Social Security Workers Are in Shambles Due to Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts

Months after Elon Musk departed his position at the Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is suffering extensive damage from the fledgling office’s onslaught of cuts.

Earlier this year, DOGE slashed the Social Security Administration’s workforce by 12 percent, leaving an already understaffed agency in a state of upheaval. The cuts have hit local field offices the hardest, reported The New York Times Wednesday.

Local branches are responsible for serving the 74 million Americans on Social Security, many of whom come to field offices for identity verification when applying for benefits and other in-person assistance. But due to cuts, people who need Social Security cards have had to wait multiple weeks to get an appointment.

And in every office that can’t meet demand, there are frontline workers struggling to manage more responsibilities with fewer resources.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert in the Midwest who spoke anonymously to the Times. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

In addition to general staff cuts, the agency has shuffled local workers to the national hotline, leaving even fewer employees available for face-to-face communication. And for people seeking help over the phone, the added representatives aren’t making enough of a dent: Many callers still spend hours on hold.

Rebekah Walker, a 41-year-old woman who’s lived with heart abnormalities since childhood, has been fighting to get a payment issue resolved with the agency for three months. She’s had to borrow money for rent and postpone medical help.

“It’s as if I am not a real human being,” Walker told the Times. “I have three children. I’m a single mom.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s self-described “pal” Donald Trump apparently can’t grasp why the pedophile’s crimes are so upsetting for the American public.

Trump complained to aides regarding the intense public scrutiny over his failure to produce Epstein’s so-called client list, claiming that “Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

After longtime allies whipped up a furor over the dismal Epstein files rollout on the second day of a Turning Point USA Conference in Tampa, Trump wanted to know: “Why is everyone so fixated on the issue?” the Journal said he asked influential allies. “What would make it die down?”

Trump claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites have shared a long and cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. The socialites were caught shepherding underaged girls into casinos together, and Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times. Trump penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and was quoted in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as saying that he had, at that point, known Epstein for 15 years, referring to him as a “terrific guy.”

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which undoubtedly already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told the Journal that the federal fiasco surrounding the Epstein scandal was “the worst managed PR event in history.” Its handling was unorganized and chaotic, with the Justice Department and the FBI regularly pointing fingers at one another.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that FBI leadership was “trying to destroy her,” according to the Journal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has upped the stakes of a potential government shutdown by threatening mass firings in federal agencies if the shutdown were to occur.

Whereas usually federal workers would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown and re-hired once Congress reopens the government, this order from the White House budget office—first reported Wednesday night by Politico—instructs agencies to permanently eliminate jobs that aren’t consistent with the president’s priorities if the government shuts down.

The Trump administration decision to use the threat of firings as leverage ups the ante in negotiations with congressional Democrats over government funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move an “attempt at intimidation” but didn’t seem swayed by the threat. He said earlier this month when talking about shutdown negotiations that the Trump administration’s attacks on federal agencies “will get worse with or without [a shutdown], because Trump is lawless.”

Schumer also believes that the firings likely aren’t as permanent as they seem—that they’ll likely be overturned in court, or that the administration will just end up hiring workers back, as they’re aiming to do with employees fired during DOGE cuts.

“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government,” Schumer said in a statement.

President Trump was so frustrated by the growing scrutiny around his ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that he personally tried to kill The Wall Street Journal’s Epstein birthday book story.

The Journal has reported that when Trump first heard about its plans to cover his strange, sultry 50th birthday letter to Epstein, he told aides that it didn’t exist, never happened, and called News Corp chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally from Air Force One to get the story pulled. After the story was published anyway, he denied that the letter existed and sued Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher. (The letter was later released.)

Trump’s attempt to kill that story—and the Epstein saga in general—has been a massive failure, rife with miscommunication and missteps that shocked even Trump staffers, the Journal revealed. When Attorney General Pam Bondi told America that she had the Epstein list sitting on her desk, the White House staff had no idea what she was talking about. And the FBI was caught completely off guard when she brought that gaggle of right-wing grifters into the White House and gave them a photo shoot with those “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders.

