It seems the Trump administration is doing no better getting its story straight about Social Security than managing the agency itself. The president has said many times, without qualifiers, that he is “not going to touch Social Security.” But almost daily, others on his team are saying otherwise — and unlike the president, they are adding qualifiers and contingencies and scenarios in which Social Security would indeed be touched.
Team Trump seems to have concluded that Social Security is no longer the “third rail of American politics” — that they can touch it and live to tell the tale. It will be up to voters to prove them wrong.
The administration is offering a bargain, designed to minimize blowback as it weakens Social Security: We will protect what older Americans are now getting, they wink, if those Americans don’t make a fuss about cutting future benefits for the young and the undeserving.
We can see a hint of that strategy in the March 17 statement from Karoline Leavitt, the president’s press secretary, when she said, “Any American receiving Social Security benefits will continue to receive them.”
Then, on March 21, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that anyone complaining about an interruption in their Social Security benefits must be a “fraudster.” Fraudsters, Lutnick observed, “always make … the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining,” To the murmured agreement of his podcast host, Lutnick added, “Anyone whose been in a payment system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen.”
There you have it — a framing that allows Lutnick and his colleagues in the Trump administration to say they do not intend to cut Social Security while devising plans to undermine it and shake the faith of the millions of Americans who depend on it.
One way to do so is to make dealing with the Social Security Administration as painful as dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles or your local cable television provider.
Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect, calls it “pure mischief, intended to weaken a widely appreciated and efficient public system that Elon Musk has disparaged as a Ponzi scheme.” Doing so will turn Social Security into a “soft target” by tarnishing its reputation and getting the public ready when they eventually talk about privatizing Social Security.
And last month, Frank Bisignano, nominated to head the Social Security Administration, echoed President Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress, where he went on at length about “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” While Bisignano, describing himself as “fundamentally a DOGE person,” said his “objective isn’t to touch benefits … there is going to be fraud, waste and abuse in there.”
Those warnings are the administration’s way of changing how Americans think of Social Security — not as an earned benefit program but as a part of the welfare system.
Historians remind us that the New Dealers who created Social Security fought hard against such a portrait. They succeeded by connecting it to a longstanding American commitment to disaster relief, with the disaster being elderly people living in misery. Trump and his allies want to undo that legacy and associate Social Security with all the negative connotations that accompany being on welfare— a modern version of Ronald Reagan’s attack on “welfare queens” that blames illegal immigrants for society’s ills.
Trump highlighted that connection throughout last year’s presidential campaign, blaming Democrats for endangering Social Security and Medicare “by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS.”
That is why, at the end of his remarks about Social Security during his podcast interview, Lutnick promised that the administration would not “take one penny from someone who deserves Social Security.” The American people should not take his word for it.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
