Social Security Employees are now on Trump's Chopping Block

 

Elon Musk has descended upon  Social Security with the same careless, ruthless abandon he has brought to every other Federal Agency.  An anonymous whistleblower stated the following actions have been taken against the Agency:

1.Probationary attorney-level decision writers who are responsible for assisting Administrative Law Judges were terminated and at a time when the agency has massive backlogs in cases at the Hearing level.

2. The new acting commissioner gloated about firing 14 employees as an "accomplishment" in his commissioner broadcast to the agency.

3. The entire office of Transformation, and its 60+ employees were dissolved. Their purpose was to promote agency-wide efficiencies and faster processing times through oversight over SSA systems and use of information technology.

4. The entire Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity and its 190 employees  were dissolved, including the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of Civil Rights.  OCREO conducts statutorily mandated requirements for employees and members of the public including the reasonable accommodation request process, the public facing discrimination complaint process, and the EEOC employment discrimination complaint process. The National RA Coordinator whose position was court ordered was also terminated.

5. Component heads and executives were told to draft plans to slash  Social Security Administration (SSA) by 50% and to reduce the total SSA workforce by seven to eight thousand.

6.SSA staff were sent an email threatening massive reorganization of SSA followed with significant workforce reduction.  The email pressured seasoned employees, even front-line employees, with monetary incentives to resign or take early retirement and threatened to fire employees for cause should they not retire or resign.

7. Executive staff responsible for overseeing regional field office operations were terminated. One region had all but 3 out of 72 staff members terminated and it is very likely that the other ten regions had similar terminations.  The regional executive offices oversee hundreds of field offices.

8. The Acting Commissioner sent out a memo to SSA staff indicating significant restructuring of the agency due to a "bloated workforce and organizational structure", even though staffing at SSA is the lowest it has been in 50 years. The reorganization includes taking the ten regions  that SSA serves and consolidating into four regions; and combining multiple  independent components together in an effort to "downsize"
 or "streamline."  This could potentially lead to massive closures in field offices, a reduction in services, and a significant number of terminations of agency employees.

9. Terminations are happening swiftly and often late in the day to avoid bringing attention to any media or congressional attention to their actions.

10.The trauma they are creating for SSA staff is unreal. According to the whistleblower at least three terminated SSA employees have committed suicide, one which the whistleblower personally knew.

 The Social Security Administration issued a Press Release on the Re-organization that claims a fifty percent workforce reduction is not accurate.  The press release which you can read  HERE  states that the SSA intends to reduce the workforce from 57,000 to 50,000 employees, a reduction of 7,000 jobs.

An Open Letter to Jeffery A. Tucker, President and Founder of the Brownstone, and Epoch Times Columnist.

 Dear Mr. Tucker,

Jeffery A Tucker    Photo by By Gage Skidmore,
CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61547947

In your most recent column in the Epoch Times you chose to reinforce a falsehood about non-partisan public civil servants, essentially blaming dedicated non-political employees for the large amounts of waste in our Federal system. You also claim, without providing any proof, that this system has been  corrupted by "a very small group of career bureaucrats who "manage the multiple millions of dollars  coming and going without oversight."  Sir, that is a bold-faced lie and you, with your pedigree, know it to be false

I am calling you out on it because you have a responsibility as a journalist to be plain and truthful to your public and not attempt to justify your support for Trump's unconstitutional and Federal law-breaking  by lying about not only Federal employees, but about the audit process itself.  

Let's begin with your demonizing of the the Federal employees who have access to the system.  I promise you that when they fill out their ethics forms each year, they are listing all their loans, credit cards, and bank accounts.  Yet the research on the non-profit you founded, Brownstone Institute, confirmed that  you chose not to list a single donor for the  $2,288,044 in contributions, grants, and other income you received in 2023.  That represents over 93% of all revenue your non-profit firm received.   You want transparency from others that you do not provide to the public yourself.  There is a name for that- hypocrite. While you are holding the wrong government worker's feet to the fire (for the purpose of creating a false narrative of fraud and waste somehow caused by the folks processing the payments the government authorizes to spend), you shut and locked the doors to your own barn.  Your historian father must be rolling over in his grave.  