The administration also notably tried to make the Epstein issue go away by having the FBI declare in July that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” on the Epstein case. That, of course, had the opposite effect.

“It was like a bomb went off after that statement went out,” a White House official told the Journal.

Now the Trump administration insists that it’s been fully transparent and done everything it could do to make the Epstein files public. That is not at all the case, as Representative Thomas Massie’s discharge petition argues.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls. This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?” Massie said last Saturday. “Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the president’s rich and powerful friends? Release the Epstein files.”

This story won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter who Trump calls. From Massie to Epstein’s victims, to the base’s obsession, there is too much momentum to simply bottle it up and forget about it. And most of this is self-inflicted from the administration.

“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” said former Trump legal team member Ty Cobb. “You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own ass now.”

Trump’s newly appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has been made well aware that her case against former FBI Director James Comey is a dud. But as the president applies pressure to prosecute his political rivals, she’ll reportedly be moving forward with it nonetheless.

The new interim attorney, Lindsey Halligan, has no prior prosecutorial experience. A former Trump personal attorney and longtime Trump loyalist, her most recent claim to fame was serving as the president’s lead Smithsonian censor, as she sought to expose and correct an “overemphasis on slavery” in the museums.

Now she’s been appointed to her new post with the expectation that she will do what her predecessor, Erik Siebert, failed to: aggressively indict the president’s foes, namely, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Comey—evidence be damned.

But while Halligan reportedly plans to ask a grand jury to indict Comey, she faces a glaring issue: The case is so flimsy that, ABC News reports, prosecutors this week, citing insufficient evidence, advised Halligan in a memo to decline to move forward with perjury and obstruction charges against him.

“A monthslong investigation into Comey by DOJ prosecutors failed to establish probable cause of a crime,” ABC News’s sources said, “meaning that not only would they be unable to secure a conviction of Comey by proving the claims beyond a reasonable doubt, but that they couldn’t reach a significantly lower standard to secure an indictment.”

Halligan has had her own qualms about the case, according to ABC News, as has Attorney General Pam Bondi, per The Wall Street Journal.

But Trump has been applying pressure, even publicly, for the cases against his enemies to proceed. The deadline to indict Comey is this Tuesday, when the five-year statute of limitations expires for accusations that he lied to Congress during his 2020 testimony regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a Saturday Truth Social post addressed to Bondi—which praised Halligan—the president called for urgent action on prosecuting the weak cases against Comey, James, and Senator Adam Schiff, lest the administration kill its “reputation and credibility.”

One day after Alex Jones publicly unveiled the Justice Department’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the lawsuit is no more.

Jones presented the inquiry Tuesday as evidence that Trump’s DOJ was willing to go to bat for him. In a letter dated September 15, U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin accused Aldenberg—one of the first responders to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School—of personally benefiting from the defamation case brought against the InfoWars host by the victims’ families. But by Wednesday, Martin had changed his tune.

“At this time, I write to inform you that there is no investigation of you or your client,” Martin wrote in his new letter to attorney Chris Mattei, who represented Aldenberg as well as the families of Sandy Hook victims, and who was the recipient of Martin’s original letter. “Because of this, I hereby withdraw my request for information from you or your former client.”

The Sandy Hook trial effectively bankrupted Jones, with the conspiracist ordered to cough up $1.3 billion to the victims of the tragedy he branded as a “hoax.” As part of that decision, the court ordered Jones to pay Aldenberg $90 million.

In his original letter, Martin had pressed Mattei’s office for information relating to Aldenberg’s former employment at the FBI, the framing of his testimony in Jones’s defamation case, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

“Less than 18 hours after calling out Alex Jones and Ed Martin for their corrupt use of the Department of Justice to harass Sandy Hook families and the heroic FBI agent who ran into that school to save any children he could, I am happy to learn that this so-called inquiry has now been withdrawn, if it ever existed at all,” Mattei told The New Republic in a statement.

