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Thomas Friedman: “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future”

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2025 //
6

Thomas Friedman is not an alarmist. He has been writing about foreign policy for The New York Times for many years. He has written about crisis after crisis. But now we are an unprecedented point in our history. An unhinged ignorant man is President. Probably he is being manipulated by others. And at times, he acts on whims and grievances.

On any day, he comes up with some dangerous idea. He is ruining most people’s life savings. Eliminating or disabling federal agencies. Attacking academic freedom; extorting major law firms and universities. Trampling on the rule of law and the Constitutuon. There is no rationale or ending to his madness.

Friedman admits he is fearful for the future of our country. So am I. Trump is demolishing all established relationships, antagonizing allies, aligning us with Putin’s goals, and breaking whatever he can. Why? Either he is crazy or stupid or acting on Putin’s behalf. I believe it’s all of the above.

Friedman writes:

So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.

“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”

It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?

This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.

He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day —and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”

But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned. Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.

The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values.

And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.

First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.

“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries?” asked The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.

The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.

The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons.

Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead.

You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.

Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners.

And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.

In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”

Does that mean China will leave us in the dust? No. Beijing is making a huge mistake if it thinks the rest of the world is going to let China indefinitely suppress its domestic demand for goods and services so the government can go on subsidizing export industries and try to make everything for everyone, leaving other countries hollowed out and dependent. Beijing needs to rebalance its economy, and Trump is right to pressure it to do so.

But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.

The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.

Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.

So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos.

If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous.

I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Stupid, Trump, Tyranny

ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2025 //
1

Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.

Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica wrote this report:

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

Categories Data, Disruption, Environment, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Research, Stupid, Trump

Trump Posts an Angry, Bitter Easter Message on “Truth Social”

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2025 //
56

Donald Trump showed his vicious, vengeful character in his Easter message, where his hatred was on full display. He posted it on his social media platform TRUTH SOCIAL. Does he know what Easter is about?

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten! Sleepy Joe Biden purposefully allowed Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America. He was, by far, our WORST and most Incompetent President, a man who had absolutely no idea what he was doing — But to him, and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!

Categories Character, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Ignorance, Insane, Stupid, Trump

Thomas L. Friedman: After Trump’s Tariff Fiasco, Will Any Other Nation Trust America?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2025 //
8

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs opinion writer for The New York Times. In this post, he excoriates Trump for his arrogance and stupidity in handling the tariffs issue, and especially for his arrogance and stupidity in dealing with China. First, he insisted that he would “hang tough” on his plan to impose draconian tariffs. When the stock and bond markets crashed, he decided to put a 90-day pause on tariffs, exempting China.

He has alienated our allies and outraged China. His arrogance has isolated us in the world as a faithless bully. It seems that Trump’s “art of the deal” consists of bullying, threatening, insulting, and humiliating the other party. It doesn’t work in the international stage. Trump dissipated long-standing alliances and has made us look foolish in the eyes of the world. In less than three months, he has squandered good will, scorned close relationships, and thrown away our reputation as “leader of the free world.” The emperor has no clothes. He stands naked before the world as a stupid and reckless man.

It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He went bankrupt six times. No American bank would extend loans to him because of his abysmal record. Yet his MAGA cult believes in his business acumen because he played a successful businessman on TV. He is a performer who knows nothing about foreign trade, economics, or history.

How will we survive four years of Trump’s demented whims?

Friedman wrote:

I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.

Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.

After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.

Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”

But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.

Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again?

This was the trade equivalent of the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan, from which it never quite recovered. But at least Joe Biden got us out of a costly no-win war for which America, in my opinion, is now much better off.

Trump just put us into a no-win war.

How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.

But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.

Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.

But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.

Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.

What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Ignorance, International, Stupid, Trump

Should We Trust Trump?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
7

Trump is a performer who plays the part of a businessman. In New York City, he was known for his high-flying lifestyle, his frequent appearances at nightclubs, and his escapades with beautiful women. A businessman? He declared bankruptcy six times. His credit rating was so poor that no American bank would lend him money.

MAD magazine published this Trump cartoon in 1992:

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Economy, Ethics, Failure, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

Trump Declares All State Environmental Laws to be Null and Void

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2025 //
37

Trump signed an executive order declaring all state laws that address climate change to be null and void. He claims that efforts to protect the environment are a hindrance to energy production. So ignoring climate change is important to national security because we need oil and gas more than we need clean air and water.

Remember when Trump said he was eliminating the Departnent of Education because states should manage their own schools and the federal government should get out of the way? Why can’t states make decisions about clean air, clean water, and auto efficiency?

Categories Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Science, Stupid, Trump

Washington Post: Social Security Facing Chaos After DOGE Cuts

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
6

What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?

