired with the sensitive data now in DOGE’s hands.

Don’t forget your password, Grandma!
As if to drive the nail in the “cruelty is the point” reputations of the Tesla owner and his presidential Tesla-buying customer, last week the agency’s new DOGE overlords declared that citizens could no longer call into the Social Security 800 hotline with questions or asset transfers, a much-used and convenient feature aging seniors have relied on over the years.

Instead, DOGE urged the program’s elderly recipients representing all stages of deteriorating health, eyesight, and tech savvy to navigate the agency’s website to ask questions and address problems. Another “solution”—after closing dozens of local Social Security workplaces, called for seniors to seek answers to their questions by driving to agency offices that no longer exist.

But when that policy ran up against a buzzsaw of angry public opinion and media coverage of the hardships the phone takeaway was causing, Musk restored the service, minus the ability to transfer assets. Still, all of this destruction and deliberate confusion sends a message: just as he has fired its key managers and taken its data, Trump means to take down all of the SSA.

Musk: “We follow the money”
This is clear to Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland, mayor of Baltimore, and SSA head from 2023-24 under President Joe Biden. Speaking at a Town Hall in the Chesapeake Bay State, O’Malley described what DOGE is doing to his former agency:
“They’re breaking it up from the inside to make it incapable of serving the American people who paid for it and its customer services…Trump wants to try to eliminate the organization to liquidate the $2.7 trillion built into the trust fund reserve.”

Another logical explanation in tandem with O’Malley’s comes from Musk himself, who admitted the takedown of Social Security comes from a kind of DOGE axiom, “We follow the money,” as confessed to Fox Business’ host Larry Kudlow on March 2.

SSA’s reserve trust fund can offset billionaire tax cuts
The $2.7 trillion built into Social Security’s trust fund reserve would take Trump and Musk more than half-way to making up for anticipated tax cuts for billionaires signalled in the bill that just passed Congress and has gone to the Senate that will deduct about $5 trillion flowing into the U.S. Treasury. Although the bill would reduce taxes to some extent for most Americans, the new law makes sweeping cuts to services that help America’s middle class and poor (March 12 factcheck.org).

This tradeoff was explained clearly in a Feb. 25 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) statement after the bill left committee and was headed for the vote in Congress: “The budget passed today calls for massive cuts in health coverage, food assistance, and help paying for college, among other areas to pay for huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses.”

Billionaires first!
In keeping with the current administration’s billionaires-first policies, Trump’s dissolution of SSA and reducing its customer services capabilities before he kills the agency outright will abuse elderly Americans by breaking up the agency they’ve paid into all their working lives and depended on for their retirement. In its place would emerge some form of privatized agency or agencies, purchased by billionaires to make money at older Americans’ expense. This outcome of the administration’s denigrate-to-destroy strategy was predicted by Senator Bernie Sanders:
“I think this is a prelude not only to cutting benefits, but to privatizing Social Security itself. If you make the system dysfunctional, why would anybody want to
support it?”

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Read Joe Rogan transcript of Musk’s “Ponzi scheme” slur
Musk has been doing his part to destroy the federal government by lying about its effectiveness while simultaneously never producing evidence that backs up his assertions. In this, he’s been aided by appearing on podcasts and television programs where friendly if not fawning interviewers allow him to talk with few interruptions and no material pushback.

That happened on March 3 with Musk as guest on the Joe Rogan podcast. While wearing one of his signature black tee shirts, Musk made headlines by contending without evidence that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Credibility’s short-lived try
Rogan began the interview with his only real attempt to push back on anything Musk would say by asking if he, Musk, were making it too easy for future presidents to completely change the government through mass shutdowns and firings, just as Trump was doing, through him, now. To TRG, this amounted to a worthy question that got to the heart of the long-term viability and wisdom of Musk’s efforts.

Such a question could put a guest on notice the impending conversation would not be a walk-in-the-park and would be a real interview. But then Rogan immediately pulled the rug out from under himself by launching into a claim without evidence of all the “fu*kery” that was going on in the federal government, thus aligning himself with Musk before the interview progressed. Instead of putting Musk on notice he couldn’t get away with facile, unevidenced answers, which he would go on to provide throughout the interview, Rogan gave away his power and signalled to Musk he’d have a complicit Joe Rogan on his side.

Here’s that portion following Musk’s “Ponzi schemes” line as Rogan goes on to play Ed McMahon to Musk’s Johnny Carson. Musk opens this part of the dialogue by laughingly describing Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.”

ROGAN: Explain that.

MUSK: Oh? Well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately and the obligation for Social Security lasts for an entire retirement career. So, uh, you, uh, you’re paying (makes gulping sound) if you look at the future obligations it (sic) far exceeds the tax revenue for, uh, have you ever looked at the “debt clock”?

ROGAN: Yes.

