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Republicans Set to Give Self-Described 'DOGE Person' Keys to Social Security Agency
"A vote for Trump's Social Security Commissioner is a vote to destroy Social Security," warned one advocacy group.
May 04, 2025
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday is set to hold a confirmation vote for President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Social Security Administration—an ultra-rich former Wall Street executive who has aligned himself with the Elon Musk-led slash-and-burn effort at agencies across the federal government.
"I am fundamentally a DOGE person," Frank Bisignano told CNBC in March, amplifying concerns that he would take his experience in the financial technology industry—where he was notorious for inflicting mass layoffs while raking in a huge compensation package—to SSA, which is already facing large-scale staffing cuts that threaten the delivery of benefits for millions of Americans.
In an email on Saturday, the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works warned that Bisignano "is not the cure to the DOGE-manufactured chaos at the Social Security Administration."
"In fact, he is part of it, and, if confirmed, would make it even worse," the group added. "We're not going down without a fight. Republicans may have a majority in the Senate, but we're going to rally to send a message: A vote for Trump's Social Security Commissioner is a vote to destroy Social Security!"
"If Mr. Bisignano can get away with lying before he's even in place as commissioner, who knows what else he'll be able to get away with once he's in office."
Bisignano, the CEO of payment processing giant Fiserv, has been accused during his confirmation process of lying under oath about his ties to DOGE, which has worked to seize control of Social Security data as part of a purported effort to root out "fraud" that advocates say is virtually nonexistent.
As The Washington Post reported in March, Bisignano testified to the Senate Finance Committee that "he has had no contact" with DOGE.
"But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the claim is 'not true,' citing an account the senator said he received from a senior Social Security official who recently left the agency," the Post noted. "The former official... described 'numerous contacts Mr. Bisignano made with the agency since his nomination,' including 'frequent' conversations with senior executives."
Wyden pointed again to the former SSA official's statement in a floor speech Thursday in opposition to Bisignano, saying that "according to the whistleblower, Mr. Bisignano personally appointed his Wall Street buddy, Michael Russo, to be the leader of DOGE's team at Social Security."
The Oregon Democrat said Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee refused his request for a bipartisan meeting with the whistleblower to evaluate their accusations unless "we agreed to hand over any information received from the whistleblower directly to the nominee and the Trump administration."
"All Americans should be concerned that a nominee for a position of public trust like commissioner of Social Security is accused of lying about his actions at the agency and that efforts to bring this important information to light are being thwarted," Wyden said Thursday. "If Mr. Bisignano can get away with lying before he's even in place as commissioner, who knows what else he'll be able to get away with once he's in office."
"He could lie by denying any American who paid their Social Security taxes the benefits they've earned, claiming some phony pretense," the senator warned. "He could lie about how sensitive personal information is being mishandled—or worse, exploited for commercial use."
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Trump Pushes Supreme Court to Let Musk's Cronies Seize Social Security Data
"Why do Elon 'Social Security's a Ponzi scheme' Musk and his DOGE cronies need to stick their fingers in your personal data—your work history, income, benefits, and health records?" asked Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
May 03, 2025
President Donald Trump's administration requested in an emergency filing on Friday that the U.S. Supreme Court allow members of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to access highly sensitive Social Security data, complaining that a lower court ruling is inflicting "ongoing, irreparable harm on urgent federal priorities."
The filing, authored by U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, asks the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to lift a preliminary injunction issued last monthby Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, who has accused Musk's team of engaging in "a fishing expedition" at the Social Security Administration (SSA) "in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion."
The Trump administration's request escalates a monthslong fight over access to the sensitive records that began in February, when the then-acting head of SSA left her post after Musk's lieutenants began infiltrating the agency and attempting to seize data.
A court ruling issued a month later ordered DOGE to "disgorge or delete all unlawfully obtained, disclosed, or accessed data." Musk, the richest person in the world, has falsely described Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme" and peddled discredited claims of large-scale abuses in the program.
The Center for American Progress noted last month that "while President Trump and Elon Musk repeat the long-debunked claim that dead people are claiming Social Security benefits, DOGE staffers are reportedly searching for dead claimants."
"As a result, according to The Washington Post, more than 10 million new people have been marked as dead since early March, including many seniors who are very much alive," the think tank wrote in an analysis warning that DOGE's efforts at SSA pose a grave threat to Social Security recipients. "For example, the SSA erroneously declared 82-year-old Seattle resident Ned Johnson dead. Before Johnson was even aware of or could remedy the mistake, the agency cut off his retirement benefits, took thousands of dollars out of his bank account, and cut off his Medicare."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in response to the administration's Supreme Court filing that "Trump and Musk need to get their hands off Americans' Social Security."
"Why do Elon 'Social Security's a Ponzi scheme' Musk and his DOGE cronies need to stick their fingers in your personal data—your work history, income, benefits, and health records?" Warren asked.
"Many Social Security field offices have lost half their staff, even as DOGE is forcing millions more people a year to visit those offices. What good are earned benefits that Americans can't access?"
As the Economic Policy Institute recently explained, Social Security personnel "protect a trove of personally identifiable information."
"Sensitive information stored in SSA databases includes not only Social Security numbers, but also detailed earnings, tax, banking, and medical records," the group observed. "Until DOGE entered SSA headquarters, this information was carefully protected, with limited access granted to specially trained employees only for specific purposes."
