I don't know who needs to hear this, but conservatives have been talking about the dumpster fire at the Social Security Administration (SSA) since at least the Reagan era. Now we discover in the Washington Post that the real problems emerged at the agency when Donald Trump and Elon Musk arrived in D.C. ten weeks ago.
Good grief! Something must be done! Things are falling apart at the seams!
The Post wants you to believe that before Trump and Musk arrived, Social Security was a thriving, well-oiled machine with no problems or waste. There were no 200-year-old people on the government dole; they were only there as placeholders. No checks were going out to those people, we were assured!
But what ho! We discover on Tuesday on the pages of the Post, that the outfit that looks to be a Ponzi scheme, which is always just a few years away from insolvency because there's no "lock box," or real "trust fund," is now "crumbling."
And be assured, young knight, lest you doubt, it's all King Trump and his right hand, Elon's, fault.
Those problems are finally being addressed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That means the solutions proposed must be wrong.
We are told that after ten weeks, the SSA "is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security."
Managers— MANAGERS!— are actually answering phones to help people with their social security questions. Some people wait very long periods before someone answers the phone, like before Elon got there. That’s because “more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000” has been riffed from the agency or taken a buyout.
Plus, WaPo claims, "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." That's not ideal for sure. It's like a bad day at a big company, as a matter of fact.
Sadly, we're not given any basis of comparison. Did the website crash last December? No idea. Six months before that? Who are we, the Post must wonder when asked for a basis of comparison, that Criss Angel magic guy? They shrug and whine, we’re just reporting what a guy who hates Trump and who works at Social Security told us, don’t ask questions. It’s all Elon’s fault!
And if you think that's far-fetched, just wait till they find out where to Post goes to make its case that EVERYTHING IS WORSE in the past ten weeks!
The Post story includes complaints from a union leader grumbling about having to go back to the office, a phone call center getting lots of phone calls in lefty Portland, reliably left Baltimore residents, some of whom were probably paid by ActBlue to show up to a town hall. People who had to go back to the office discovered that their chairs were dusty, the whiteboard pens were dry, and there were no more office supplies at the office they didn’t want to go back to anyway. Who was supplying their office supplies at home?
I wonder how things were working in Nebraska. No one knows because no one asked.
The Post rounded out its story with stories of people who already get their direct deposit Social Security checks but worry that too much fraud and waste could be found, slowing down other people’s checks. Or something.
Notoriously leftwing Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) is very concerned!
“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview. “I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
What’s coming? Their checks are coming.
The Post writes of dramatic questions being asked by people who call in to those hard-working, overwhelmed call centers:
[T]he questions have become predictable: What is the U.S. DOGE Service doing to Social Security? Will the office close? Will my benefits continue?
I wonder why they think that.
Over to you, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
Oh, Pramila, you minx you. Your FAKE NEWS nose is growing again.
— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) March 21, 2025
What Pramila won't tell you is that in the first sentence of this story it says, "... individuals wanting to claim benefits who cannot prove their identity online will need to apply in person."
What this really…
The lefties also tell the Post that they don’t like how people who can’t prove their identities to get SSA payments must come in person to an office to prove who they are. They really, really don’t like that. What’s next? Voter I.D.?!
Trump’s asked Elon to do surgery on a patient who’s awake and unmedicated, and bad things may happen. Those computer systems use old and outdated code and hardware while wasting money on service agreements that are void and may be stripped from the agency or fixed. Wait till AI chat boxes are on the SSA software, if they're not there already. What happens if an AI bot answers the phone? You can expect holy hell to rise from the dust bunnies under the unused desks.
We’re glad that suddenly the Washington Post deigns to write about the problems at Social Security.
Imagine all that happening in only ten weeks.
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