Twenty years in the past, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Safety was responsible. Voters rebelled in opposition to his plan to partially privatize the favored retirement program and, the next 12 months, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The occasions of 2005 cemented Social Safety’s fame because the “third rail of American politics.” For the following 20 years, Republicans didn’t contact it.
Maybe Elon Musk wasn’t paying consideration. Again then, he had but to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a frontrunner of DOGE, he’s opened an sudden campaign in opposition to Social Safety.
Musk not too long ago known 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 information, and the Trump administration has reduce the company’s workforce by hundreds. Earlier this week, Social Safety officers introduced adjustments that might 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 considerations. And so they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who may pay for Musk’s selections in subsequent 12 months’s midterms.
If Musk needs to fulfill his purpose of slicing $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll should do much more than eradicate USAID, the Shopper Monetary Safety Bureau, and even the Division of Schooling. He is aware of the actual cash is within the three pillars of America’s social security web: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Safety. “Many of the federal spending is entitlements,” he mentioned earlier this month. “That’s the large one to eradicate.”
Republicans have realized that going after these packages carries an enormous electoral threat. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t assume politically,” Tom Davis, a former Home Republican from Virginia who ran the occasion’s marketing campaign committee within the early 2000s, instructed me. His strategy, Davis mentioned, is “prepared, fireplace, purpose.”
Musk has “been fairly profitable in enterprise, however he’s clearly not very talked-about, and his DOGE actions are making him much less widespread,” a senior GOP strategist instructed me, talking on the situation of anonymity to keep away from scary 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 considerations 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 instructed me, summarizing his message to constituents.
Trump may be capable of declare a mandate from voters to justify a few of his early value slicing; he’s lengthy criticized overseas assist, for instance. However throughout the 2024 presidential marketing campaign, he repeatedly vowed to protect entitlements, even when some in his occasion needed to trim them. Republicans have relied on these guarantees to attempt to reassure voters that their advantages are secure. “I feel President Trump has made it very clear that he doesn’t wish to contact Social Safety,” Consultant Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, instructed reporters on the Capitol final week. “We’re not slicing 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 fees about this system. In the course of the president’s deal with to Congress earlier this month, he mentioned his administration had recognized “stunning ranges of incompetence and possible fraud” in Social Safety. However the examples he cited—folks born within the nineteenth century supposedly nonetheless getting checks—had been nearly actually data-processing errors that mirrored this system’s antiquated laptop programs, not fraud.
The administration’s makes an attempt to cut back fraud may jeopardize official recipients. Starting subsequent month, folks will not be capable of name the Social Safety Administration to file for advantages or replace their banking info. As a substitute they’ll have to take action on the company’s web site or—if they will’t confirm their identification on-line—go to an SSA workplace in particular person. The brand new necessities could possibly be a selected hardship for older beneficiaries who stay in rural areas—a constituency that leans closely Republican.
“In the event that they kill the flexibility to cellphone Social Safety with questions, that may trigger actual issues with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This could 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 completely different info about Musk and what he has performed with DOGE, then requested which of them they discovered regarding. The 4 examples that respondents nervous about most all concerned attainable cuts to Social Safety. “That is what Democrats must get by means of their heads: It’s all Social Safety proper now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, instructed reporters throughout a briefing.
What Trump and Musk are doing now’s far completely different from what Bush proposed 20 years in the past. His plan known as for structural adjustments to Social Safety that might permit recipients to place their advantages into non-public 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 concept. He supplied a reminder that Trump and Musk may wish to contemplate: “Whenever you transfer too far, too quick in politics,” Davis mentioned, “the voters pull you again.”
