It’s not the first time that Republicans have threatened to dismantle Social Security— the cornerstone program that has provided reliable financial security to American workers for nearly a century. Now, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has its eyes set on the third rail of American politics. This week on Trumpland, Alex Wagner speaks with agency employees in the eye of the storm as chaos ensues for them and the millions of beneficiaries who rely on these payments. Then, a conversation on the uncertain future of Social Security with the former Associate Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, and FDR’s grandson, James Roosevelt.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Ned Johnson: Hello?
Alex Wagner: Hi, Mr. Johnson. How are you?
Ned Johnson: I’m fine. Thank you.
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Alex Wagner: This is Ned Johnson. He’s 82 years old and lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.
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Ned Johnson: My wife got the first notice from Bank of America with their condolences over my death.
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Alex Wagner: As you can hear, Ned Johnson is very much alive.
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Ned Johnson: Two days later, we got a second notice from the bank declaring that the Social Security had deducted $5,200 from our checking account.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
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Alex Wagner: Johnson was mistakenly put on what is called the Death Master File, and now had to convince the Social Security Administration that he wasn’t dead. That process likely hasn’t ever been very fun or easy, but these days it’s a full-time job.
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Ned Johnson: I discovered after 50-some odd phone calls trying to get through and was put on hold for two hours at a time, and then the phone would go dead and you have to start all over again.
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Alex Wagner: Johnson finally got through and was given an in-person appointment six weeks later. Instead of waiting a month and a half, he decided he’d visit his local Social Security Office in person.
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Ned Johnson: I was ushered into the room by three armed guards and sat with some 50 odd people. So I sat there for six or eight hours that day, and I realized that I was never going to get to the front of the line to see one of about three or four case workers. Their office facility has about 30 or 40 workstations and only had three or four agents.
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Alex Wagner: As he puts it, Johnson got lucky. As soon as a window opened up, he ran over and told the agent, “I’m not really dead. Can you help me?” After several more hours of waiting and speaking with several more agents, they were finally able to start the process of resurrecting Ned Johnson.
In the meantime, Johnson had lost his healthcare. His credit score went down to zero and his entire life has been totally upended. And even though Social Security has assured Johnson that he’s now alive in their system, he hasn’t gotten his next payment yet, so he can’t be entirely sure.
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Alex Wagner: Did you ever find out why Social Security decided you were dead?
Ned Johnson: Well, I’ve asked that question numerous times. The standard answer seems to be as well it was a computer glitch or a human missed entry into their system.
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Alex Wagner: Ned Johnson is one of more than 73 million Americans who receive benefits from the Social Security Administration every month. A portion of each paycheck most Americans receive is paid into the system. It’s money they rely on in retirement after a lifetime of paying into the system.
That check which averages just over $20,000 per year is the sole income for 40% of seniors in the United States. And it isn’t just retirees who rely on this money. It’s also people with disabilities, as well as their spouses and children and their survivors. But now under the Trump administration, Social Security is under fire from DOGE.
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Elon Musk: Social security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.
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Alex Wagner: That was Elon Musk talking to Joe Rogan back in February of this year. Now, Donald Trump, both as a candidate and president, has vowed to preserve Social Security. Here’s Trump a month after the 2024 election.
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Kristen Welker: You won’t touch Medicare and Social Security.
Donald Trump: That’s abuse.
Kristen Welker: Okay.
Donald Trump: No. I said we’re not touching Social Security, other than we might make it more efficient, but the people are going to get what they’re getting,
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Alex Wagner: But making the program more efficient has already caused unbelievable chaos.
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Reporter: A major change coming to Social Security, in an effort to crack down on fraudulent claims. The Trump administration planning to impose stricter measures on how to verify a person’s identity. Soon, people will no longer be able to prove their identity over the phone, meaning those who can’t do so using the online service have to go in person.
The change comes as the agency plans to close dozens of Social Security offices nationwide and layoff thousands of workers. The tightening measures coming from DOGE and Elon Musk, who is using claims of voter fraud and illegal immigration to make the pitch for cuts, allegations for which he hasn’t offered evidence and experts say is inaccurate.
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Alex Wagner: After weeks of outcry, the Trump administration actually backtracked on its requirement that all Social Security identification was required to be in person. Instead, only people flagged for fraud would be required to make an in-person visit.