There is a very distinct difference between the employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) who process payments and the folks in government making the policy-level decisions that determine who receives those those payments.  The BFS employees have a primary task of making certain that payments are processed accurately, efficiently, and  to verify that the data they receive is correct.  I am going to underline the next sentence even though I know, from your extensive economic background, that you already know this but decided to patronize these employees anyway. These employees are not making policy-level decisions on who gets paid or how much.  Do you know who is? Try reading the Republican Budget  Resolution where they plan on raising the debt ceiling by over 4 trillion dollars.

Mr. Tucker,  there are only three groups that can determine the amount, the recipient, and the timing of payments. The first and most important of these is Congress who passes legislation that authorizes payment.  Federal Agencies that administer departments like Social Security, and Medicare, and the Directors of those agencies.  That is it, that's the whole bunch. Please stop blaming  the mechanic for the lousy driver who owns the car and then totals it.

Now let's research your other bold-faced lie.  You claim there is no auditing oversight.   If that is correct why is there an FASB at all?  The Office of Inspector General (OIC) is the auditing watchdog for several Federal agencies. President Trump fired seventeen OIC inspectors after taking office. But he didn't fire Heather Hill, the TGIA Inspector General who has oversight and answers to the Secretary of the Treasury and probably he cant' fire her without violating The Inspector General Act of 1978, which they may have already violated in their earlier firings of 17 other inspectors. 

Congress can also audit the books as a requirement for every expenditure they authorize.  It is a standard practice for Grant recipients to be audited. This is where you should be concerned, instead of attacking civil servants with no decision-making ability for the hard work they do, And finally, the TGIA Inspector alone has audit responsibilities over the IRS, not some poor schmuck  cleaning the processor. 

We are all patriots here, Mr. Tucker. So when you write a disingenuous patently fact less column in order to gaslight your readers, we fellow patriots must respond.  The Guinea pigs running on the machinery wheels to keep payments moving efficiently are not society's thieves.   I would submit that those thieves are the ones who, (according to your own tax records), turned a beginning balance of  $932,000 in January of 2023 into $2,500,00 through publicly traded investments. Wow,  Brownstone made $1.5 million off of less than a million dollars.in a single year.  And this during Joe Biden's term!

Finally,  the Institute you founded and donate your time to  (how magnanimous of you) gave a grant in the amount of $250,000 to a foreign entity. Who are you in bed with, other than Donald Trump, Mr. Tucker? That  is more than you pay your Executive Director.   A quarter million just flies away.

In conclusion, you might want to take a good look in your Baptist mirror and think about your historian daddy.  Because you are helping to destroy the very fabric of our country and, like so many others in the Trump Kingdom,  you are a hypocrite and you have lied to your readers in order to advance a coup.  

My daddy used to say that some folks go to school half their lives and when they get out they don't know a damn thing about how to manage life so they make shit up.  Bird-dog 'em when you can.  Sir, you've been sniffed out.

Sincerely,

Rick Fisher, Retired Town Manager

Ridgecrest, California

Brownstone Institute Tax Records

  

You Can't Sew a Riff with Words - The Stitch is in the Details

Last weekend phones across the country blew up Elon Musk, Executive Director for the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), sent an email to every Federal employee.  Mr. Musk wanted each employee to provide information on the work they had done the previous week. Failure to provide would be considered a resignation. On the military side of the fence, soldiers, and civilian employees were ordered to email DOGE by midnight Sunday or resign their position.  Then came the counter-orders from Central Command-  do not respond, do not reply, do not engage Mr. Musk concerning his request.  Do not comply. 

When the midnight deadline passed, non-compliance with the DOGE order had spread across the several Federal agencies, from the military to the Department of Justice.  The irresistible force had met the unmovable rock.

The most recent DOGE Executive Order issued by President Trump includes a Section on Exemption that waives the heartless requirements on employees, contracts, and even credit cards, under  a  microscope made by a South African billionaire and designed to find waste where there is none,  find laziness where hard work thrives,  and end public service to communities because this government does not know how to govern efficiently.  They don't want to govern at all actually.  