The Washington Post reported on chaos at the Social Security Administratuin:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.

The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.

“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.

“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.

The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.

The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.

A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.

The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.

“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”

The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.

Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.

The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.

Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.

In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.

The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.

But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.

At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.”

“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.

Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..

What readers are saying

The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Science, Stupid, Trump

Rex Huppke: Trump Golfs While His Tariffs Destroy the Global Economy

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
9

Rex Huppke writes opinion columns for USA Today. In his latest column, he muses about Trump’s on balance as most Americans watch their retirement savings melt away.

He has a way of finding the humor in gut-wrenching events. Recently he has been writing about Trump’s demolition of the global economy. Don’t worry if your life savings is shrinking. Trump isn’t worried. Trump promises a future of plenty, someday. Trust him at your own risk.

It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He filed for bankruptcy six times. American banks would not lend him money because he was not credit-worthy. His “Trump University” was required by the courts to pay former students $25 million for defrauding them. People forget that he played a businessman on TV. If they knew that, they might be reluctant to support his decision to impose tariffs on every nation (except Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus.) He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He thinks we should not have any deficits. I heard a law professor explain how crazy that idea is. He said, “I shop at my local grocery store and have spent thousands of dollars there. They don’t buy anything from me. I have a large trade deficit with that store.” Nuts.

Huppke writes:

While Americans reeled from watching the economy tank and their retirement accounts get slap-chopped, President Donald Trump – lover of tariffs, destroyer of economies, liar above all – spent the weekend golfing in Florida and hobnobbing with wealthy pals.

He was gracious enough to take a break from the links Saturday to tell Americans, via social media, to “HANG TOUGH.”

Thanks, buddy. As we await whatever fresh hell Monday’s stock market brings and brace for the global response to the ludicrous tariffs you slapped on pretty much everyone, including some random penguins, we’ll do our best to hang tough, comforted by the fact that you and your assorted weirdo billionaires had a lovely weekend.

Look, the let-them-eat-cake vibe of Trump golfing while our economy burns – he even posted a video of himself playing on one of his own stupid golf courses – is enough to put satirists out of work.Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

And I’d almost be able to swallow the maddening absurdity of it all if Trump and his Republican barnacles would just straight up admit their galactic-level hypocrisy.

What if a Democratic president had done this?

None of what Trump is doing with tariffs is a surprise. He told us over and over that he was going to do this. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.

So, of course, he has ignorantly unleashed tariffs that are upending the world trade order and making everyone hate us. Anyone surprised by this insanity hasn’t been paying attention.

But imagine an America where a Democratic president got fixated on tariffs while clearly not understanding how tariffs work. An America where that Democratic president needlessly triggered a trade war, watched the stock market plummet for two days, then trotted off for a golf weekend during which he profited off people partying at his resort.

Would Fox News preach patience if a Democrat tanked the economy?

And let’s say this Democratic president has a weirdo rich pal he named Treasury secretary, and that guy – who’s worth a cool half-billion at least – went on TV and shrugged off the idea that Americans thinking about retiring are worried about the tariffs fallout.

In this scenario, Republicans would have already impeached the Democratic president – twice. Pitchfork sales among right-leaning Americans would have skyrocketed, and the Treasury secretary would have had to flee the country. Fox News would have wall-to-wall coverage painting this hypothetical president as a literal demon and demanding he step down because he’s insane or a communist or both.

That would bring a third impeachment from Republicans, and Fox News itself, along with the entire right-wing media ecosystem, would explode with enough ferocity to open a portal to another dimension.

Imagine if Biden did even a fraction of the damage Trump has done.

That hypothetical is 1,000% accurate. You know it. I know it. Republicans know it, and Fox News sure as hell knows it.

If Joe Biden, as president, intentionally murdered the stock market, it would have ended his presidency. Period. Biden, instead, made our economy the envy of the world and Republicans still wanted to end his presidency. So don’t tell me any of what Trump is doing would be even momentarily tolerated if Trump were a Democrat. 

This point is not debatable.

I’m sick of people shrugging off GOP hypocrisy – they need to own it

So all I ask, as my 401(k) shrivels like a raisin and rich jerks keep telling me to suck it up, is that Trump and his Republican bootlickers and all the little goobers on Fox News and Newsmax and the Illustrious King Trump Mighty Genius Appreciation Network (I might’ve made that last one up) muster the decency to admit they’re giant freakin’ hypocrites.

I’m talking about apex hypocrites. These are unrivaled practitioners of the dark art of hypocrisy. 

And they need to own it.

Better to be poor and honest than poor and a liar, right?

C’mon, tough guys. Show a modicum of courage and tell us what we already know. 