“Let this be a reminder: This is not a moment to cower in silence, but to stand up to bullying, lawless misconduct,” Mattei said. “This isn’t over.”

Mattei had previously scorned Martin’s participation in Jones’s ongoing harassment campaign against Aldenberg as “corrupt complicity.”

Jones made his name and living by casting doubt on the reality of the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people. His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.

Kennedy Center interim president Rick Grenell sent in a group of gay conservatives to heckle and harass a Black performer during her concert because she was a “liberal.”

Prominent fingerstyle guitarist Yasmin Williams performed at the Kennedy Center on September 18 at a concert she had committed to before the Trump administration’s culture war on the iconic theater.

Washingtonian reported that Kennedy Center workers learned that 50 seats at Williams’s show had been saved for the Log Cabin Republicans, a nonprofit group that seeks to simultaneously “support LGBT issues and conservative values.” The center increased security in the venue as about 20 men in MAGA hats took their seats.

“They said they were concerned for my safety,” Williams told Washingtonian. “There were about 20 guys in suits, and some of them were wearing MAGA hats.”

In their newsletter, the “Bi-Weekly,” Log Cabin Republicans president Andrew Manik told his group that Williams was a “vocal opponent of President Trump,” and ordered them to “make sure the audience is filled with Patriots.” The email also said that some attendees would get tickets for free drinks.

The concert seats were reserved for them by Grenell, multiple Kennedy Center employees said, and one of his staffers directed the Log Cabin Republicans to them when they arrived.

Nevertheless, Williams took the stage.

“I’ve been grappling with whether I should do this show for a while, and I’m here!” she said as she began to strum her guitar. “I decided to do this show to support the people … who made the Kennedy Center the prestigious place that it was. Sadly, I have to say ‘was,’ because of the hostile takeover from the Trump administration. It seems to have tarnished the reputation of this place.”

“I don’t support the new board at all,” she continued. “Especially you, Rick Grenell, I am not a fan of yours at all.”

This was met with claps and a smattering of boos, and one attendee even yelled at Williams to give a shout-out to the recently deceased Charlie Kirk. Eventually, the group moved elsewhere and Williams continued her show.

This was the culmination of months of antagonism from Grenell. In April, Williams emailed the interim president asking him if Trump’s overhaul of the center would lead to any logistical changes. She described what he sent back as “absolutely insane.”

He told her that any artist who canceled a show out of protest “did so because they couldn’t be in the presence of Republicans,” asking Williams, “Who is the intolerant one?”

“Let me remind, YOU reached out to me unsolicited and accused me of being an intolerant. Don’t be a victim now. You asked,” he concluded.

While Grenell’s gambit with the Log Cabin Republicans is absolutely nefarious, the state suppression of art is incredibly commonplace in this administration, as its culture crackdown has reached the Smithsonian and national parks.

Despite video proof of the disruption, the Kennedy Center disputes the claims. “This is an absolutely ridiculous claim. There was no coordinated effort by the Kennedy Center. Grenell had no involvement. We did not even know they were coming,” Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi told The Washington Post. “They did not heckle and frankly it is defamation of character for her to say that—she however bashed Grenell and the Center from the Kennedy Center stage. Republicans are patrons too and they are welcome at the Kennedy Center just like anyone else.”

A federal judge on Wednesday smacked down the Trump administration’s attempt to condition federal disaster relief on states’ immigration enforcement cooperation.

A coalition of 20 Democratic state attorneys general sued the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency in May, on the grounds that they had illegally imposed “immigration conditions on billions of federal dollars appropriated by Congress to support critical emergency services and infrastructure projects.”

