Yves here. A not-surprising Trump abuse: mangling the Social Security database so that people who are alive are designated as dead.  The excuse is that DOGE is purging “illegal” immigrants, so as to make them financial unpersons and force them to leave the US.  But natch, this job is b being badly done, since tech bros who like to break things and worry about damage later are in charge.  This practice is  a brute force way of reducing payouts, particularly in combination with staffing cuts that greatly increase the difficulty of getting records corrected. And it further guts the ability of Social Security staffers to do their regular work.

Please forward this post to your Congresscritters, with a note that these instances alone demonstrate that DOGE needs to be barred from making changes to Social Security databases and code.

By Darius Tahir, KFF Health News correspondent, who previously worked for

Keep reading this article on Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith) - Blog.