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The Lawfare Podcast
Lawfare Daily: Social Security, the ‘Death Master File,’ and Immigration Enforcement
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host
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- [01:02]
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- [01:36]
Devon O'Connor
Are they claiming for themselves the ability to mark someone as dead knowingly who hasn't died? And I think that's where the sort of, you know, the specifics of it aren't nearly as important in some ways as just that one bare fact.
- [01:55]
Quinta Jurecik
It's the lawfare podcast. I'm Senior Editor Quinta Jurecik, here with Kathleen romig and Devon O'Connor of the center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
- [02:06]
Kathleen Romig
When we say that we're worried about the Social Security Administration weaponizing the death master file against political enemies, that's not just a dark fantasy. That's something that they've proven that they are willing to do, and that they did do against Governor Mills.
- [02:21]
Quinta Jurecik
We're talking about the Trump administration's reported efforts to wield data from the Social Security Administration as a tool of immigration enforcement. We're here to discuss what I think is one of the stranger and frankly, more disturbing efforts spearheaded by Elon Musk's Doge Project, which is the plan to leverage the Social Security Administration's death master file as a tool for immigration enforcement. Before we get too deep in though, I do want to start with the basics. What exactly is the death master file?
- [02:54]
Devon O'Connor
You have to start with the idea that the Social Security administration has been tasked with ensuring that everyone gets the Social Security benefits they're entitled to. But when you think about it, the Social Security Administration doesn't know who is going to be entitled to benefits in the future, and then they need to know how much that person is going to be entitled to. So as a result, they kind of have to keep tabs on the work histories of basically any person who performs what's called covered work, you know, work where you're paying Social Security taxes, and they could someday determine whether you get benefits and how much you get. And of course, one eligibility criterion for receiving Social Security benefits is being alive. And one form of Social Security benefits that you may be eligible for are called survivor benefits, which are the benefits paid to a spouse or a dependent, like a young child, on the basis of a deceased worker's work history, if that spouse and child are eligible to receive the benefits. But you have to confirm that the worker is dead. So there are basically two really good reasons. The Social Security Administration needs to know who's died, and the Social Security administration is charged with collecting the information they need to administer Social Security benefits. But it's not the case that we have some, you know, federal vital statistics office or agency that's charged with collecting all that information. So, you know, the Social Security Administration can't just go and ask them. They don't exist. So instead, they have to be the ones who go and gather that information, and the death master file is the result. And if you want, we can talk a little bit more about, you know, how Social Security gathers that information. You know, but importantly for our discussion, which I think we'll probably get to, you know, the Social Security Administration ultimately isn't the only organization that uses that information.
- [04:42]
Quinta Jurecik
And I have to ask, why is it called the death master file? That just sounds incredibly ominous.
- [04:48]
Devon O'Connor
I mean, I think totally fair. I think that it is a description of what it is. And really the way to think about it is the Social Security administration, as I said before, is keeping tabs on everybody, and they have something that's called the numident. And the numident is a database essentially, of every time anyone applies for a Social Security card or is assigned a Social Security number, they go into the database. And then one of the things, like we said, that the Social Security administration is tracking is when or if those people die. And so the death master file is sort of the extraction of that information. A way of sharing information about everyone with a Social Security number who the Social Security Administration has information suggesting they have died.
- [05:35]
Quinta Jurecik
And so what has the administration done and what is it planning to do with the file that has gotten so much attention recently?
- [05:43]
Kathleen Romig
A couple of things. One is what had been widely reported before now, this project that Elon Musk calls the are you alive? Project, and what he characterizes as a cleanup of Social Security's death information. So that's taking that numenant file, that and for people who were born typically before 1920, adding synthetic dates of death. So they've already done that for 10 million people or 10 million numbers. And reportedly they're going to continue to do this project. And so what's notable about that is that they're not following the same protocols that SSA has done in the past when they clean up this data. So for example, they're using synthetic dates of death. They're not necessarily confirming that the person is in fact dead from another source, which is usually what they do.
- [06:36]
Quinta Jurecik
And to clarify, when you say a synthetic date of death, that just means that like they're making up a date.
- [06:40]
Kathleen Romig
They'Re making up a date of death. Exactly. So the death date, the death date is the run date of when they do the, you know, when they process these files. And they're processing them millions at a time. And so they will say for, you know, for every single person who was run on, you know, say let's to say they're doing it tomorrow on April 26th, they'll say their date of death is April 26th, 2025. And so that, you know, SSA takes the idea of data integrity very seriously and for good reason. As Devin described, they need to know the actual date of death in order to, you know, administer the Social Security programs. And so this is just not typically how it's done. There's usually a lot of safeguards to ensure that they are not erroneously marking someone as dead when they're really alive. And right now, at the pace that they're doing this and without the verification that they normally do, and the fact that they're using these made up or synthetic dates of death, all of those things are concerning. And in fact, we are hearing that more frequent reports, at least anecdotally, of living people accidentally being marked dead as part of this effort. So that was the first thing, but it's not the most ominous thing. And Devin? Yes, go ahead.
