Under Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Social Security Administration has sought to downsize and reorganize its operations. This week, the agency made the highly controversial decision to nix identity verification over the phone. The policy shift threatens to force millions of seniors (many of which have poor mobility) to travel to field offices to receive their benefits. At the same time, DOGE has been closing SSA field offices across the country, making it increasingly difficult to access those offices.
Organizations like Social Security Works are organizing to fight the changes, and they hope to spur a groundswell of activism that can convince the government to reverse course. Still, the group’s executive director, Alex Lawson, thinks that the SSA’s recent policy change will have immediate and disastrous impacts on the agency’s ability to deliver retirement benefits to Americans.
“We know exactly how it will impact benefits,” Lawson said. “There will be tragedies, people will be harmed, people will die.” It’s pretty clear, Lawson added, that the goal of Musk’s DOGE is to destroy the Social Security program from the inside out. “You listen to Elon Musk on Joe Rogan’s podcast and you hear his disdain, his hatred of Social Security,” Lawson said. “He thinks it is an incredible net negative for the country.”
The SSA, which is currently being led by a new, DOGE-linked director, has argued that the policy shift is about rooting out fraud and abuse within the program (which is also the ostensible goal of DOGE), but critics maintain that the real intent is to drive the agency into dysfunction.
“Many people will just not be able to get benefits,” said Lawson. Huge numbers of retirees are going to be driven into SSA field offices that were “already straining, even before the Trump presidency,” he said, noting that even under Biden, the agency was already at fifty-year staffing lows. The changes under Trump are now threatening to destroy the agency’s operations and its ability to dispense benefits, he said. “Now you have firings, buyouts, they’ve closed 45 offices, they’ve instructed GSA [the General Services Administration] to end the leases on all of them,” he said. “It’s all aimed at creating a crisis, at collapsing the system.”
The Trump administration even seems to have admitted that recent policy shifts could disrupt service delivery, with the U.S. Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, going on TV and claiming that an occasional drop in retirement benefits is really not that big of a deal.
Howard Lutnick: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month, my mother-in-law— who’s 94— she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d just think something I messed up.” pic.twitter.com/Nez8FdEEAN
— Ron Smith (@Ronxyz00) March 21, 2025
Lawson said that the tactics being employed are a very old strategy used by private actors to attack public systems. “Kneecap the mailman, complain that the mail is late, suddenly remember that you’ve got a cousin in the private mail delivery service and that they’ll do it for twice as much and deliver half.” Part of the strategy is to “lower public confidence” in Social Security as a program, he said: “If you can convince people that they’re going to get nothing, they will be willing to accept less than they’re owed.” The only thing DOGE is doing efficiently is hurting the Social Security program, he added.
Lawson said he doesn’t think Musk understands the benefits of Social Security because he comes from a background in which economic security was never a question. “He was born with an emerald mine,” Lawson said. “Not even a silver spoon. An emerald mine. He’s not a normal person.” Musk has denied multiple times that his family owned stakes in South African emerald mines or that the profits from said mines funded his early career, but his own father, Errol Morris, has said that the family was involved in the emerald trade and that his son’s denials were “just because, you see, he wants to tell the people in America that he also had a hard time.” In 2016, Elon, himself, told Forbes that his father had “a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia” when he was 15 years old.
Musk has referred to Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” which Lawson said is a ridiculous comparison since Ponzi schemes are about taking someone’s money and not giving anything back, while Social Security is funded by Americans’ money and often returns more than retirees actually pay in. “A Ponzi scheme is a criminal enterprise based on fraud that benefits one or a group of criminal actors at the top,” Lawson said. “Social Security is a very transparent—you can find out where every nickel and dime goes—social insurance, pay-as-you-go system. It’s wage insurance. There’s nobody who’s profiting from Social Security. There’s nobody on top of the program who’s getting money out of it. There’s no profits from it. All of it goes back to the people who are paying in.”
Lawson compared the goal of privatizing Social Security to America’s previous transition away from defined benefit pension plans and towards 401ks. Americans are much less secure within the 401k system, which is tied to the stock market, he said. The private sector literally cannot provide the same benefits that the SS program does because you can’t turn a profit from what Social Security provides, Lawson said. Social Security is not designed to make money, it’s designed to ensure that people can enjoy old age without working themselves to death.
Cuts to the Social Security program will create real, tangible harm to untold numbers of people, the activist added, noting that he had recently spoken with a lot of seniors who were incredibly frightened about what the cuts would mean for them. “You miss one check and people are like, ‘I can’t fucking eat. What am I supposed to do? It’s all I’ve got, I’m going to get thrown out.’ You talk to these people and they want me to tell them there’s nothing to be scared of. There’s a lot to be scared of right now.”
However, Lawson said his organization hopes to convert Americans’ fear into rage—the kind that will motivate them to get involved politically. The goal is to inspire a lot of people to come out and support their crusade against DOGE in the coming weeks—like on April 5th, when the group is organizing a national day of action. “This is a guy stealing our money. I don’t think little Elon Musk understands the magnitude of what he’s fucking with right now,” Lawson said.
