Member Newsletter
One of the central features of Trumpism is that Trump never wants to deal in pain. Not for people who might vote for him. Or at least, no pain to anyone who might vote for him … that they would blame on him. That’s why, at least in concept, he’s always said he’d never support cuts to Social Security or Medicare. That’s in concept of course. What happens down in the fine print of administrative decisions or omnibus tax bills is another matter. But the position in concept is still important and fairly consistent. But over the last couple weeks things have gone sideways in a pretty big way. And key players in his administration-in-the-making are now proposing massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
Let’s go to Trump and Musk’s DOGE clown show. As you know, Trump has in some post-politics, performative sense authorized this government streamlining panel, run by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which will radically cut the size of the federal government and reduce its spending by at least one third — two trillion dollars annually. Completely insane numbers. But for the moment, DOGE is the great performative political shiny object of the Trump 2.0 Era. Republicans and the part of modern conservatism that blends into right-wing influencer culture is giddy about the possibilities. Democrats are terrified that Musk is essentially taking over the federal government. What everyone agrees — for better or worse — is that it’s a huge, huge deal.
I’m normally not the biggest fan of the Punchbowl newsletter. But this, from yesterday, is actually a good rundown of what DOGE remains, just an advisory thing that will propose things to Trump and the Republican Congress. It’s as powerful as whatever Trump feels he can do by executive action or Congress can do with legislation. For now, every Republican and even a few Democrats want to group around DOGE and get some of the magical fairy dust, kind of a post-reality rave and dance party for bad people. But the appropriators, the people in Congress who decide how money is spent, are mostly saying nice things and “we’ll get back to you, but sounds lovely” and moon-walking away from the conversation.
Of course, there’s the additional matter that Musk can use his mix of media platform dominance and paid media to push his ideas. But for my present purposes that’s a different issue. My hunch is also that Trump and Musk are on an inevitable collision course and destined for a break-up that will be intense, ugly and possibly hilarious. But again, another story for another day.
Starting a few days ago, Musk commented approvingly on a long thread by a longtime Social Security abolitionist, Senator Mike Lee, making the case for abolishing Social Security and replacing it with private accounts. This was followed by a series of remarks by both either saying Social Security is a scam or, alternatively, that you can cut billions or hundreds of billions and no one will notice. Just Wednesday Ramaswamy went on CNBC and in addition to discussing various other ideas about innovation and efficiency, noted that there are “hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract just from basic program integrity measures” out of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the quote suggests he thinks he can claw back these savings by cutting off benefits to people who don’t really deserve them or are legally entitled to them.
Whatever!!!
‘Tis not for me to question why one of Donald Trump’s budget cutting czars says he wants to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare and another seems to want to abolish Social Security altogether. All that matters is that they do.
Are you represented by a Republican member of Congress? Or, really, are you represented by a Democratic one? I would right away call their office and ask if they support this plan to make these drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He says “hundreds of billions” — draconian level cuts. They’ve made numerous comments like this over the last few days. But the clearest is the comment to CNBC, which I linked above. Ask if they support this or have a position on it. And I’d be grateful if you let me know what you heard.
Thanks.