- [07:53]
Devon O'Connor
So I was going to say, so if that's the challenge that comes with accidentally marking someone as dead, and being more aggressive in trying to close out these open records. And it's worth saying because a lot of this started with I think Elon Musk tweeting about, oh, this Social Security database. There are millions of people who are not marked as dead or I forget what his exact expression, but he was joking about Twilight. Are there people walking around vampires who are 150 years old collecting Social Security, you know, benefits? And it's very clear that that's not what's happening and that this has been a long time known challenge, which is that, you know, Social Security is a program that started in the 1930s and they've been when they started collecting information on people, you know, it was on paper records, maybe it became on microfiche, maybe it was went to disks and now we're in the sort of digital era. But like there were a lot of like, you know, shoeboxes full of paper records to go. And when they started, you know, someone whose information they were collecting in 1930, you know, may have been alive for decades before that. And so you can imagine that over time there's lots of reasons why there would be incomplete records. And Social Security doesn't just want to mark a Social Security number holder as dead without knowing. So there was a large set of these numbers, you know, seemingly, you know, seemingly of high age where there just was no confirmed date of death, not to say that they were alive. And in most of these cases, you know, the inspector general's office and others are doing checks to say like, are these people receiving benefits? Oh, they're not receiving benefits. So it's not. They may appear to be 150 years old, but that seems like a recordsmith. So why don't you just close that off? Well, the answer is what Kathleen said, right? What if you accidentally close it off and the mistake wasn't that that person was 150 years old, but that like someone keyed in a birth date of, you know, 1912, when the birth date was 2012. And now you've created a problem for some, you know, currently 13 year old in the future when they realized that someone thought that they were 113. And so that was suspicious, but in reality, like the mistake was something else. So you just, you just don't lightly, you know, without having received information about the deaths. And maybe we should talk about how they gather that death information too at some point. But this was the, this is the challenge of accidentally marking someone dead as they sort of aggressively go to try to close out these records. Then as Kathleen alluded to, they. They moved into a different world, which is intentionally marking someone as dead, even when they know that person is still alive. And so what we saw was that the New York Times reported that on April 8, the names of more than 6,300 people were added to the Death Master file list, knowingly, even though those people were alive. And this was a list that was sent to the Social Security Administration by DOGE staffers and allegedly was comprised of migrants whose status had just been revoked, meaning that they had been lawfully present, they had been granted a Social Security number and ability to work in the country, but that that status was taken away from them by this administration, and coincident with taking that status away, they were going to add these people to the death masterpile. And they said, you know, not publicly, not in any sort of straightforward way, but in response to stories about this on background or in statements to reporters, they said this was a list that was limited to people that the administration said were convicted criminals and suspected terrorists. But the Washington Post reported that that list included, you know, among other things, like a few minors, you know, a child as young as 13, and that the staff at SSA who had received this list, you know, did a quick check on their databases to see if there was any criminal interactions or signs of, you know, criminal records on some of these younger Social Security number holders and couldn't find any. So it's hard to take the representations of the Trump administration totally at face value. And it also feels like maybe that description was overly broad, or the list may be overly broad, or there may be some mistakes, and then the other part of it, so we can talk about what happened with that and all the sort of risks and fears and concerns that that might raise. But there is also worth keeping in mind that there has been reporting suggesting that the Trump administration is considering doing this for a large, expanded list of folks. Right? And there were. We know that there are hundreds of thousands of folks who were lawfully paroled into the country from Cuba, from Haiti, from Venezuela, and there were hundreds of thousands of people who entered the country and were given work authorization under the CB1 program during the Biden administration. And the Trump administration has said that they are, you know, immediately revoking the parolee status of all of those people who came in through parole, that they are ending the lawful status of all those people who use the CB1 program. And so that's going to play out in the courts, because that's still being determined, you know, whether that was that revocation of status is being done lawfully. But that just adds sort of one more element as they're adding people now to the death master file list, you know, that, that, that, that sort of, that sort of is their presentation of who this is affecting. But it raises just the most fundamental question, which is are they claiming for themselves the ability to mark someone as dead knowingly who hasn't died? And I think that's where the sort of, you know, the specifics of it aren't nearly as important in some ways as just that one bare fact.
- [13:15]
Quinta Jurecik
So I want to dig into that. But before we do, I think you touched on something that is worth clarifying. It may not be a immediately obvious to listeners why someone who is potentially subject to removal from the United States would have a Social Security number to begin with. And Devin, you kind of touched on that there, but can you just kind of walk us through like let's say, you know, I'm someone who is currently in the United States without documentation. What is my interaction with the Social Security Administration such that I actually would have that number and would have engagement with the, with the administration, would be paying into it, so on and so forth?
