Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Are Sending Social Security Into “Death Spiral”

The Social Security Administration is falling apart at the seams as Elon Musk and his gang of reckless twentysomethings continue their never-ending pursuit to dismantle the federal safety net.

The agency’s website has crashed numerous times in recent weeks as people attempt to log into their Social Security accounts and access their benefits. Outages have lasted anywhere from 20 minutes up to a day, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The disastrous technical difficulties set off alarm bells for millions of Americans, and come as DOGE has cut more than 7,000 workers at the agency, including a 50 percent cut to the technology department. Musk and his cronies also plan to migrate Social Security data off its current programming language and rewrite the code in a matter of months, which could lead to further website outages, Wired reported last week.

The billionaire has long set his sights on attacking the program that provides benefits to more than 73 million Americans. He’s repeatedly called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and spread numerous baseless claims against the agency, including that Democrats are using Social Security to attract illegal immigrants.

“By using entitlement fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants and buy voters,” Musk said during a podcast interview with Senator Ted Cruz last month. “Basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and will vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”

The recent website outages are likely due to an untested fraud detector system put in by DOGE that couldn’t withstand such a high number of users, the Post reported. Though users received messages onscreen that said they weren’t receiving payments, their checks were still deposited—for now. Starting April 14, SSA identity certification will get a lot stricter: Recipients will have to verify their identity online or in person, which will supposedly limit fraudulent claims. People could previously verify their identity over the phone.

The unnecessary change will no doubt cause confusion and technical issues to an already overloaded system, putting millions of Americans’ benefits further at risk.

The Trump administration has removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, as first reported by The Washington Post. It also changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” and removed a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1822 and escaped in 1849. She had the courage to come back and help 70 other enslaved African Americans escape via the Underground Railroad. She also served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, leading the raid at Combahee Ferry that freed 700 slaves. She is one of the most heroic Americans to ever live.

The Trump administration is downplaying the removal of Tubman’s picture and the softening of historically accurate language.

“We have dozens of pages about Harriet Tubman celebrating and memorializing her impressive role in American history,” an NPS spokesperson told The Hill. “The idea that a couple web edits somehow invalidate the National Park Service’s commitment to telling complex and challenging historical narratives is completely false and belies the extensive websites, social media posts, and programs we offer about Harriet Tubman specifically and Black History as a whole.”

But this move clearly aligns with the administration’s spiteful war on whatever it deems “woke,” as outlined in the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History executive order that directs Vice President JD Vance to remove anything that portrays this historically racist country in a “negative light.” This is the same executive order that is bringing back Confederate statues that were removed in 2020.

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep a Maryland resident deported by mistake locked up in a notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison—and the Supreme Court is apparently happy to help.

Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused a deadline Monday for the government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to his birth country of El Salvador last month, to the United States. Donald Trump had asked the high court earlier in the day to block U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order to return Abrego Garcia by Monday at 11:59 p.m.

Roberts ordered that a full response to the government’s filing must be delivered Tuesday by 5 p.m. Around the same time Roberts issued the order, Abrego Garcia filed an opposition to the government’s request to vacate.

In her ruling Friday, Xinis called Abrego Garcia’s deportation a “grievous error” and ordered his return, an order Solicitor General D. John Sauer called “unprecedented and indefensible.”

“Even amidst a deluge of unlawful injunctions, this order is remarkable,” the Trump administration’s filing to the Supreme Court reads. “The United States cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations.”

But the only reason “sensitive international negotiations” are even needed is because the White House deported Abrego Garcia due to an “administrative error” last month, despite repeated claims that no errors were made in determining deportations.

In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge ruled Abrego Garcia faced legitimate threat of persecution in El Salvador and was therefore barred from being sent back. The Trump administration deported him anyway, baselessly claiming that he has ties to the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Abrego Garcia is now being held in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, the largest prison in Latin America and one notorious for human rights abuses.

The government’s attorneys had already asked the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pause Xinis’s order, a request that the Fourth Circuit denied Monday.

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the Fourth Circuit’s order reads. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump threatened Monday to escalate his trade war with China by ratcheting up tariffs on exports to a staggering 104 percent.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump threatened to impose an additional 50 percent tariff on China if it did not rescind the retaliatory 34 percent tariffs on U.S. imports Beijing announced Friday.

These tariffs would be in addition to the 34 percent “reciprocal tariff” Trump announced last week, which was already added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month. The White House confirmed that Trump’s tariffs on China would be 104 percent.

Trump said that if China’s new tariffs weren’t withdrawn by Tuesday, his new tariffs could be imposed the following day.

“Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately,” he said.

