Portside

Once upon a time, Donald Trump endeared himself to millions of working-class voters by telling them he, unlike the rest of the Republican Party, would do “everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is.” While the GOP platform explicitly rejected the idea the program was untouchable and promised only to keep it unchanged for “current retirees and those close to retirement,” Trump told voters he “want[ed] to keep Social Security intact” while “they want to cut it very substantially, the Republicans.”

After weeks of charging that Social Security payments were going to tens of millions of dead people, Trump made the claim a major part of his address to Congress this past week, where he said there were “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program.” This was no offhand mention: the claim took up more than two-and-a-half minutes in the speech, or four full four paragraphs, with Trump listing in tedious detail the millions of Americans in various age groups over one-hundred years old still in the Social Security databases.

This claim is such nonsense that it’s been repeatedly and widely debunked, including by Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy. In reality, the program has not been paying benefits out to anyone over the age of 115 since 2015, and the incongruous age listings are likely a quirk of antiquated coding.

But Trump’s emphasis on the supposed rampant fraud in Social Security — as well as claims by people close to him, like billionaire Elon Musk, that the program is a “Ponzi scheme” — is part of a long tradition in US politics: of Republican and Democratic politicians hellbent on cutting Social Security using claims like these as a fig leaf to justify taking apart it and other entitlement programs.

Take former president Ronald Reagan, a lifelong foe of the program who for decades backed privatizing it. Upon winning the presidency, Reagan put together a task force that recommended raising the retirement age and other cuts to Social Security over the course of his presidency.

Reagan laid the groundwork for these attacks on the program by incessantly claiming that “waste, fraud, and abuse” were rife in government programs, especially those that older Americans relied on; that he would “look at every program” to achieve savings by targeting this fraud and waste, while insisting he would protect entitlements like Social Security and Medicare — though he couldn’t guarantee it.

Reagan was far from the only one. Here’s Bill Clinton talking about the “fraud and abuse” in Social Security by prison inmates, a crackdown he predicted would save a paltry $2.5 billion over five years (at a time the national debt stood at more than $5 trillion), which he launched at the same time he was planning a bipartisan deal to privatize the program. Or look at the various budgets of lifelong Social Security hater (and massive hypocrite) Paul Ryan, gesturing vaguely at “fraud, waste, and abuse” in entitlement programs as he plotted out how to brutally slash them. Or Rand Paul, who has made dismantling the program his life’s goal, claiming that everyone “knows someone who’s gaming the system.” Many of them have used the same “Ponzi scheme” talking point as Trump’s billionaire lackey, or words to that effect.

But Trump’s rhetoric isn’t just setting the stage for hypothetical, future cuts to Social Security that aren’t politically possible yet — though Russell Vought, Trump’s right-hand man and the architect of his presidential agenda, has said this is the exact plan. No, Trump and his people are cutting Social Security as we speak, only doing it in a way that is less obvious, headline-grabbing, and likely to draw pushback.

As reported by the American Prospect, the Trump administration initially pushed to halve the workforce of the Social Security Administration (SSA), but has settled — at least publicly, after the news demanded an urgent round of damage control — for downsizing it “merely” by 12 percent, or seven thousand workers. Together with ending government leases on office buildings used by the SSA, one plan is reportedly to simply redirect more people to call centers instead.

The end result will be to make the nuts-and-bolts system that administers the program less functional and convenient, increasing wait times at the reduced number of offices, forcing people to travel vastly longer distances for in-person needs, or making them sit on the phone on hold for an interminable amount of time. But it will also wreak havoc on program benefits themselves, with a study finding that Reagan’s very similar workforce reduction in the 1980s led to nearly 80,000 eligible people not getting the benefits they were entitled to (out of a beneficiary population nearly half the size of today’s).

What really gives the game away is the fact that these reductions are, by the accounting of even a right-wing think tank that supports cutting the program, “miniscule”: the SSA’s administrative budget that this is all meant to trim was meant to be a mere $15 billion for this fiscal year, roughly 1 percent of the $1.6 trillion the program is set to pay out, and a basically nonexistent fraction of the $31 trillion debt that Musk and his cost-cutters are meant to be going after.

But that’s not their goal. Instead, Musk, Trump, and the people around him are launching an attack on Social Security by stealth, to not just cut its benefits but set the stage for its privatization, just as George W. Bush and once tried and failed to do through Congress — only this time, their method is to plunge the program into artificially induced dysfunction, before pointing to the problems they created as proof that government isn’t fit to administer retirement benefits, and that the whole thing should be handed over to a corporation that can make money off it.

This is the same plan to dismantle Social Security and the same rhetoric used to justify it as we’ve seen for decades, whether from Paul Ryan, Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan. The only thing exceptional is how brazen and aggressive Trump’s version of it is.