What do you have to lose? Your guy is in charge. He’s taking a wrecking ball to America, and there’s little people like me can do other than come up with clever opposition slogans for protest signs.

As the markets crash and the imaginary factories Trump keeps babbling about never come and regular Americans start Googling recipes that can stretch a pack of bologna out for a full week, Republicans need to say it loud and say it proud: “We are total hypocrites and we’re only OK with this mess because a Republican created it!”

You may end up as broke as the rest of us, but at least you’ll be able to tell your pauper children that, in the end, you were honest.

Do it, you cowards.

Categories Cruelty, Economy, Extremism, International, Stupid, Trump

Gary Legum: Elon Musk Is Screwing Up Social Security

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2025 //
11

Social Security is called the third rail of American politics. The third rail is the one you never touch because it will electrocute you. millions of retirees will want your scalp. Many have no other income.

But Elon Musk is fearless. He thinks he knows how to “fix” Social Security. Not only is he sure that billions are wasted on dead people but now he thinks the computer code must be rewritten.

Gary Legum of Wonkette explains how Musk is touching the third rail:

Having already fucked up the Social Security Administration six ways from Sunday with staff cuts and new ID requirements and field office closures, the incels of the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly plotting one more big step in their rampage: They are planning to rewrite the SSA’s entire computer codebase in a more modern programming language. And they plan to have this project completed in “a few months.”

Oh guess what, it’s Saturday morning (Gary wrote this post Friday afternoon) and the Social Security website is already down.

It has been a long time since we had a database/computer technology-adjacent job, but we know enough to understand that migrating a huge system with a reported 60 million lines of code is not something that happens that quickly. This is a years-long sort of job, one that will take the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It’s a delicate undertaking, and the vampires of DOGE have proven themselves anything but delicate.

Of course, they have also proven that they genuinely don’t give a shit if you wind up sleeping under a railroad trestle after their hacky changes leave you listed as “dead” in Social Security’s databases, so there is one more reason to not trust them if you needed one.

So, we hope you current Social Security recipients enjoyed getting your benefit checks or your benefit direct deposits on time! Hell, we hope you enjoyed getting them, period. Because there is an excellent chance all that is about to be deader than Elon Musk’s soul.

Wired reports on the new plan in a frightening new story with the words “System Collapse” prominently displayed in the title. It all reads as stupid as it sounds. The basic gist is that SSA systems still run on COBOL, a common, business-oriented programming language that has been around since the 1950s. COBOL has lasted this long for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that it still works really well. Programmers at the SSA still actively work with it despite the existence of newer, more modern programming languages for a few reasons, one of which is that it is very robust. So robust, in fact, that quite a few federal government systems still run on it.

The federal government tends to lag way behind in modernizing the technology that bureaucrats use to keep the country running. But as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And DOGE has already proven that it is unfamiliar with COBOL conventions, as Wired already explained in an earlier story about why, contra Musk’s band of Nazi virgins, there were not actually millions of Social Security checks going out to 150-year-olds.

This is one system you do not want to screw up until you are absolutely, positively sure any replacement system is up and chugging along. The computers at Social Security are paying benefits to 65 million Americans every month. For many of them, this is their only source of income. Fuck it up, and people, especially the elderly, can’t pay rent or buy food. Their existence is already precarious enough.

Yet that is likely to be the result when the weasels of DOGE (we very much appreciate the Wired locution referring to it as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” as it is anything but that) get through here.

How enormous an undertaking is it to move the SSA off of COBOL? Let Wired tell you:

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

Lot of problems with that, starting with the fact that even generative AI code still has to be checked for errors. And if it’s wrong, someone still has to manually fix it. What do you think the chances are that DOGE will thoroughly test any changes made by either humans or a technology capable of about the same level of thought as a blender? We’re not talking about Jarvis from the Iron Man movies, we’re talking about Large Language Models of code trained on other code written by humans that likely contains plenty of its own errors. The possibilities for disaster are infinite.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

This is just basic quality assurance testing. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the sorts of dweebs hired by Elon Musk — and by Donald Trump for that matter, he’s still allegedly the president — is that they simply shrug when something breaks before moving along to the last thing. Careless people smashing things up and then leaving the mess in their wakes for others to clean up, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once memorably said of another generation of arrogant, over-moneyed chucklefucks.

Wags online are suggesting that breaking Social Security is the entire point. Conservatives have long wanted to end the program. But too many people rely on it, so cuts are impossible to get through Congress. It’s the infamous third rail of American politics.