- [13:54]
Kathleen Romig
Well, undocumented immigrants do not receive Social Security numbers from the Social Security Administration, full stop. If you're not documented, you do not lawfully get an ssn. But immigrants who are lawfully present and work authorized must have a Social Security number. And that's because they are legally required to make contributions into the Social Security program when they work. So in the Social Security act it says the commissioner must assign Social Security numbers to for lawfully present and work authorized immigrants as soon as possible and keep careful records of their wages. For the reasons that Devyn described. Sometimes lawfully present immigrants without work authorization are also assigned Social Security numbers. Sometimes they just need a Social Security number for another reason. But all of these Social Security numbers are flagged with codes to indicate and even write on the card itself to indicate what kind of a number it is. So like I was born here in the US So my Social Security card is just a plain card. But if I were a work authorized immigrant who was not a citizen, it would say right on the card, you must check this worker's immigration paperwork and their work authorization for them to work. And likewise, if they didn't have work authorization, it would say that on the Social Security card and also in the electronic files as well. So the fact that a non citizen would be getting a Social Security number when their work authorized is not a problem. Even though Elon Musk and some of the Doge people that he's working with have purported it to be some kind of a scandal. It's exactly the lawful way to do things. We want lawfully present work, authorized workers to be paying into the system. That's the law. And also it helps Social Security's finances.
- [15:42]
Quinta Jurecik
So let's talk about why the implications of this are so extreme. And Martin O'Malley, who led the Social Security Administration under President Biden, gave this really striking quote to the New York Times where he described being added to the death list when you're not dead as tantamount to, and I quote, financial murder. So what happens if you add someone who is alive to the death list? What are the ramifications for their life?
- [16:09]
Devon O'Connor
Sure. So I think, you know, it's not just the former commissioner saying that, you know, the acting commissioner was quoted in one of the pieces as basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing, but he basically said, we are doing this to terminate their financial life, the people being targeted. There's two sort of prongs from which that emanates. And to do that, like if you will spare a quick story about the death master file. So Social Security, as we said, collecting the death master file, death information on all of these people in 1980, and I hope I don't get any of the facts of this wrong, but in 1980, a postal service worker who thought that there were pension benefits going to people who were deceased as he's delivering or as he's seeing people deliver, and he said, well, you know, the Social Security Administration collects this death information. If we had the use of this death information, we could stop this from happening. And he sues the Social Security Administration, basically. And they come to a agreement, a consent agreement that says this information that's being collected as part of the what we call the death master file. Right. Should be public information. And the argument was that normally you wouldn't share information like that because there'd be a Privacy act concern, like you can't share people's information. But the argument that they made was, well, these people are dead, so they don't have privacy rights. And they entered into an agreement that said the Social Security Administration would make available, you know, through a Freedom of Information act request. Right. In the same way that you can get, you know, that certain information held by the government is potentially publicly available to you, that the death master file would be one of those things. Now, I'm skipping over a lot of developments, but a lot of people realize that having Access to death information like that, you know, in a central repository would be valuable, would be something that they could use, whether for anti fraud purposes or for some, you know, legitimate business purposes. Over time people realized, well, there's a lot of risks with making all of that information available, especially if you end up with, you know, fraudsters and kind of a foot race. They find out who's died and what their Social Security number was, and they go on a race before someone else figures out that that name and Social Security number belongs to someone who is dead. And so they came to kind of an agreement. And the way that it has shook out over time is that the Social Security Administration maintains the Death Master File for its own use and for the use of the federal government in ways that Congress has determine, which includes a lot of information that was reported to them by the states. The state's information the Social Security Administration doesn't have the right to share. But for the other information that they've gathered in order to do this, you know, it was determined that they could share that. So they said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make the full Death Master file, excluding the state information, available to anyone in the public who wants it, but they can have it on a three year delay because of this sort of concern over fraud. So you know, today you could go and you could get access to this, but if you have a legitimate business or anti fraud purpose and you're willing to certify that purpose and you sort of will get certified that you're going to protect this data and use this data appropriately, then you can pay the Commerce Department some money. And on a weekly basis, as frequently as a weekly basis, you can get the Death Master File for your business purposes at least the federal information, not the state information they collected. But like, so they call that the limited death master file. And that is information that, you know, credit companies may be using, your bank may be using, life insurance companies will use, pension administrators will use. And so in this way, the death Master file is both a federal tool that has been shared with federal agencies to ensure that if you have a benefit, you know, and being alive is a relevant criteria for receiving that benefit, that they can use it as an eligibility check, that it can be shared. Congress provided an avenue for it to be shared with through data agreements. So you put on the list, you know, accidentally, you could be a, you know, a senior. All of a sudden Medicare thinks you're not alive anymore. Your Social Security benefit could stop, you know, Federal benefits are really effective. But even for someone, you know, which is almost assuredly the case for some of the lawfully, the formally lawfully present folks that we're talking about, you know, even though they probably weren't eligible for any benefits, they weren't receiving, you know, federal benefits, they're still going to be affected because that information is potentially depending on their bank, you know, and their credit score. You know, the next time they go and apply for a job, if someone checks to see is this person legitimate, and it turns out this person is dead, well, that's going to complicate things. You know, if you go to get money out of your bank and your bank thinks that you've died, that's going to complicate things. You know, you're. You're just going to find that