Trump’s latest announcement is sure to send the already volatile stock market swinging. The Dow Jones plummeted more than 900 points at open Monday, after closing with 1,500-point losses for two consecutive days at the end of last week as investors reacted to China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Trump’s promise to once again increase the U.S. tariff rate on China is just the latest escalation in his ongoing mission to start a global trade war that he believes will send every world leader to his door, hoping to make a deal. In the meantime, major U.S. financial institutions predict an economic recession is on the horizon.

One of Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Peter Navarro, is blowing off an offer from Vietnam to eliminate all of its tariffs on American goods.

In an interview on CNBC Monday, Navarro said that the country’s offer was not enough for the U.S. to lift its tariffs against Vietnam, saying that it “means nothing.”

“When they come to us and say, ‘We’ll go to zero tariffs,’ that means nothing to us because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” Navarro said, by which he meant the routing of Chinese products through Vietnam, intellectual property theft, and a value-added tax. Later, though, Navarro conceded that zero tariffs would be a “small first start.”

Navarro’s tone contradicts Trump’s post on Truth Social Friday where he bragged about Vietnam’s offer to cut tariffs to zero, showing that the Trump administration is not on the same page when it comes to the president’s tariffs, introduced last week on April 2 in an event Trump dubbed “Liberation Day.”

The chaos over the tariff plan has not only led to chaos in international markets but has spooked even officials within the Trump administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is reportedly eyeing the exits. But not Navarro: He’s staked his career and what little remains of his credibility on the idea.

The Harvard-educated economist, who also worked in the first Trump administration, has been pushing for tariffs for years, citing the work of economics expert “Ron Vara” in many of his books. The problem is that Ron Vara is actually a person Navarro made up to bolster his own ideas, and the name is even an anagram of Navarro.

After serving four months in prison for defying a subpoena from Congress’s January 6 committee, Navarro was given a lifeline by Trump, who tapped him to work in his administration. Now it seems that Navarro is the idea man for these tariffs, having successfully convinced the president of the plan’s (not at all) genius. When the promised economic boom doesn’t come, will he get the blame?

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has finally admitted vaccines are needed, as measles cases continue to skyrocket across the country.

As of Friday, more than 600 measles cases across 22 states have been recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, marking the third-largest measles outbreak of the twenty-first century, less than halfway into the year.

More than 75 percent of the country’s cases have been recorded in Texas, which has seen almost 500 cases—nearly all of which have been among unvaccinated people. On Saturday, an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl died from the disease, marking the second death of a child from measles since February.

Kennedy, who traveled to West Texas on Sunday to meet the families of the two victims, seems to at last be realizing just how deadly the infection can be, after years of downplaying its effects and spreading baseless vaccine claims, including that the vaccine is as dangerous as the infection itself.

“I came to­ Gaines County, Texas, today to comfort the Hildebrand family after the loss of their 8-year-old daughter Daisy,” he wrote in a statement on X Sunday. “My intention was to come down here quietly to console the families and to be with the community in their moment of grief.

“The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy added, admitting to the benefits of the only evidence-based method proven to prevent measles infection.

But Kennedy hasn’t totally given up on his anti-vaccine agenda. Just hours after the Hildebrand family’s funeral, Kennedy posted on X praising two anti-vax doctors who he claimed had cured “300 measles-stricken Mennonite children” using “aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin.” Budesonide is a corticosteroid used to treat asthma and inflammatory bowel disease, and clarithromycin is an antibacterial drug.

The health secretary has previously touted cod liver oil, which is rich in vitamin A, as a cure for the infection, despite there being little medical evidence to support the claim. In high doses, vitamin A can also lead to nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, and liver damage, which has been recorded in the lab work of some of the 50 children who have been hospitalized for measles in Texas.

In his statement, Kennedy said HHS is partnering with Texas health officials to better “control the measles outbreak,” as well as deploy CDC teams across the state. It’s a long-awaited response from the HHS, but it’s too little too late for some.

President Donald Trump said that he hopes to erase the U.S. trade deficit with other countries—but anyone who understands economics knows that wouldn’t be a good thing. 

“I spoke to a lot of leaders—European, Asian—from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said, ‘We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,’” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One Sunday. “We’re not gonna do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or at worst we’re gonna be breaking even.”

A trade deficit isn’t a “loss,” regardless of what Trump thinks. A trade deficit simply means that one country spends more on goods from another country than that country spends on goods from them. 

Crucially, economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing at all, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is being taken for a ride betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of economics that is built on a dislike of other countries and a desire to be the dealmaker responsible for a new world order. 

Trump warned that it would be the “worst” for China. In 2024, the United States had a $295.4 billion trade deficit with China. Trump said that China would need to “solve their surplus” before he would be willing to make a deal on tariffs. 

The president predicted that his “reciprocal tariffs” would raise $1 trillion in the next year and that “thousands” of companies would relocate manufacturing to the U.S.  

China announced Friday that it would impose 34 percent tariffs on imports from the U.S. in response to Trump’s new “reciprocal” 34 percent tariff, which was added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month.

