Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa USA via AP Images
Elected officials and constituents took to the streets to rally for protection against cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, March 8, 2025, in Baltimore.
Donald Trump’s attacks on government come in two forms: insidious and in your face. His insidious attacks include his war on DEI, his selective withdrawal of federal aid from blue cities and states, and his charges of antisemitism as a way of defunding liberal universities.
At the same time, he has pledged not to go after broadly popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. But despite his intermittent attempts to be strategic in his wreckage of government, Trump can’t help giving in to his intermittent impulses. And his army of incompetent appointees adds to the problem by functioning like so many sorcerer’s apprentices.
Consider the emblematic case of Social Security. There is no more broadly popular government program. Past attempts to weaken or partially privatize it have always run into a political buzz saw. When it was necessary for demographic reasons to raise the retirement age or shave benefits, as in 1983, architects of the revisions took great care to make sure that the enterprise was bipartisan and understood as a necessary move to strengthen Social Security, not weaken it.
Trump himself has repeatedly insisted that Social Security is sacrosanct. He has even proposed ending the taxation of Social Security benefits.
But with or without Trump’s complicity, his minions have not been able to resist trying ways to weaken Social Security by the back door. Elon Musk has termed it a Ponzi scheme. It’s not a pretty picture for the administration when the world’s richest man and destroyer-in-chief of government signals coming attacks on the program on which tens of millions of seniors depend.
In the past two weeks, there were four separate sneak attacks. First, plans were announced to cut the Social Security workforce by 12 percent, or 7,000 employees. The Social Security staff is already at its lowest level in decades relative to population. Some Social Security offices will also close. (The Prospect has reported that acting commissioner Leland Dudek initially asked for 50 percent workforce cuts, but while that has been scaled back, some sources have continued to report that figure.)
I’m old enough to be on both Social Security and Medicare. My experience is that Social Security workers are unfailingly knowledgeable, competent, and polite, whether on the phone or in person. Unlike call center workers for private insurance companies, they are not trying to sell you anything, which is itself a breath of fresh air.
Collecting Social Security benefits is pretty straightforward, though you need to calculate whether you are better off taking a smaller check by retiring early or waiting to collect a larger one. Social Security workers are happy to help you sort this out, in terms of what’s good for you, not like a private insurer trying to maximize the profit of the company. The Social Security staff, like the Social Security and Medicare programs, shames its private-sector rivals.
There is no more broadly popular government program than Social Security. Past attempts to weaken or partially privatize it have always run into a political buzz saw.
Medicare is a little more complicated, especially if you also choose to purchase a so-called “Medigap” policy. Social Security staff will also work with you on this.
My only modest complaint in my several dealings with Social Security is that sometimes you have to wait on hold for a few minutes. I’ve never had to wait at a local Social Security office more than half an hour.
But as staff are cut and offices are closed, this will create both longer waiting times for the general public and greater workload and stress among Social Security staff, deliberately debasing an exemplary public program by stealth. Sources have told the Prospect about regional office consolidations in the Midwest and West that will eliminate 86 percent of the workforce. Separately, an email sent to Social Security Administration employees explained that voluntary reassignments will go primarily to backfill losses at local field offices, bringing in inexperienced staffers from other parts of the agency who will likely slow the process further.
On March 7, the Social Security Administration also announced that people who inadvertantly get too large a check through no fault of their own will lose 100 percent of their benefits. And the Trump administration briefly tried a bizarre foray in Maine, where parents were told they could no longer register a newborn for a Social Security number at the hospital and instead had to visit one of the state’s eight Social Security offices, according to an email sent to Maine officials. This was reversed after a day.
In addition, detailed testimony released on March 7 in a federal employee union lawsuit, given by former associate Social Security commissioner Tiffany Flick, lays out the extent to which Elon Musk and his pawns have gone in their effort to gain access to confidential Social Security data. This information could be used to violate personal privacy, undermine confidence in Social Security, make selective benefit cuts, or even disrupt payouts, all in the name of looking for largely nonexistent fraud. According to The Washington Post, even Trump’s handpicked acting Social Security commissioner, Leland Dudek, warned senior staff that Musk’s DOGE troops are running roughshod at the agency.
All of these backdoor attacks are of a piece. They need to be understood for what they are.
And in upcoming budget negotiations, it will become clear that there will be no way to reach Trump’s tax and spending goals without deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. The Medicare program, like Social Security, is also vulnerable to assaults by stealth.
Project 2025, the blueprint for so many of Trump’s assaults on government, calls for making Medicare Advantage the “default option” for new enrollees. This commerical insurance product captures private profit at public expense. Medicare Advantage policies are far less efficient and far more vulnerable to manipulation at the expense of patients than traditional public Medicare. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, not a bunch of radicals, have detailed $83 billion a year in Medicare Advantage overpayments through manipulating diagnosis codes to make patients look sicker. Herding relatively healthy seniors into Medicare Advantage also weakens public Medicare, setting up future cuts as fiscally necessary.
The Medicaid program, which is mainly for the poor, actually serves some 79 million people, and upwards of 1 resident in 3 in many Southern counties. Its biggest single use is to cover nursing home care for the elderly, which includes lots of parents of middle-class people, in red states as well as blue ones.
In short, if Democrats do their jobs, Trump is very vulnerable on all three fronts, whether he goes after these three landmark programs frontally or by stealth. Democrats have had a rough few weeks, both rhetorically and tactically. Surely they can unify around the simple proposition that Trump and Musk are undermining popular programs that serve most Americans in order to finance tax cuts for the rich.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, in a Friday House floor speech, gave a pitch-perfect rendition of how Democrats should be talking. “Your Social Security benefits are your hard-earned benefits,” she said. “They don’t belong to billionaires like Elon Musk.”
A couple of weeks ago, James Carville wrote a much-disputed op-ed piece suggesting that the Democrats should play dead in the budget negotiations. If the Democrats can’t unite behind a strategy of spotlighting Trump’s threat to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, they will not just be playing dead.