depending on who has access to that death master file information, all of a sudden, you know, being found to be dead is a huge pain in the neck, and it's going to cut you off from all kinds of financial resources. It's going to complicate your lives in a million ways. And the Social Security Administration, right, they have been doing, you know, millions of people die every year and mistakes get made. And they've done everything in the past. They've worked really hard to limit the number of mistakes. But they will acknowledge when a mistake happens, it's really dangerous. It's both very painful, it's very frustrating. It takes a lot of time to go build everything back. But it's also really dangerous if you're being separated from your benefits, you're being separated from your access to your money. If you're being turned down, you know, for credit at the wrong time or whatever the case may be, it is really risky. And so they've tried to make it as easy as possible when a mistake happens to prove that you do not belong. I mean, you have to prove that you're alive, which actually, you know, is pretty straightforward to do. You walk into a Social Security office with a little bit of ID and you're like, I'm alive. And then they'll give you a letter because then you now are going on an odyssey that you do not want to go on, but a journey to all of your financial institutions that may have found out that you've died to try to repair the damage. So these are really consequential mistakes. And when they happen, it's a lot of pain. But it seems like for the first time, the Social Security administration and the Trump administration are attempting to weaponize that to actually deliver those consequences on purpose. And again, to quote the acting commissioner, apparently, you know, to try to terminate someone's financial life as a way of. Of punishing them, a way of trying to force them into some action.
- [22:19]
Quinta Jurecik
So, as you say, it seems like the administration is planning to kind of use this as a tool to push people to leave the country. And one thing that came up for me when I was reading about this is that, as you say, Devin, you know, getting back on these lists, as you know, alive after you've been marked dead is an extraordinary difficult thing to do, I imagine, especially so if you're older, as some of the people who have been marked debt because they're, you know, up there in years have been. But I imagine, especially if you are someone who is in a kind of a very contingent position, perhaps because you had lawful status and now you may not, or you're not sure what it will be, that it's going to be particularly difficult to kind of get yourself back added to, you know, your bank, your credit card company, so on and so forth, as alive, because you're now also in this position of kind of flagging for all of these institutions that you're still in the country, which is exactly what the government doesn't want. It's where the government doesn't want you to be. So I'm curious if there are any other sort of aspects of that, those difficulties that would be magnified for someone who is in the category of people who the administration seems to want to drive out.
- [23:36]
Devon O'Connor
I want to pose a slightly different situation. You know, they think they are targeting a certain set of people. But in saying that there are now people who intentionally are being put on this list for a reason that is not just death, have they thought through what that means for the person who accidentally is added to that list? The thing that we know that happens, that they've been historically trying to limit, you now find you are on the Death Master File list. A mistake that can happen to anybody. Is it enough now to walk into a Social Security office and say, I'm alive? Well, that will prove that you should not have been added to the Death Master File accidentally, but it will not prove that you weren't intentionally added to the Death Master File. And so the question becomes, how does one get off the Death Master File in that case? And what we've seen in the initial reporting of what's happened so far is the Social Security Administration hasn't actually sort of gone through and changed any of their policies to reflect this weird New complication. So as much as in the initial blush, I was very worried about the kind of, you know, this like, weird bureaucratic circumstance where just proving you're alive is not enough to prove that you're not dead for purposes of this list. But it seems like, and maybe this is something they'll, you know, I hesitate to say fix because it seems completely horrible. Right. I don't know if they've thought through the implications of this. Like, how do you show that you don't belong on the death master file for some unknown other set of criteria? Because it's not like they created some very public, very obvious set of criteria that say this is the reason why you're on the list. And they haven't created a obvious process by which one contests whether or not that is the right thing and whether you've been put on the writ list correctly or not. So in some ways, in doing this, you know, I think it's going to make it difficult for the people who were targeted because anyone ending up on this list, it's going to be horrific. But now the people who are accidentally on this list may actually find themselves in an even worse position than they were before. And that's kind of, you know, that's like crazy to think about what the implications of that are. But that just sort of brings you back to like, the most big picture part of all of this. I mean, I describe this to someone and like, the reaction is usually either like kind of disbelief or like almost dark laughter. Like the, like, it sounds crazy to say the federal government has decided that they have the ability to mark as basically equivalent to dead someone they know to be alive. And then everything kind of stems from that. The question of, like, what is the legal authority that they are using in order to do that has not been answered because there hasn't been any real transparency. But in not making a claim as to how they are allowed to do this, which they don't seem like they should be. As a matter of fact, most of the laws will say they have to faithfully execute the Social Security Administration. Unclear how that is helping with this. And in other places they are told, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but they're told not to falsify information. And here you have someone putting in a death date that they know not to be true. And that seems not okay. And then you have people who are alive, who presumably have privacy rights being commingled on a list of people who are dead, who allegedly the only reason that list was ever sort of available to those people was because they didn't have privacy rights, because they were. And so you are just creating this sort of like storm of weird illegality. But I will say also, if there's not an authority under which they're claiming to do this, there's also not any sort of bounding principle. There's not any reason to say so if they can do this in this instance, who do they think that they can't do this to and why? There's no guardrails, there's no oversight and there's no process to get it fixed when mistakes get made and we know that mistakes are going to be made. So it is like kind of unleashing, you know, a hard to believe, a hard to describe in a straight faced way thing into the world. It just like, it just sort of boggles, I think, to think that they're claiming this ability and they're doing it through this manner and just everything sort of is downstream from that crazy weirdness.