Other efficiencies include the plan to eliminate paper checks, which some half a million Americans still rely on for their payments. And then there was reporting from Wired last week that official communications for the Social Security Administration would be shifting exclusively to X, formerly known as Twitter. After the story published, the White House denied that was the case, but Wired stands by their initial reporting about the proposed change.
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Unidentified Female: Hey, can you help us save Social Security?
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Alex Wagner: On Tuesday afternoon as part of a Social Security Day of Action, there was a small gathering in Upper Manhattan, outside the local Social Security Office where people held signs and passed out flyers.
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Unidentified Female: I haven’t started collecting yet. I am trying to wait till I’m 70. You know, now, I just don’t know what to do. Should I get in before it disappears? Should I wait because financially that would be best? But I’m just very, very frightened.
Unidentified Female: You are pissing off and taking away benefits from people who have time on their hands, can organize. This is the stupidest political calculation.
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Alex Wagner: This was one of three events in New York City on Tuesday, a follow-up to the hands-off protests across the nation 10 days prior, where according to organizers, millions of people took to the streets. These threats to Social Security have become an issue that Democrats have started to rally around.
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Unidentified Male: You got the wealthiest guy on earth, Mr. Musk, and this guy is running all over Washington, D.C., slashing the Social Security Administration.
(Crowd Booing)
Unidentified Female: They are slashing the programs that we have spent a lifetime paying into.
(Crowd Booing)
Alex Wagner: And on Tuesday, former President Biden, in his first public speech since leaving office, took the stage in Chicago to explicitly criticize the threats to Social Security.
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Joe Biden: My friend, Governor O’Malley knows what they’re really up to. He says they want to wreck it so they can rob it.
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Alex Wagner: Back at the event in Upper Manhattan this week, Susan Fountain, one of the organizers, explained what she’s doing to protect her Social Security.
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Susan Fountain: Everybody should consider printing out their Social Security earnings record, go on the website, download it, print it out. Because, you know, if the DOGE kids mess up the Social Security database or, you know, God knows what they might do, I don’t know, but we should all be able to document what our earnings record was. So I downloaded and then printed everything because I’m going to the bank right after this rally to put it in my safe deposit box. Yeah.
Alex Wagner: So you’ve printed out --
Susan Fountain: Yes.
Alex Wagner: -- your Social Security payments --
Susan Fountain: Yes.
Alex Wagner: -- that have been made throughout your life.
Susan Fountain: Yep.
Alex Wagner: You have them with you and you’re going to go to your bank --
Susan Fountain: And my earnings. Yeah.
Alex Wagner: -- and put them in your safe deposit box.
Susan Fountain: Yeah, because I just want to be able to document. If this system goes down, if things crash, have some documentation so that you can, you know, justify the benefit that you are supposed to be getting.
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Alex Wagner: On this episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner,” how worried should Americans be about their Social Security? We speak with some of the people in the belly of the beast.
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Unidentified Male: It is complete confusion. They’re changing the rules. They give us one day to learn it. Somebody needs to do a complete stop and a complete 360 before it’s too late.
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Alex Wagner: And try to understand what the legacy of this new deal program could teach us about the fight to determine its future.
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James Roosevelt: People have to be informed. They have to wake up and they have to say, if they’re going to do this, that affects us in our daily lives so deeply, it’s got to stop.
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Alex Wagner: On Tuesday, I spoke with Althia Mowatt, Rennie Glasgow, Amber Westbrook, and an employee who requested anonymity, who we’ll call Dan. They all work at the Social Security Administration and are typically at the receiving end of long lines filled with worried people. All four spoke to me in their capacity as members of, and on behalf of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents them.
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Alex Wagner: What has it been like since the president came into office and DOGE started exerting its influence over the administration, that Social Security Administration?
Unidentified Female: It has been an everyday nightmare.
Rennie Glasgow: Today, we are in a free fall. Individuals are hurting. It’s extremely stressful.
Unidentified Female: It’s been a whirlwind. I have been at this agency over 20 years and I have never seen so much change so quickly in all of the years I’ve been at SSA.
Unidentified Male: It’s been chaos. At first, we thought we were all okay. You know, they’re messing with these other agencies. Social Security is good.
And then from there, it just escalated. They’re trying to buy people out, use taxpaying money to say, hey, why wouldn’t you leave? Go find a more productive job. Subjecting employees to these emails that are totally unnecessary. They’re just shaking a tree, trying to get as many apples to fall out of it as they can. It’s a very troubling time. Let’s put it that way.