To be eligible for federal funds, states were directed to comply with a number of conditions. For instance, they were to provide federal immigration agents “access to detainees” and “honor requests for cooperation, such as participation in joint operations, sharing of information, or requests for short term detention of an alien pursuant to a valid detainer.” They were also forbidden from operating “any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.”

Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled in the states’ favor Wednesday, finding the administration’s conditions unconstitutional and in violation of federal law, and ordering them removed.

Smith deemed the immigration-related conditions “unlawfully ambiguous,” “overbroad,” and “unrelated to the underlying programs”—considering the grants “fund programs such as disaster relief, fire safety, dam safety, and emergency preparedness.” Tying the aid to immigration cooperation is also coercive, he said, since “states rely on these grants for billions of dollars annually in disaster relief and public safety funds that cannot be replaced by state revenues.”

This story has been updated.

Vice President JD Vance wants everyone to stop calling people who they disagree with Nazis—but some of us are old enough to remember when he called President Donald Trump “America’s Hitler.”

Speaking in Concord, North Carolina, Wednesday, Vance urged people to turn down the temperature following a deadly shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas.

“If you want to stop political violence, stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo. If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi,” Vance said. “If you want to stop political violence, look in the mirror. That’s the way that we stop political violence in this country, and we’ve got to do it.”

One might refer Vance to a mirror. Just last week, he railed against a journalist who criticized Charlie Kirk’s legacy by calling them “soulless and evil.” That journalist immediately was doxed and received death threats. But looking back, Vance himself used “Nazi” rhetoric to describe his own boss.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?” Vance reportedly wrote in a 2016 message to his then-roommate, Georgia state Senator Josh McLaurin.

What’s actually discouraging is just how quickly Vance changed his tune on Trump, transforming from a self-described “Never-Trump guy” into the number two man of Trump’s sweeping policy agenda targeting immigrants and dissenters. Vance once warned that Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” Now that we’ve arrived in that place, he seems convinced someone else is to blame.

Meanwhile, Trump has never shown any interest in turning down the heat. The president has previously labeled his political opponents “vermin,” and those who disagree with him “the enemy within.” He called Democrats “evil,” “sick,” and “vicious” while feigning outrage over their “divisive” and “disgusting” rhetoric.

While delivering a eulogy at a memorial for Charlie Kirk over the weekend, Trump went off-script to say he wouldn’t embrace forgiveness as the right-wing activist’s own widow had done. “I hate my opponent. And I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry,” Trump said to laughter.

Donald Trump’s big mouth is starting to bite his allies: Even Ohio Representative Jim Jordan found it difficult to defend the president’s careless remarks regarding his administration’s growing attempts to censor the press.

In an interview with CNBC Wednesday, Jordan conceded that Trump’s language regarding his administration’s handling of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was tantamount to coercion.

“Congressman, can I just read you something? This is what the president of the United States says, and you tell me whether you think this sounds like coercion or not,” said Squawk Box host Andrew Ross Sorkin.

“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this,” Sorkin continued, quoting Trump. “Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative.”

Jordan, in turn, attempted to deflect the criticism, pointing out that Trump’s pressure ultimately was not successful, considering Kimmel’s triumphant return to some late-night broadcasters Tuesday night. But the Ohio Republican couldn’t defend the White House from a point-blank question.

“But that does sound like pressure from the government, right? There’s pressure, it may not be successful pressure, but it’s pressure from the government?” pressed Sorkin.

After a pause, Jordan relented: “I guess you could say maybe some.” He quickly clarified that he believed it boiled down to a “business decision.”

Other MAGA allies were less protective of the administration’s recent actions, which involved FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatening government action against any broadcaster that continued to air Kimmel after the comedian made a not untrue remark about Charlie Kirk’s assassin.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for one, likened Carr’s behavior to a “mafioso,” and recognized that opening the door to federal censorship would only end badly for Trump and his allies.

“I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said; I am thrilled that he was fired,” Cruz said on his podcast. “But let me tell you: If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like’—that will end up bad for conservatives.”