- [27:58]
Kathleen Romig
That point is so important that if they can do it to anybody, they could do it to everybody. It's, you know, they're, of course they're starting with a relatively small list, 6,000 or so people, but they could do it to much larger groups. They could do it to citizens. We know they're sloppy. I mean, I think that's so important that like in so many of the other things we know, they don't know what they're looking at. You know, the, you know, Devin mentioned earlier the way that they misrepresented what they were seeing in these exact files, the numinant files, when they were saying that tens of millions of living people were receiving Social Security benefits. I mean, that even President Trump was asserting that at the joint address, the State of the Union equivalent, You know, they don't know either they're willfully misrepresenting what they're seeing or they're grossly misunderstanding it, but the effect is the same, that they're making huge mistakes. And these are very consequential mistakes. And so when they tell us, you know, who's in a particular batch, we don't actually have any reason to believe that that's true. We don't have any reason to believe there are not US Citizens mixed up in it already or that that's where they're going to go with it. We know they can be very, you know, vindictive toward their perceived enemies. And so this makes me very, very nervous. And it clearly the story has resonated because so many people can see the potential for abuse here.
- [29:19]
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- [30:52]
Quinta Jurecik
This also gets to another aspect of kind of the bigger story around what's happening at the Social Security Administration right now, which is that the agency has really been hit hard by the glaring eye of DOGE has turned toward it. There's been a lot of reporting about slashing budgets, staff. There was an effort to limit the ability to engage with the agency over the phone. That was then rolled back. But I have also been wondering, you know, okay, let's say that people are now going to be streaming into offices because they've been incorrectly marked dead and it's creating huge problems in their lives. What happens then when you also enter this situation where there are just not enough people at the agency to fix these problems, which Devanev, you described. It's sort of, you know, it's not one problem. It's 15, 20, 30 different problems that no one has ever dealt with before because no one has ever used the systems in this way. Is that an aspect of the puzzle that you're Concerned about very much so.
- [31:59]
Kathleen Romig
The Social Security Administration has been an agency under a lot of strain for a long time. Each year the agency serves approximately 1 million additional beneficiaries on net. And despite that, the agency lost 10,000 employees in the period from 2010 to last year. So, you know, fewer staff, serving dramatically more people has created strains. So it's, it's not as easy as it should be to make contact with the Social Security Administration or to get problem solved. So that was just the baseline that we were dealing with. But like you said, since Doge arrived, that problem has really gone from bad to worse. They have reportedly just in these first few months of the administration, cut the SSA staff by 7,000 people. So that's really dramatic. And it wasn't according to any particular plan. They're just pushing people out. They're paying people not to work, paying people not to serve the public. And that has real effects on frontline service. So one of those programs is a buyout where they were offering up to $25,000 for people to leave. And SSA reported that over 2,000 of its frontline staff who work in field offices and on the 800 number have already taken just that one single thing. So that's 2,000 or more fewer people who can pick up the phone when you say, no, actually, I'm alive, or when you go into an office and say, I need you to help me fix this. So that's a big, big problem. And, you know, we can see it in the stats that show how difficult it is to make contact with the Social Security Administration. Just this year, SSA said that you cannot walk in anymore to a field office for service. You have to make an appointment in advance. There is no way to make an appointment online. So you have to call. Well, the callback time when you call the 800 number averages two and a half hours. Most people do not get through to an agent on the first try at all. And then those who do, it's a two and a half hour wait. So you might have to go and call back another day if you don't get through on the first day. And then to make an appointment, it can take typically over a month. So the majority of people wait longer than 28 days in order to have that appointment scheduled. And then, of course, you have to, you know, if you have to go in person, which you would, to prove that you're actually alive, you would have to show some proof of life and bring your documentation. Then you'd have to get to that office and the distances to field offices can be pretty far. Like, we just did an analysis recently that showed 6 million Americans, or American seniors specifically, live more than a 45 mile round trip from their local Social Security field office. That number would be even bigger if we extended it beyond seniors. And so that, you know, it's really burdensome for people to access Social Security Administration services. So when we talk about, like, what a Kafkaesque nightmare this is, to be erroneously or even purposefully declared dead and to have to try to reverse it, that's just the first step of the nightmare, is trying to get service from ssa.