If, on the other hand, Social Security broke because a bunch of nerds broke it, and then nobody could get hold of anyone at the agency to help sort out why their measly $2,000 check hasn’t come through this month because DOGE shut down all phone help lines and closed many field offices that people could otherwise have gone to, well, that’s just an act of God that can’t be helped. Shrug and move on to the next thing, the Silicon Valley ethos.

We doubt it is one reason more than another. Sure, ending Social Security through the back door would fulfill a long-term goal of the Right. It could also be that the DOGE guys really are so high on themselves that they look at government programmers and think, What a bunch of dinosaurs! Get out of the way, old people, and let us show you how this shit gets done.

Well, we weren’t going to be able to retire for awhile anyway. Now maybe we’ll just work until we drop dead under that railroad trestle where we’ll spend our dotage.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Stupid, Technology

Washington Post: Trump and RFK Jr. Are Destroying Public Health Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2025 //
4

The Washington Post editorial board warned that Robert Kennedy’s deep cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services will damage the economy. They will also damage the nation’s health. Kennedy is not laying off paper-pushing bureaucrats. He is firing scientists and closing divisions working on drugs and cures for dangerous diseases and conditions.

The editorial board wrote:

The market took no time to weigh in on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mass layoffs at the nation’s health agencies. As Health and Human Services employees arrived to work on Tuesday to discover their badges no longer worked, stock prices for health-care and biotech companies plunged. By the end of the day, the S&P’s index for the pharmaceutical industry had dropped 4 percent.

This should be a warning to the new HHS secretary and President Donald Trump: The employees of these institutions are as essential to the U.S. economy as they are to public health.

HHS officials have defended their planned 25 percent reduction in force (affecting about 20,000 employees) as a means to achieve efficiency. They claim it will save taxpayers about $1.8 billion annually. But this amount — minuscule relative to the multitrillion-dollar federal budget — could be wiped out by the economic damage that comes from discarding broad institutional knowledge.

The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, is slated to shed 3,500 staffers, or about 19 percent of its workforce. Among those who received layoff notices on Tuesday were many experts who assist with reviews at the Office of New Drugs. The director of this office, Peter Stein, resigned after being reassigned to patient affairs. Other top leaders have also been pushed out, including Hilary Marston, the FDA’s chief medical officer, and Peter Marks, its highest-ranking vaccine scientist.

HHS insists these layoffs will not weaken the agency’s core functions, especially drug approvals — but given how many high-level positions now sit vacant, this is hard to believe. Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner during Trump’s first term, said on X that the “barrage” threatens to bring “frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need.”

The National Institutes of Health, a sturdy engine of biomedical innovation, also saw many of its leaders defenestrated. Directors of at least four of the 27 institutes that make up the agency were removed from their posts, including Jeanne Marrazzo, the country’s most senior infectious-diseases official.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other layoffs at the agency’s research centers threaten to diminish its scientific prowess. The National Human Genome Research Institute, for one, which has made countless discoveries about the roles genes play in diseases, lost dozens of staffers as well as its acting chief, Vence L. Bonham Jr., who was installed just last month.

This turmoil comes amid the administration’s attempt to slash funding that NIH provides to outside research institutions. The administration seems not to care about U.S. investments in science that have been essential to building and maintaining a strong economy.

Equally concerning is what these layoffs could mean for public health. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is set to lose 2,400 workers (an 18 percent reduction in staff), HHS cost-cutters have erased entire offices, including those dedicated to curbing HIV, tuberculosis, tobacco use, lead poisoning, substance abuse, birth defects and many other health threats. Kennedy — who also laid off many of the department’s communications staffers — has provided little rationale for any of these cuts. But if his goal is to save money, this is the wrong strategy. By keeping health-care costs down, public health programs often bring substantial returns on investment.

What makes these risky cuts especially baffling is that they’re being made only a few years after the covid-19 pandemic taught Americans about the need for a strong public health system, and amid the worst domestic measles outbreak in years. Bird flu also has begun spreading to humans — yet among those laid off were nearly all of the leading staffers at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, which is assisting the government with its bird flu response.

It’s true that HHS’s vast bureaucracy has long needed serious — even radical — reforms to eliminate waste and make its agencies more effective. The CDC often acted clumsily during the pandemic and struggled to communicate effectively with the public. And although the FDA was streamlined during the Biden administration, it could use innovative ideas to energize its food division — perhaps by making it a stand-alone agency.

But the job cuts this week do not amount to efficient reform. The Trump administration has shown great skill at “moving fast and breaking things,” to borrow the motto used by chief bureaucracy-smasher Elon Musk. But Trump and Kennedy should remember, too, that when “you break it, you buy it.” The damage they do to the country’s public health and biomedical research infrastructure is their responsibility, and they will bear the political consequences.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Stupid, Trump
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