Summary:
Donald Trump’s interim Social Security chief suggested Thursday night he will effectively turn off the agency that manages the essential safety net program for seniors and the disabled, if Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can’t access the non-anonymized sensitive personal information and data of hundreds of millions of Americans, based on a judge’s order.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” said Lee Dudek, acting Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner, arguing the order was too broad, according to Bloomberg News. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” he said, adding: “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”
Dudek’s threat to block SSA employees from using the agency’s IT systems — a move that could halt Social Security payments — came in response to a judge’s temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union. The order bars Social Security Administration officials from allowing DOGE, including Musk, and the SSA’s DOGE team to access personally identifiable information. It also directs Musk and DOGE to delete from their possession all non-anonymized personal data, and bars them from having access to SSA computers or code.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander wrote that the SSA had likely violated administrative and privacy laws when it gave DOGE “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.”
She added that the “defendants, with so-called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”
That’s the move that will send people over the edge. What a ridiculously stupid administration
Unfortunately it won’t. Too many people didn’t learn, and learn from, history. They’ll watch as their freedoms are eroded away in the name of “making America great,” and then cry about how everything got so bad as if they had nothing to do with it.
I think you underestimate the rage of old white people.
I think we also might be forgetting how much control the Right Wing Propaganda Machine has on their people. They’ll blame ‘activist judges’ on the gaps in service, which in turn will mean more violence against those judges.
It’s not an easy discussion here. All outcomes are bad, and that’s exactly what the Trump Administration has created, a situation where they win regardless. The shutdown? They’d continue to gut agencies and force funding to their toadies anyway. This situation? They’ll blame the Dems and Activist Judges for it. The failing economy and stock market due to tariffs? Biden’s fault.
That’s partly why we see the Dems slow walking a response, there aren’t clear avenues of attack here when their enemy holds all three branches in power, has the freedom to break every law and ignore the constitution, and has a massive state sponsored propaganda machine that their followers believe is the gospel.
Take away SS, and you will leave many old people with nothing left to lose, and many of them own guns, and have had military training. In addition, ANY of them that kill governmental officials will be hailed as heros, the same as Luigi.
I dunno, killing entitlements is the only thing that seems to energize a lot of them.
Y’all, it would make me ecstatic to be completely wrong with this hot take. I guess it’s a combination of my lack of faith in the citizenship to give enough of a shit, and my lack of faith in our government to listen.