Twenty years in the past, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Safety was in charge. Voters rebelled in opposition to his plan to partially privatize the favored retirement program and, the next yr, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The occasions of 2005 cemented Social Safety’s status because the “third rail of American politics.” For the subsequent 20 years, Republicans didn’t contact it.
Maybe Elon Musk wasn’t paying consideration. Again then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a pacesetter of DOGE, he’s opened an surprising campaign in opposition to Social Safety.
Musk just lately referred to as this system “the largest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Safety Administration and obtained delicate taxpayer knowledge, and the Trump administration has lower the company’s workforce by hundreds. Earlier this week, Social Safety officers announced modifications that would make it tougher for retirees to entry their advantages. These strikes—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who’ve jammed congressional cellphone strains and town-hall conferences to register their issues. They usually’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who may pay for Musk’s selections in subsequent yr’s midterms.
If Musk needs to satisfy his aim of chopping $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll should do much more than get rid of USAID, the Client Monetary Safety Bureau, and even the Division of Schooling. He is aware of the true cash is within the three pillars of America’s social security internet: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Safety. “Many of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the massive one to get rid of.”
Republicans have realized that going after these packages carries an enormous electoral danger. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t assume politically,” Tom Davis, a former Home Republican from Virginia who ran the get together’s marketing campaign committee within the early 2000s, advised me. His strategy, Davis mentioned, is “prepared, hearth, intention.”
Musk has “been fairly profitable in enterprise, however he’s clearly not very fashionable, and his DOGE actions are making him much less well-liked,” a senior GOP strategist advised me, talking on the situation of anonymity to keep away from upsetting a combat with the president or his rich lieutenant. “He’ll find yourself being a heavy weight across the neck of not solely President Trump however Republicans typically.”
Most elected Republicans have been cautious to keep away from criticizing Trump or Musk. However as DOGE has continued to assail Social Safety, some have began feeling stress from their constituents. Callers inundated Consultant Invoice Huizenga of Michigan with issues about Social Safety cuts throughout a phone city corridor the Republican held earlier this month. He assured them this system wouldn’t be touched. “I’ll admit that there have been occasions the place Elon Musk has tweeted first and thought second,” Huizenga advised me, summarizing his message to constituents.
Trump may have the ability to declare a mandate from voters to justify a few of his early value chopping; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for instance. However throughout the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, he repeatedly vowed to protect entitlements, even when some in his get together wished to trim them. Republicans have relied on these guarantees to attempt to reassure voters that their advantages are secure. “I believe President Trump has made it very clear that he doesn’t wish to contact Social Safety,” Consultant Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, advised reporters on the Capitol final week. “We aren’t chopping Social Safety.”
Musk’s offensive in opposition to Social Safety, nonetheless, has made these claims tougher to maintain. And Trump himself has amplified a few of Musk’s most specious costs about this system. In the course of the president’s deal with to Congress earlier this month, he mentioned his administration had recognized “surprising ranges of incompetence and possible fraud” in Social Safety. However the examples he cited—folks born within the nineteenth century supposedly nonetheless getting checks—have been nearly actually data-processing errors that mirrored the program’s antiquated computer systems, not fraud.
The administration’s makes an attempt to scale back fraud may jeopardize legit recipients. Starting subsequent month, folks will now not have the ability to name the Social Safety Administration to file for advantages or replace their banking data. As an alternative they’ll have to take action on the company’s web site or—if they’ll’t confirm their id on-line—go to an SSA workplace in individual. The brand new necessities might be a selected hardship for older beneficiaries who dwell in rural areas—a constituency that leans closely Republican.
“In the event that they kill the power to cellphone Social Safety with questions, that can trigger actual issues with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This may give Democrats a gap.”
Polling backs up the strategist’s claims. In a survey launched yesterday, the Democratic agency Blueprint learn respondents a listing of 20 totally different information about Musk and what he has achieved with DOGE, then requested which of them they discovered regarding. The 4 examples that respondents frightened about most all concerned doable cuts to Social Safety. “That is what Democrats have to get by means of their heads: It’s all Social Safety proper now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, advised reporters throughout a briefing.
What Trump and Musk are doing now’s far totally different from what Bush proposed 20 years in the past. His plan referred to as for structural modifications to Social Safety that will enable recipients to place their advantages into personal funding accounts, which Bush argued may yield extra earnings for beneficiaries whereas extending the fiscal solvency of this system. Davis was serving within the Home when the general public rejected Bush’s thought. He supplied a reminder that Trump and Musk may wish to think about: “While you transfer too far, too quick in politics,” Davis mentioned, “the voters pull you again.”