- [35:12]
Devon O'Connor
And I'd add to that that I think there is a pattern in the things that they've done at the Social Security Administration that is somewhat mystifying. But if you ask the question, what has DOGE done to make the Social Security program better serve the people who rely on it? I think you would sort of strike out. You can point to them attempting to restrict phone services and then, as you said, walking it back and in doing so, both in a rushed implementation that was creating deeper confusion with the acting commissioner. I think Kathleen Wright is on record as having said, like, in moving forward like that might, you know, he got a memo saying, like, this is going to cause problems. And there's reporting that people are saying this is causing, like, fraud attempts because people are contacting people. They hear there's something about identity verification no longer being allowed, and people are calling them and being like, well, just give me all your identity information and I'll make sure this just doesn't happen to you. Right. People are going to the source to prey on the seniors, and you're kind of creating the environment in which that happens. You know, we had this blow up in Maine that I think largely went unnoticed, but is like, in some ways almost as shocking as the sort of declaring as dead people aren't dead, which is, you know, after decades and decades of a system that worked, which is like when a child is born, you check a box in a hospital and they get a Social Security number. And if someone dies, you know, this, the, you know, the funeral home can send in a report and then you don't have to go to the Social Security office as a grieving family to get things taken care of and to let the Social Security Administration know that they're dead, and they cut it off. And there was a, like, email that was like, right, is Kathleen. Kathleen, this is right. Right. There was an email that was reported and the acting commissioner sent, and he said, like, I don't care if this is going to lead to more fraud. We're doing this to like and you know, it got turned around in like less than a week, right? But like just the idea that you're going to take something that works, that just works and intentionally break it. Like, who is being better served, how is that making things better? And again, it was just going to end with more people, new parents of newborns, like grieving families having to get in line to get into overstaffed Social Security field offices. And you're thinking like, what's the purpose? They're cutting staff, they're huge cuts to staff. As Kathleen talked about, is that going to better serve like the people who are trying to get their Social Security benefits or trying to get questions answered? So what is the thing that they are doing that is actually both reflective of, they understand who they are serving and is improving those services? Instead we have this pattern and it's not just at the Social Security Administration, but it's been notable. Like, you know, the main example of cutting off the electronic reporting of births and the electronic reporting of deaths for no real reason. It mirrors, in some ways you have this death master file. Like this is not the most important part of the story. I think the people and the way they will suffer and this kind of totally unbounded by law claim to do this and set off this nightmare. That's the story, right? But maybe the 15th story in line is something like this, that the government has a tool here, something that the government probably uniquely can do to gather this information. And that's valuable. It's not even just valuable to the government itself, although it is valuable to the government to share information here is who's dead. So we don't make improper payments, you know, on our benefit programs, but something that was actually valuable to the private sector and to state agencies. And they could get access to this information and they could use it for their purposes, for anti fraud purposes or in support of their businesses. Here's a unique government asset. And they came in, doge came in and they broke it. Like they intentionally broke it. They're polluting it, they're changing what it means and what it is. And the trade off the benefit of that is apparently so they can try to terminate the financial lives of thousands of people whose lawful status is still in question in the courts. You know, that's what they get. That's like the plus side of the ledger. And then on the negative side of the ledger is like potentially completely ruining this thing and sending People off on these Kafkaesque bureaucratic adventures to prove that they're alive and, and sort of degrading everything. And then at the end of the day, it's like, how does this make things better for seniors or people with severe disabilities who rely on Social Security? So again, like, that's not like the number, you know, one, two, or three story to come out of this. But it is such. It's so endemic of a pattern of just taking things the government does. Probably could be improved, could be done better. But, like, but they work and then breaking them without sort of any regard for that cost and trade off. It's just, it's. It is mind boggling on that aspect, too.
- [39:49]
Kathleen Romig
It is. And, Devin, I'm so glad you brought up Maine. I mean, I think actually two of the most troubling things about what happened in Maine are. Well, one is that it was clearly an act of political retribution against Governor Mills. And that came out in subsequent reporting where there was correspondence with the acting commissioner that said that they did this because the governor acted, quote, like a petulant child in her conversations with President Trump. And so when we say that we're worried about the Social Security Administration weaponizing the death master file against political enemies, that's not just a dark fantasy. That's something that they've proven that they are willing to do and that they did do against Governor Mills. And so that is really scary, knowing that they are willing to use these very powerful tools to punish not only their enemies, but in this case, like Devin said, that collateral damage is grieving families and new babies. And the other thing that's so troubling about that is that that cancellation of means, electronic birth and death reporting happened even as Elon Musk and President Trump were out there claiming that all of these dead people were supposedly getting benefits. Well, what's the first line of defense against Social Security? Accidentally paying a benefit to a person after they die? Electronic death reporting. That is how 99% of those death reports reach the Social Security Administration. They typically reach SSA within days of a death. But when you cancel electronic death reporting, which happens automatically and very quickly, then like Devin said, we know that leads to improper payments. We know that means that some people are going to continue to receive their benefits after they die because their families are going to have this responsibility of going and filling out the paperwork separately and manually. And so they knew they were creating errors. They knew they would, in fact, pay more dead people benefits because of the action that they took. And they did it. Anyway, the same week that President Trump was making those claims during the joint address to Congress, I mean, it was just shocking.