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Alex Wagner: That last voice you heard there, the person we’re calling Dan, he’s particularly worried about what’s happening to Social Security under DOGE.
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Alex Wagner: What are you hearing from the American public?
Unidentified Male: The public is terrified. The ones that we’ve spoken to, they come into the office. They call our phones. Our phone traffic is blowing up lately, but seems like more people are coming in as they continue just to create more chaos, more rules that really aren’t needed. We were fine before. Now, they’re gutting our backend support. It’s really terrifying. It is. What is their plan? Fraud this, fraud that, but then they fire the inspector generals.
Alex Wagner: When you say they’re gutting our backend support, what’s the practical effect of something like that on a member of the public?
Unidentified Male: Yeah. So the field office, we’re the front-facing face of the agency. Pretty much you come in, you see us, we help you with whatever it is you need. Behind us, there’s regional offices. They work on workloads that support us. There’s certain things that we don’t do in the office. We will transfer to another office to be done.
The payment centers effectuate our payments for Title II program. And I mean, if you want to talk to payment centers, I think they’re consolidating them down to four. Before, it was taking forever to get something out of a payment center, just because our staffing was so bad. And now that they’ve shaken the tree and gotten the apples to fall out of it, when we’re saying, hey, we’re going to send something to the payment center, we’re now like, hmm, I don’t know how long it’s going to take because they’re reconfiguring it.
The public is terrified. These are elderly people. They come into the office. They think they have to sign up for I.D. proofing. They’re already getting benefits. They give us training on something one day, they enforce it the next. It’s chaos. It really is.
Alex Wagner: It just feels like there’s so much swirl and disinformation around Social Security. I’m thinking in particular about the reporting that DOGE falsely labeled 6,000 living immigrants as dead. When you heard about that, I mean, first of all, what was your reaction to that and what was your thought?
Unidentified Male: It’s terrifying. I’ve been involved in a resurrection cases before, where you bring somebody back to life pretty much, because they were killed off in our systems. It stops their life. It stops their credit. It stops their bank accounts. It stops their health insurance.
If those people are indeed alive, it is going to end their lives as they know it. Right? So then you’re going to have all of these people, if they exist, are going to come rushing into our office. And our offices, already, our seats are full. So you’re just going to stand there until we could see you because there’s not enough of us and they’re still trying to get rid of us.
There’s nothing efficient about this. And when somebody gets killed off in our system, and if it’s by error, it’s time-consuming. We don’t have time anymore. From the hours of 9:00 to 4:00, we’re dealing with people coming in the door, people that are calling. All the backend work is sitting there.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Unidentified Male: There used to be adjudication time for certain offices, where the claims reps would be allowed to work like four hours a week, and they just canceled that pilot. So this agency is self-inflicting this chaos for no reason. They’re saying it’s fraud. The people that were responsible for the fraud before, they fired them. Again, it’s chaos.
Alex Wagner: Do you feel like enough attention is being paid to what’s going on? I mean, I know real damage is being done and not just, you know, in the short term, but the gutting of the backend, or the workflow itself is being harmed to a degree that it will take a really long time to come back from that even if you get the resources reallocated to you.
Unidentified Male: Yeah. Somebody needs to do a complete stop and a complete 360 before it’s too late. It is complete confusion. They’re changing the rules. They give us one day to learn it. And then people come in and they’re like, hey, this is the new policy. And we’re still trying to figure out what the policy even was.
We got one day of training and then they’ll say, hey, you know what, we’re changing that policy. And then they’ll give us a training video and say, hey, you got to watch that video. And then you can get into the training video because you’re like, hey, we’re going to do another training video because we’re changing a policy again. So everything is a complete waste of time, and the public is the one that’s hurting.
Alex Wagner: How much confidence do you have that if someone was in real trouble and needed help from the SSA, they would be able to get it in a timely fashion at this point?
Unidentified Male: Myself and my colleagues, we don’t want people in trouble. We want to be able to help them as soon as they come in, but it’s becoming more difficult. Things are becoming slower, and I worry sometimes.
I just had a lady whose check went to the wrong bank account last week. You know, we have to do a fraud check and I’m like, is this going to take the normal required amount of time? Are the people that did that still there? I don’t know the answers to those questions. It used to take a couple weeks. Is it going to take a month from now? This is time-consuming.
So if I’m sitting there doing a fraud report for somebody, it takes about an hour, maybe 45 minutes to get everything, send it off, get all the evidence together. Meanwhile, there’s people just piling up in the office, waiting for me to get done with that, so I could take on the next one.