Trump’s announcement of “reciprocal tariffs” last week sent the U.S. stock market plummeting to its worst day since 2020, and major financial institutions updated their recession projections for 2025. But Trump merely compared the financial chaos to a sick patient taking their “medicine.”

Trump was widely mocked for his ridiculous plan to eliminate the trade deficit. 

Tahra Jirari, director of economic analysis at the Chamber of Progress, wrote on X Sunday that “a trade deficit isn’t a ‘loss,’ it just means we import more than we export. Countries run trade deficits for all kinds of healthy reasons (like strong consumer demand). ‘Breaking even’ isn’t how global trade works.”

Zeteo News’s editor in chief Mehdi Hasan wrote on X Sunday that Trump was “an ignoramus the like of which we have not seen in our lifetimes. Wharton must be so embarrassed.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor in chief of The Dispatch, wrote in a post on X Monday that “Trumpers slavishly defend one man unilaterally screwing up the economy and the America-led global order because he’s some kind of genius. And it turns out—as was apparent for decades—he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The stock market is in such a dire state that an inaccurate report of a 90-day pause on Trump’s global tariffs gave investors real confidence, making the market shoot up before it crashed back down.

On Monday morning, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett went on Fox News and was asked if the administration would consider such a pause.

“The president is going to decide what the president is going to decide. There are more than 50 countries in negotiation with the president…. I would urge everyone, especially Bill [Ackman], to ease up the rhetoric a little bit,” Hassett replied vaguely. “Even if you think that there will be some negative effect from the trade side, that’s still a small share of the GDP. This idea that it’s gonna be a nuclear winter or something like that is completely irresponsible.”

Verified X user Walter Bloomberg mistook this quote for a resounding yes and reported that the administration was indeed considering a 90-day tariff pause “FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.” The news was soon read on CNBC, causing the stock market to move positively for the first time in days, by 7 to 10 percent.

“INSANE market action right now. Market exploded higher on a headline attributed to Kevin Hassett,” said Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal. “And now nobody can figure out where it came from and the markets are diving again. An 8% surge and then a 3.5% plunge in a matter of seconds.”

The White House denied all claims of the pause and Bloomberg deleted his X post, falsely attributing the report to Reuters.

The Trump administration has basically no answer for why it imposed tariffs on a group of uninhabited islands off the coast of Australia.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted that there was something very smart about placing a levy on the penguin-populated Heard and McDonald islands.

“Well, I mean, that, come on, Jake,” Rollins said. “Here’s the bottom line: We live under a tariff regime from other countries.”

“The McDonald islands is not imposing—” Tapper interjected.

“Whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic, the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. I did not come up with the formulas, I’m the ag secretary,” Rollins continued, listing how she had helped farmers acquire soil and fertilizer.

The White House admitted last week that the tariffs were cooked up with bad and arbitrary math. As economists and financial writers attempted to understand the logic behind how Donald Trump’s team had determined the percentage of tariffs imposed by other countries, they discovered something wildly unusual.

The administration calculated the tariffs rate by only looking at goods provided, rather than the combined value of goods and services—something that “most economists seem to think is an odd way to calculate tariffs,” according to BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh.

But none of that has swayed Rollins—or, apparently, the president.

“But I have no doubt that I speak on behalf of President Trump that he would say he has the utmost confidence in the team and what they have built and what they have put together,” Rollins said.

“We are unleashing a new golden age, and we will see an economy that will benefit not just every corner of America but our farmers and our ranchers and the people that have been left behind far too long by Republicans and Democrats,” she added.

By Monday morning, the stock market was swinging wildly as investors rushed to understand the potential global impact of Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 756 points—or 2 percent—by 10:30 a.m. That followed a significant dive late last week, in which the market saw back-to-back 1,500-point losses “for the first time ever,” according to CNBC.

American businesses have, thus far, lost $9.6 trillion due to the instability, according to Forbes.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has argued that some foreign companies were attempting to circumvent levies by shipping through the McDonald and Heard islands before reaching the U.S.

“If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” Lutnick told CBS News on Sunday, calling it a “ridiculous loophole.”

And ridiculous it is—especially since practically a minuscule amount of trade goes through the islands.

“According to export data from the World Bank, the islands have, over the past few years, usually exported a small amount of products to the U.S.,” reported the BBC, noting that “in 2022 the U.S. imported $1.4m from the territory, nearly all of it unnamed ‘machinery and electrical’ products.”

The Heard and McDonald islands tariff was very obviously made in error, at least through the eyes of foreign officials. Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Network that the tariff was “clearly a mistake” and indicated a “rushed process.” Farrell extended a free trade agreement with the European Union last week, stating that “the world has changed” in the wake of Trump’s announcement.

Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington. 

The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,  Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.

Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs. 

Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”

This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force,  including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts. 

As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints. 

Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?