- [41:50]
Quinta Jurecik
So this gets to something that I've been really puzzled by, which is why Doge and why, you know, the corner of the Trump administration that's working with them seems so determined to, like, grab the third rail. You know, it's. And when I say the third rail, of course, this sort of common phrase is that Social Security is the third rail of American politics. You do not, whatever you do, for God's sake, do not try to touch Social Security, because people will get really mad. And I guess, you know, Elon Musk and the Doge folks just didn't get the memo. But, you know, it's. It's not just them, right? I mean, there's. There's this additional sort of retaliation effort against Maine. There's all all kinds of things. Why is there this obsession with attacking and making less efficient and using as a weapon this agency that is, I mean, for many people, a sort of a very positive way that they engage with the government? It just seems like a baffling move politically, even apart from the kind of moral and functional problems with it.
- [43:00]
Kathleen Romig
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question, one that, as you can imagine, is posed to me very often, and I always start by saying, I don't know them, and I don't know what's going through their heads. At first, it was extremely extraordinarily baffling to me because, like you said, it's literally generations of political wisdom say, do not mess with this program. It is beloved by the American people, and you pay a political price for doing it. So, yes, I don't. I certainly don't have any direct knowledge of why they're doing it, but I do. I can look at the pattern of the kinds of things that they're saying. You know, they're making these wild claims about tens of millions of dead people getting benefits, you know, at first, or. Or of like, you know, illegal aliens are draining the trust funds, or like, you know, Elon Musk called it the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, or hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, things like this. I mean, these are just wild and very, very easily debunked claims that have, in fact, been debunked over and over and over again because they're just so off the mark, and there's no. There's just absolutely no evidence to support them. And so why would they keep doing that? Not only do it, but then double down and triple down and, you know, increase the audience or the, you know, level of the people who are making these claims. I mean, you have to think that they're purposefully undermining the trust and support in a program that is so deeply woven into American life that they know that they're doing that. They know people love this program. They know that we all, whether we're beneficiaries now, is almost 70 million people are, or we expect to become beneficiaries in the future. I mean, it is that deeply integrated, and people rely on it so much, it does seem like it's a precursor to doing something that is going to harm the program because they are trying to, you know, they seem to be actively trying to undermine our trust and support for it.
- [44:49]
Quinta Jurecik
Devin, do you have any theories?
- [44:51]
Devon O'Connor
I refuse. I refuse to be forced to try to get into the mindset of why. Look, I mean, I think everything Kathleen said strikes me as, you know, plausibly true. I think it's like. I think it's so hard. I mean, I've asked this question on so many of the things that Dosh has done. Like, what. What is the incentive? What is the motivation? What is the thing that they're hoping that they will achieve that justifies why they're doing this? And I like, you know, in explaining the death Master file piece to people, trying to give them the sense of why this is a good idea and why someone might be supportive of it, you know, is so hard because it feels like their balance, their ability to sort of judge the cost and benefit, trade off, that, I think, to other people, looks completely different. It must just look really different to them. But if you, like, kind of take the idea that their mission is supposed to be government efficiency at, like, a face value, and you're saying, like, how does this make government more efficient? How would you explain what is being made better? How things are being improved here is such a. Is such a struggle. It's. It's like a real challenge. So I'm always like, you know, I spend too much time trying to figure out, you know, like, what is the narrative that makes this make sense? And. And can we sort of figure out if it makes sense on those terms? But, you know, I don't want to. I don't want to offer what they're thinking.
- [46:20]
Quinta Jurecik
In this case, I do want to make sure that I ask you about some reporting that I saw actually right before we started recording, which is about the acting commissioner sent out an email to Social Security employees saying that the majority of them are the Plan is to convert them to Schedule F roles. So these would be roles that have far less in the way of the protections that civil servants usually enjoy. And there's been a lot of reporting, you can read about it on Lawfare, about schedule folks as a tool to kind of ensure compliance in the part of, you know, usually apolitical agencies with a president's particular political agenda. So just to close us out, I'm curious if, if you both have any thoughts on what it would mean to move the Social Security Administration into a place where most people there are in a schedule F role.