The Trump administration's aggressive push to access SSA data comes amid a broader assault on the agency and Social Security itself, despite the president's vow to protect the program.
Earlier Friday, the White House released a budget proposal that calls for leaving SSA funding flat, which advocates said is effectively a cut given rising costs.
"The truth is that Social Security is extremely understaffed, which is increasing backlogs and wait times," Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works, said in a statement. "This budget will make those backlogs and delays worse. It will make mistakes—including the Orwellian nightmare of being inadvertently declared dead when you are not—harder to fix."
"This budget's cuts to Social Security are right in line with Elon Musk's DOGE, which has pushed out over 7,000 SSA workers, including some of the most experienced and highly trained," Altman added. "Many Social Security field offices have lost half their staff, even as DOGE is forcing millions more people a year to visit those offices. What good are earned benefits that Americans can't access?"
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The DOGE Days Are Over: Elon Musk and the End of the Techno-Fantasy
For all his bluster and noise, Musk never figured out how to meet people where they are. Utopian tech visions rarely do.
Apr 27, 2025
Elon Musk’s political and cultural influence—once feared as dystopic, transformative, and totalizing—is beginning to resemble a flash in the pan.
Not long ago, Musk seemed poised to remake the world—or at least to meme it into submission. His presence felt not only pervasive but inescapable. He was the heir apparent to techno-authoritarian chic: a “dark MAGA” demigod in a zip-up jacket, preaching a gospel of Martian salvation and machine-learning rapture.
But today, his standing is slipping. Recent reports suggest Musk has fallen out with U.S. President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Cabinet members reportedly clashed with him over his interference in federal agencies; others took him to task for rogue public statements. He drew further public ire for what many saw as a graceless and callous approach to mass firings. Polls show that while many Americans still express interest in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they overwhelmingly disapprove of Musk at the helm.
Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void.
Then came his public rebuke in Wisconsin, where a $20 million effort to influence a state Supreme Court election—complete with Musk handing out million-dollar checks at a rally—was soundly rejected by voters. All the while, Tesla faced mounting scrutiny from regulators, and average Americans started attacking the cars themselves.
Now, his jokes have gone stale. X (formerly Twitter) is drifting into irrelevance, and his once-magnetic pull over public discourse feels more like static than signal. The man who once stormed a stage wielding a chainsaw is now being quietly uninvited from the party.
But if this does mark the end of Musk’s political career, it shouldn’t be remembered as a sideshow. Musk represents a recurring fantasy: a transgenerational techno-messianic dream that imagines salvation through systems, transcendence through circuitry.
To understand Musk’s rise and fall, it helps to look backward—specifically, to his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. A Canadian chiropractor and political dreamer, Haldeman led the Canadian chapter of Technocracy Inc., a gray-uniformed movement in the 1930s that believed engineers—not politicians—should rule the world. It was a post-democratic fantasy of optimized control, an early prototype of what we now call algorithmic governance.
When that didn’t pan out, Haldeman joined the Social Credit movement around the time its Quebec chapter began promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and flirting with homegrown fascism. Censured and disillusioned, he moved his family to apartheid South Africa, a country he praised in his writings as a stronghold of Western Christian values and white self-governance. There, Musk’s father, Errol, built wealth through engineering and real estate ventures, and later acquired part ownership in an emerald mine in Zambia.
Elon Musk inherited this worldview and polished it. His own techno-utopianism is just a shinier version of this old settler dream. The medium changed. But the fantasy didn’t.
Unlike traditional MAGA, Musk’s vision doesn’t look backward into the past. It projects forward—into the void. His vision is of a world run by smart people and smarter machines, with little room for emotional irregularity, biological vulnerability, or democratic friction. In this model, emotion is treated as a bug. The body becomes obsolete.
It’s not just Musk. His outlook is broadly shared among a certain class of technocratic elites who, despite appearing ideologically opposed, converge on a shared goal: the construction of a post-human world. Whether framed as innovation, inevitability, or progress, the underlying premise is the same—merge biology with technology, and minimize the complications of the human condition.
Klaus Schwab, the recently investigated former head of the World Economic Forum—and an advocate of implantable microchips—summarized this new paradigm in a 2022 interview with Swiss broadcaster RTS: “In this new world, we must accept transparency—total transparency. You have to get used to it. It must become integrated into your personality.” He added, “But if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.”
That same year, Yuval Noah Harari, a senior advisor to the WEF, declared: “We are now hackable animals… The idea that we have a soul, this spirit, and free will—that’s over.”
As the AI wave crested, the tech industry followed suit. Meta launched a child-friendly AI therapist. Microsoft patented chatbot technology to simulate the dead. Apple’s VisionOS 3.0 began muting family group chats based on an “emotional volatility index.” Emotional honesty gave way to managed vibes.
Amid it all, Musk tweeted: “It has become increasingly clear that humanity is the biological bootlicker of AI.” A curious comment from a man who has actively helped to tighten the laces.
But now, the music seems to have stopped. Musk appears increasingly out of step with the moment. For all his bluster and noise, he never figured out how to meet people where they are.
Utopian tech visions rarely do. They tend to hover above the friction of daily life—above labor, land, and limits—before, inevitably, they come crashing back to Earth.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to Klaus Schwab as the likely former head of the World Economic Forum. However, he resigned days before the piece was published. It has been edited to reflect this.
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