MUSK: OK. There’s a present-day debt, there is the present day debt, but there is (sic) our future obligations. So when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual what people think it is is because of the future obligations…(sic)

Rogan, who would admit to another interviewee in a later program, “I don’t even know how Social Security works,” casually interrupted his guest by lobbing this softball:

ROGAN: Wasn’t there some Social Security whistleblower somewhere?
MUSK: Yes!... but, while struggling to conjure up the details, Rogan’s producer or someone off camera dampened the fiery allegation, saying he recalled it to be “Just one woman in one state…”

Robert Reich rebuts Musk’s flip falsehoods
As Rogan was neither knowledgeable, nor of a mind to challenge the world’s richest man’s allegations, it took Social Security and government policy experts in the days following the March 3 firestorm to do just that.

One of them was former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, now professor of public policy at U.C. Berkeley. Dissecting Musk’s accusations in his Substack column the next day, Reich clarified the difference between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security:

“A Ponzi scheme is when a con artist lures investors into a fake investment project, pockets the cash, and then gets new “investors” to funnel their cash to the earlier investors—until there are no new recruits and the whole thing collapses. The last ones in are suckers left holding worthless bags.” (TRG could not help but wonder if this describes what Trump, Musk, and other billionaire Trump donors are envisioning to replace SSA.)

Reich added, by contrast, that Social Security is “the opposite of a Ponzi scheme…a simple ‘pay as you go’ program where current workers via the payroll tax, fund payouts for retirees and disabled people.” And in 2024, about one in five U.S. residents received payments on a regular basis from the organization being dismantled by Trump and Musk.

The Ponzi scheme slur was just one of a series of claims Musk got wrong in the interview, where he began the conversation accusing the United States Government without evidence of being riddled with “massive fraud.”

Musk’s Ebola scam and the fawning Joe Rogan (again)
It’s impossible in this posting to take on all his untruths, but the next example clearly reveals how Musk casually trafficks in half-truths, misstatements, unfounded theories, and lies. That he does that so far with no accountability is both sad and dangerous. You’d think the person taking a chainsaw to government programs and jobs would feel an obligation to speak accurately and truthfully—putting his actions in context and with an understanding of the stakes to the country of destroying the American governmental structure with breathtaking speed and scope.

That Musk feels free to do so without such honesty or understanding falls not just on him, but also on the backs of the many ill-prepared and/or fawning program hosts. These, like Rogan and Fox’s Larry Kudlow, repeatedly agree with Musk or refuse to challenge the world’s richest man.

Chuckling amidst the carnage
For example, at one point, Musk mused whether the fired government scientists working to prevent another Ebola outbreak were actually going to create an outbreak by “creating the virus” in their labs. “I don’t even know if this work is effective!” Musk asserted rhetorically and chuckled, as Rogan chortled in tandem with his guest.

Not bothering to understand if the scientists’ work was, or was not required; typical of the scientific process; or “effective,” Musk’s DOGE group nonetheless fired the scientists, but then later supposedly rehired them; we don’t know. The American people first learned of their returning to work when Musk, in a Trump cabinet meeting, claimed falsely that they were all now back in their offices doing their jobs.

But an NPR report found no clear evidence that they have returned to their positions. For example, according to Dr. Craig Spencer, a scientist at Brown university who was working on Ebola prevention with the fired government scientists, there's still an “absence of U.S. support on this effort” in the way of funding and manpower. In other words, if the government scientists were really re-employed, why aren’t we seeing them? And why isn’t the government money flowing? Absent that “proof of life,” it appears the administration has in truth dismantled the infrastructure the U.S. relies on to detect and battle pathogens that could cost American lives.

Wanting to save Social Security and other important programs? Get out and make your
voices heard!
If the Trump/Musk strategy is transparently false on its face, that leaves Americans who want Social Security and other life-saving programs living in fear their treasured safety nets will all disappear despite their wishes. According to the National Academy of Social Insurance, 73 percent of Americans strongly support the program (nasi.org). So more than seven out of 10 senior Americans will be cut off from the program they love with nothing to say in the matter…the Trump/Musk way…unless they make their voices heard.

For many American seniors, Social Security has meant the difference between living out their final years with security—not having to depend on relatives, but rather keeping their dignity along with their homes and ability to pay their bills.

Given Trump and Musk’s determination to scuttle the program despite its importance, the only solution appears to be one put forth by Democrats, politicians, and political organizing groups: call Republican politicians and call, write, and urge Democrats to support you. Take to the streets to make visible your First Amendment rights and fight back for the program that’s meant so much to you.

How to get involved may be addressed by clicking on any of the following web addresses. If so inclined to follow up, I wish you luck in writing, calling, demonstrating, and using your voice.

Just one word of caution: When taking to the streets in protest, avoid intersections and walk with a friend.

—trg

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CMary:The Resistant Grandmother

Musk terrorizes seniors in cruel SSA blitz

Seven out of ten Americans love Social Security. Maybe that’s why Musk and Trump want to wipe it out.

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