- [47:14]
Kathleen Romig
Yeah. And to clarify, like what I've seen so far, they did seem to exclude the frontline staff, and that's about 3/4 headquarters of the agency staff. So outside of the frontline staff, though, it is a majority of people, from what I've seen, who they plan to redesignate as Schedule F. And so that would be in, you know, primarily in headquarters roles. Yeah. The idea that these people are somehow policy influencing whole components, as they would say, that's just kind of a big office, whole offices worth of people. There were over 20 offices listed where every single member was considered policy influence. I mean, that's just ridiculous. It's completely absurd on its face. And especially when you look at the offices that they're naming like human resources or anyone having to do with the information technology. I mean, these clearly are not policy influencing roles. And so, and by my count, you know, just kind of trying to eyeball an estimate, it's at least 10,000 people at the agency. I mean, that just, you know, beggars belief that 10,000 people are meaningfully influencing policy in an agency like this. It's just, it's absurd. And so it seems that what they really want to do is to further politicize this agency and to purge even more people from this agency and to get them to do things exactly like what we've been talking about today. And in fact, you know, we've already started to see it. The Washington Post reported that one of the very respected executives who works on information technology at the agency objected to some of these things that we're talking about and in particular to their manipulations of the death master file. Well, he was escorted out of the building and fired. And so I don't see any reason not to think that that's exactly why they're doing this. They want to have a workforce that they can more easily manipulate. They want to do more things that, you know, nonpartisan career staff would likely advise them is not wise or not legal. And they want to be able to get rid of those people and to just really deepen the problems that we're seeing at the Social Security Administration.
- [49:17]
Devon O'Connor
I think this is true of Kathleen and it's true of me, which is that we've both served in career roles and political roles in government. And when you serve in a career role in government, your job is to help them to carry out their policy agenda, you know, and. But you have two purposes. One purpose is to help them carry out their agenda as they've expressed it, their priorities. They were elected, you know, and your job as a civil servant is to help them take the reins of government and use it as they see fit, because they are the ones who are elected by the government. But you also swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. And so you also are in the position as a career civil servant sometimes of having to let them know when the things that they are asking you to do maybe are in violation of the law or would go against the Constitution. And so, you know, a lot of the Schedule F schedule policy, you know, this reclassification of career civil servant status that has been that way for decades and decades, you know, at its root is about converting those people to at will employment, meaning you can fire them without cause. Because today, you know, there's, it's difficult, lots of talk about like hiring and firing reform in the federal government and what the right thing to do is, but this is like making everyone at will, being able to fire for reasons other than cause. Everyone serves at your whim, not just the political officials. It feels along the lines of what Kathleen said, which is you want the ability, you basically want every employee who's there to know that they are, they're there conditionally on doing exactly what you say, regardless of whether that conflicts with the other responsibilities they have as civil servants. And that you don't want to hear and you certainly don't want to see in writing what the negative consequences of the things you're proposing to do are, even if sort of informing you of those things is good government. You know, we saw this at Social Security when they did the phone restrictions, which were totally unnecessary because there were tools to address the fraud concerns, which was a tiny amount of fraud. There was a tiny amount of fraud happening as a result of people changing their direct deposit information over the phone. There was a tiny amount of fraud happening as a result of people trying to claim to be someone who they aren't when initiating a benefits claim over the phone as relative to all the other Manners in which you can do that. And their approach to that was we're going to basically get rid of the ability to do those things over the phone. We're going to send people to online, seniors, potentially very old people, people with severe disabilities, people who have mobility issues or they can come into the field office. And it was such a crazy calculation of the benefit gained again versus the burden imposed and how hard you were going to make things. And there was a memo to the commissioner from career staff that said, great, this is the policy you want to enact. Go nuts. Here is what we think the burden of that is going to be. We think that 4 million people will have to make, on an annualized basis, 4 million people will have to make an in person visit to a field office because they won't be able to take advantage of, they won't be able to successfully complete online identification. They won't. But like, that is like very honest career, you know, advice from a career civil servant trying to help them understand what it is. And that memo leaked out and that was a lot of the reasons why, like people understood what the calculus was and they're like, whoa, this is a huge burden, this is a terrible thing. And they were forced to walk it back. Is this meant to keep memos like that from being written? Again, not the execution of the policy, which is up to the policymakers and Social Security to do, but even the analysis of the policy, even any questioning of the policy, even any sort of documentation of what the trade offs might be. So that's where you get, you know, you feel like this is just meant to keep everyone in line in some way. It's not about like, are they doing the thing that they're supposed to do? Are they going to help you carry out your policy agenda? But do they do it exactly the way you say, not tell you any of the downside, negative consequences that are possible and sort of abdicate all their other responsibilities because they're so worried about being fired. If they say one negative word, we're going to get worse government. If this, if this goes through, we're going to get worse government, not more efficient government. Not that like this is, you know, so that's, I mean when I hear that news and like, I think there'll be legal challenges, I think there'll be all kinds of problems, right? But like when I hear it, I, it just sounds like this is a way to try to bully people into doing things that shouldn't be done and to shut up about it.
- [53:48]
Quinta Jurecik
On that note, let's have a very, very cheerful note. Devin, Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us.
- [53:55]
Devon O'Connor
Thank you for having us and thank you for covering this story. It's such an important thing they're doing and I think it needs scrutiny and understanding.
- [54:05]
Quinta Jurecik
The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of this and other Lawfare Podcasts by becoming a Lawfare Materials supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. And look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents Podcast podcast series about the war in Ukraine and check out our written work@lawfirmedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Patya and our audio engineer this episode was Kara Shillin of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening.
- [55:02]
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