This administration wants to hire UFC fighters to train our FBI agents,  they want to embarrass the Democratic leader because he did not bend a knee and kiss the President's ring.   They want to align with the dark and evil forces of the world while they "dismantle the deep state."  

This poorly-mannered bully of a President, has skin so thin, it's transparent.  We can see right through him.  He will respond to protests with violence, he will respond to criticism with arrests and detainment, and he will never, ever accept the blame when this country falls.  There has never been a more despicable person in charge of the U.S. government since Andrew Jackson was President.  We must be prepared to stand up, to fight if necessary, and to defeat this administration and his cult of worshippers.

And as for this the Executive Order, the Exemption Section simply shows that the monkeys in his tree are already fighting over the bananas.  Be proud.  You most likely are reading this article in English, the official language of the United States, according to our Muslim-hating, Putin-kissing  Embarrassment in Chief,  Donald Trump.

z

 

Keeping Up With the Trumps

Keeping Up With The Trumps

This will become a regular feature of our blog.  It is when we try to play catch-up with all the exciting events happening at Trump Castle. This were we peek inside the white walls and see how the heck the the Trumps are getting along with their subjects.

02/25/2025

DOGE EMPLOYEES RESIGN

 It has been whispered along the castle walls that twenty-one civil servants working for Prince Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) jointly resigned today. These heroic Federal workers, software engineers, product managers, and others, released a joint statement, stating they were refusing to use their skillset to "dismantle critical public services" and place American individuals' data at risk.  We cannot yet confirm that these brave rebels may soon be arrested by the Palace Guard.   

02/26/2025

KING'S DECREE - IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT'S "DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY" COST EFFICIENCY INITIATIVE

Declaring that the word Efficiency must be used redundantly or twice, the King has issued an Executive Order that he hopes will cover his naked arse, since Prince Musk has been actively scraping every last coin out of the empty coffers of the King's Departments and Guilds.  The King mocks the U.S. Constitution again by beginning his Decree with the words "By the Authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America,..."  when it has been clearly explained that he does not have this authority under the Constitution and he is violating Federal Law with the reckless and dangerous actions of Prince Musk and his young co-horts, twenty-one of who quit his service in protest.

The Decree provides Definitions of Administrator, the second time that was necessary, the first being the King's Decree No. 14158 of January 20, 2025 which first established this Department, we shall call DOGE for brevity's sake.   Our favorite definition is "DOGE Team Lead" which is defined as "the leader of the DOGE Team at each agency" which also was previously defined in the previous Decree, as redundancy remains a critical asset to the King.   Some in the castle have wondered  who is paying for DOGE teams at every agency and whether it would have cost less to use the normal auditing process already in place for several years and fully lawful.

This Decree demands that every agency submit every contract for review, with a few notable exceptions.

Under Section 4, the King has decreed that the Decree does not apply to:

 (a)  Law enforcement officers, as defined in 5 U.S.C. 5541(3) and 5 C.F.R. 550.103, or covered contracts and grants directly related to the enforcement of Federal criminal or immigration law;

(b)  U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security;

(c)  the Uniformed Services, as defined in 20 C.F.R. 404.1330;

(d)  any other covered grant or contract, agency component, or real property that the relevant Agency Head exempts in writing from all or part of this order, in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead and the Director of OMB; or

(e)  classified information or classified information systems.

Well, that is a relief, especially concerning (c) the Uniformed Services.  

FEDERAL JUDGE RULES TRUMP AND MUSK CANNOT FIRE CIVIL SERVANTS EN MASSE

On Thursday, February 27th a Federal Judge ruled that the mass firings of Federal government employees is illegal.  However a final ruling has not yet been issued. An appeal of the final decision is likely from either party, although the King may choose to ignore the ruling altogether in keeping with his current practice.  Further appeals to the Palace Court are likely.  In other Court action, Head Palace Justice Roberts paused a Lower Court ruling unfavorable to the King, whilst he reads it over lunch before afternoon prayers..

-The Castle Reporter