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social security
'Dangerous Power Grab' as Supreme Court Sides With DOGE on Social Security Data
"This action by six far-right justices is an affront to every principle of government transparency and the rule of law."
Jun 07, 2025
Defenders of Social Security are responding with critical anger to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday that side with the Trump administration in a legal battle over access to sensitive data of tens of millions of Americans by the Department of Government Efficiency, the government-eviscerating agency first spearheaded by right-wing libertarian and mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
The unsigned emergency order from the court came in response to an emergency application from the Trump administration defending DOGE's ability to have access to Social Security databases that two labor unions, alongside the Alliance for Retired Americans, had file a legal suit to protect. By its ruling, the Supreme Court stayed a lower federal court's ruling that said DOGE must "disgorge" and "delete" any of the data it accessed or downloaded from the agency files.
While the underlying case plays out, DOGE is now authorized to retain the data and access to the information, which critics say cannot be entrusted to the newly-created department and unvetted personnel who control it.
"This is a sad day for our democracy and a scary day for millions of people," said the coalition behind the challenge in response to the decision. "This ruling will enable President Trump and DOGE's affiliates to steal Americans' private and personal data. Elon Musk may have left Washington, D.C., but his impact continues to harm millions of people. We will continue to use every legal tool at our disposal to keep unelected bureaucrats from misusing the public's most sensitive data as this case moves forward."
"If Americans' personal Social Security data is misused or abused by this administration, the Supreme Court's majority will have been fully complicit."
While the majority ruling was unsigned, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elana Kagan backed what was described as a "blistering" dissent, authored by Jackson, countering the determination and warning against continued access for DOGE while the case makes its way through the lower courts.
"On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans' legally protected, highly sensitive information that—if improperly handled or disseminated—risks causing significant harm," she wrote. "On the other, there is the government's desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE's access is lawful."
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, called the majority's ruling "extremely troubling" for a host of reasons.
"We echo the concerns of the minority, as articulated by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that the decision creates 'grave privacy risks' by giving DOGE 'unfettered data access — despite its failure to show any need or any interest in complying with existing privacy safeguards,'" said Richtman. "It is hard to justify the court's action, especially in light of the incompetent, reckless manner in which DOGE has already interfered with the operations of the Social Security Administration, prompting a spike in new Social Security claims by older people who fear the situation will only get worse."
Devon Ombres, senior director for Courts and Legal Policy at the center-left Center for American Progress, echoed those concerns.
"This action by six far-right justices is an affront to every principle of government transparency and the rule of law. DOGE has shown no need to review every American’s personal information, and the high court provides no explanation in granting it access," said Ombres. "Americans have no way to know how DOGE will use or misuse this information, nor what DOGE is or what it is doing. Shame on the court for rubber-stamping this administration’s lawlessness and further undermining the public’s trust in government, which President Trump has eroded."
Citing Musk, who recently left his position at DOGE and has been engaged in a high-profile spat with President Donald Trump in recent days, Richtman said the Tesla and SpaceX founder and world's richest man cannot be trusted, giving the lies he told about Social Security fraud that "undermined people's faith in the system."
"This hardly inspires confidence that DOGE has either the sense of ethics or public service to be entrusted with Americans' private data, leading us to believe that the court simply is abetting another dangerous power grab by the Executive branch," said Richtman. "If Americans' personal Social Security data is misused or abused by this administration, the Supreme Court's majority will have been fully complicit."
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Musk Exits Trump Administration, Leaving 'Legacy of Carnage and Corruption' in His Wake
"We will have to keep up the pressure, scrutiny, and eventually formal oversight until we finally take back our government from Musk and the entire billionaire class," said Rep. Greg Casar.
May 29, 2025
Billionaire Elon Musk announced late Wednesday that he is leaving the Trump administration after spearheading a monthslong, lawless rampage through the government that hollowed out entire agencies, hurled critical functions such as the distribution of Social Security benefits into chaos, and installed many unqualified lackeys whose work will continue in the coming months and years.
Musk's announcement came just ahead of the official May 30 deadline for his departure as a special government employee. That designation allowed the world's richest man to play a key role in the Trump White House without facing Senate confirmation or the full slate of ethics rules that apply to ordinary federal officials.
"As my scheduled time as a special government employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President [Donald Trump] for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending," Musk wrote on his social media platform, X. "The DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government."
While Musk came nowhere close to his initially stated goal of slashing $2 trillion in federal spending, his team's infiltration and efforts to gut federal agencies inflicted lasting damage, progressive lawmakers and watchdog groups said in response to news of his departure.
"DOGE is not a way of life, it's a mantra of destruction," said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. "The legacy of Elon Musk is lost livelihoods for critical government employees, hindered American education, loss of funding for scientists, and the violation of Americans' personal privacy, all in the service of corrupt tech-bro billionaire special interests."
"The carnage is even more horrifying internationally, as Musk's chainsaw will lead to the pointless and needless deaths of likely millions of people in the developing world," Gilbert added. "This is a legacy of carnage and corruption that will haunt us for many years to come."
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called Musk's exit a win for "the anti-corruption, anti-billionaire movement in American politics" but warned that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO's "likely goal is to continue exercising corrupt influence—just from behind a curtain, as billionaires too often do."
"We will have to keep up the pressure, scrutiny, and eventually formal oversight until we finally take back our government from Musk and the entire billionaire class," Casar said.
Next week, the Trump White House plans to send to the Republican-controlled Congress a $9.4 billion rescission package that, if passed, would codify some of the spending cuts pursued by Musk's team. Politicoreported that the package "will target NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid agencies that have already been gutted by the Trump administration."
The impact of DOGE-led attacks on federal agencies and Trump's withholding of hundreds of billions of dollars of congressionally approved spending will persist long after Musk's exit.
Reuters highlighted one example last week, reporting that "Head Start preschool programs for low-income U.S. children are scrambling to cope with funding cuts and delays, as they feel the squeeze of President Donald Trump's cost-cutting drive."
"Adding to the strain," the outlet noted, "Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency released $943 million less in congressionally approved funding for distribution through April 15 compared with the previous year."
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We've Endured a Half-Century of Kleptocrats' Plunder of People's Wealth and Health
Neoliberalism has spurred 45 years of financialization, as Wall St. pillages-for-profit every sector, from healthcare to housing.
May 21, 2025
The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration prioritized a standard for economic and democratic empowerment of the people. FDR's New Deal advanced the common good and an economy for the people. The 1935 Social Security Act became the boilerplate for universal healthcare.
The post-WWII "Golden Age" of capitalism boosted economic growth, people's prosperity, and middle class expansion, lasting until 1975—subsequently displaced by global neoliberal capitalism.
Principle Political Dichotomy: Corporatists vs. Working People
Since the 1970s white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and aspiring oligarchs have converged under the Republican Party umbrella to seek deconstruction of democracy toward harnessing wealth and political power, while promoting supremacistentitlement—the presumed right to criminalize and hold hostage other people's lives based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and class wealth.
Nixon Supreme Court appointee Lewis Powell's 1971 Memorandum, termed a "capitalist coup," further galvanized corporate money toward rewrite of law, policy, and judicial precedent to consolidate corporate political power.
Since Reagan, continual huge tax cuts for wealthy corporatists have spiked national deficits, paid for with deficit-cutting on the backs of working people by cutting public and social programs.
Kleptocracy, also known as "socioeconomic thievery," describes the half-century robbery of the American people by corrupt leaders who expropriate wealth of the governed for their own gain. Contemporary Gilded Age Robber Barons continue to expropriate people's wealth. A RAND Corporation Report reveals that from 1975-2023 the top 1% robbed $79 trillion from the bottom 90%. Had earnings remained equitably distributed at pre-1975 levels, the average worker in the bottom 90th percentile would earn $32,000 more annually.
Even as the neoliberal "greed is good" ethic prioritized enhancement of shareholder profits, Reagan administration neoliberalism supercharged wealth transfer upward, crushing unions and wages, gutting antitrust law, deregulating banks and industries, enabling predatory private equity practices, and legalizing stock buybacks that continue to multiply billionaires' wealth.
Neoliberalism has spurred 45 years of financialization, as Wall St. pillages-for-profit every sector, from healthcare to housing. Kleptocrats leverage rivers of dark money to capture media and dominate lobbyist-controlled legislatures and elections, flooding the 2024 election with nearly $2 billion.
Commodification of Health for Profit Betrays the Original Intent of Medicare
The Social Transformation of American Medicine, by sociologist Dr. Paul Starr is a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of corporate takeover of U.S. healthcare. Starr describes former President Richard Nixon as the first mainstream political leader to "take deliberate steps to change American healthcare from its longstanding not-for-profit business principles into a for-profit model to be driven by the insurance industry."
A 1971 video exchange between President Nixon and his aide John Ehrlichman celebrated the Kaiser CEO's prioritization of profit over healthcare. Enthused Ehrlichman, "...All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make."
Ostensibly intended to cut costs and improve healthcare access, Nixon's 1973 HMO Act advanced the concept of for-profit "managed care" health models. Each manifestation of managed care, including Accountable Care Organizations and Medicare Advantage, have proved increasingly profitable for Wall St. and the health industrial complex.
With passage of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, former President George W. Bush spearheaded privatized, for-profit Medicare Advantage insurance, purportedly written to "compete" with Original Medicare to save costs and improve healthcare access. Failing to do either, Medicare Advantage betrays the original intent of Medicare—to universalize coverage and rein in health costs with transparent pricing. Medicare Advantage plans often lack data and compliance information, while payment rates are manipulated based on a complex "risk modeling" process.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports: Even as Medicare Advantage insurers' profits are inflated, quality of patient care is reduced.
The United States remains an outlier—the only developed nation lacking universal healthcare, the only nation that places profiteering middlemen between patients and their doctors.
Since Reagan, continual huge tax cuts for wealthy corporatists have spiked national deficits, paid for with deficit-cutting on the backs of working people by cutting public and social programs. The 2025 Republican reconciliation bill promotes enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, and huge cuts to Medicaid and SNAP programs.
Were House Republicans serious about cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," instead of cutting Medicaid coverage for 8.7 million people, they would eliminate Medicare Advantage scams that bleed $140 billion in annual overpayments from the Medicare Trust Fund—invested in as a lifetime earned benefit by every U.S. worker. Fraudulent "upcoding" exaggerates patient health conditions, costing $23 billion in 2023 overpayments. Some Medicare Advantage plans employ AI or a computer algorithm to instantly deny payments—reportedly used by Cigna to deny over 300,000 requests for payments in 2022.
Rigged to maximize government overpayments to pad shareholder and CEO profits—ultimately to privatize Original Medicare—Medicare Advantage overpayments are funded by taxpayers and Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare enrollees, who pay, among other costs, increasing Medicare Part B premiums annually—totaling $13 billion higher premiums in 2024.
A physician-authored report advises: "The time has come to declare Medicare Advantage a failed experiment and abolish it." Taxpayer overpayments to Medicare Advantage should instead go to boost an economy and healthcare for the people by eliminating profit-maximizing insurance middlemen. At least 22 studies report annual $600 billion Medicare for All administrative savings, enough to extend comprehensive health coverage to all ages.
A 2018 economic analysis by UMass Amherst Economists concluded that Medicare for All would significantly improve healthcare outcomes, and reduce healthcare spending by nearly 10%—from approximately $3.24 trillion to approximately $2.93 trillion. Additional projected annual prescription drug savings total $200-$300 billion.
Washington Complicity in Half-Century Privatization of Medicare
Further boosting privatization of Medicare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) "innovative payment" experiments, modeled on "Managed Care" Accountable Care Organizations, were written into the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2023 that CMS experiments with "value-based" ACO payments failed to control costs, improve quality, or increase equity, costing Medicare $5.4 billion more than it saved during its first decade.
Medicare for All Would Vitalize an Economy for the People
The United States remains an outlier—the only developed nation lacking universal healthcare, the only nation that places profiteering middlemen between patients and their doctors. U.S. healthcare spending since 1980 outpaces other nations, and demonstrates "by far the worst overall health performance."
Only Single-Risk-Pool Medicare for All can leverage cost-savings of global health budgets to achieve financially sustainable, universal, comprehensive healthcare, while greatly reducing the 30% administrative costs of thousands of fragmented Medicare Advantage plans. The newly introduced Medicare for All Act of 2025 would eliminates out-of-pocket costs—premiums, copays, and deductibles—and unnecessary supplemental plans—Medicare Parts A, B, C, D, and Medigap.
For the first time in almost a century prioritization of universal health coverage would eliminate profiteering middlemen, boosting an economy that serves working people—not the ballooning billionaire kleptocracy.
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