Alex Wagner: Wow.
Unidentified Male: It’s only eight hours in a day. Yeah, it’s crazy. I constantly have to remind myself like, yeah, this is real. This is happening.
Alex Wagner: I had Social Security, which was one thought to be fairly untouchable, you know?
Unidentified Male: Yeah. I didn’t know what Social Security was. When I first took the job, I just got out of the military, got back from Iraq. I was like, hey, federal job. This is the American dream. This is what people want. You get out of military, you get a good job, and you work your way up.
I start at the bottom. I grew to love this agency, to be honest with you, and I grew to love representing employees that work for it. Because when you have the happy employees, you have a better customer experience.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Unidentified Male: People come into these offices and they’re like, hey, you know, I was nervous. I didn’t know that it was going to be this relaxed. This is cool. You helped me. I mean, that’s what we’re there. We’re not AI bots. If that’s what the end goal is, I feel bad for society.
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Alex Wagner: For Rennie Glasgow, a claims technical expert, the recent announcement that the Social Security Administration will be using only X to communicate with the public goes well beyond a potential inconvenience. For him, it signals something else.
Rennie Glasgow: As soon as I saw that and heard about that, my first indication was that this is the beginning of the buyout. This is the beginning of privatization. This is the beginning of Elon Musk taking over Social Security. This is the beginning of the Ponzi scheme that he talks about.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. Why was it the beginning, I mean, just because it’s going to be so destabilizing?
Rennie Glasgow: Not only because it’s going to be just destabilizing, but because it is an effort to put money into Elon Musk’s pocket out from the public’s coffers.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Rennie Glasgow: That $3.0 plus trillion, Elon Musk is trying its best to get his hand on that. And this is one initial step and I believe this is the beginning of the privatization of Social Security.
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Alex Wagner: We reached out to the Social Security Administration for a response and received this statement from a White House spokesperson. “MSDNC is shamelessly fear-mongering to seniors. President Trump has made it crystal clear he will always protect Social Security and ensure higher take home pay for seniors by ending the unfair taxation of Social Security benefits. Under his leadership, the Social Security Administration is working tirelessly to modernize systems, improve customer service, and safeguard the integrity of these vital programs.”
We’re going to take a short break. We’ll have more from “Trumpland” in just a second.
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Alex Wagner: This year marks 90 years since Social Security was created back in 1935. Americans suffering from deep poverty during the Great Depression were offered a revolutionary program to ensure their long-term economic security.
The program was the cornerstone of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it became central to his legacy. Since Roosevelt, Social Security has become one of the most popular government programs in existence, which is why despite some unsuccessful attempts by conservatives to privatize the system, Social Security has been largely considered the third rail of American politics.
So to understand why the Trump administration is choosing to touch that third rail, I spoke to the former Associate Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a man named James Roosevelt, who also happens to be FDR’s grandson.
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Alex Wagner: Hi, Mr. Roosevelt. Thank you so much for doing this.
James Roosevelt: Please call me Jim. It’s great to see you.
Alex Wagner: Jim, thank you. So I guess I want to start with a little perspective here, because Republican presidents have been going after Social Security since, effectively, your grandfather’s heyday, right?
James Roosevelt: Republicans have been trying to repeal Social Security ever since it passed in 1935. They tried to just repeal it up to World War II. Then they stood back for a little while. Then after World War II, they started trying to cut benefits. And that’s when my father started the National Committee to preserve Social Security and Medicare in 1982.
Then President George W. Bush announced that he was going to lead a campaign to privatize Social Security and that he would be campaigning in each of the 50 states. And every time he visited a state and explained what he was doing, the polling numbers for privatization dropped.
So they abandoned that for 20 years until they did Project 2025. And as we’ve seen on so many fronts, they have very well-thought-out a campaign to reduce the benefits and protections of the American people.
Alex Wagner: For a long time, Republicans have been trying to privatize Social Security. But it’s effectively been a third rail because it’s one of the most popular programs in the country. It’s a matter of survival for a certain number of millions of Americans.
James Roosevelt: Well, Social Security is not only a matter of survival. It’s also reliable.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
James Roosevelt: It has never missed a payment since 1940 when it began making payments, and it is self-financing.
Alex Wagner: So you make the good point that it is self-funding, that it is very efficient, that it has not, you know, missed a payment. It feels like there’s a concerted effort right now to make the program less functional.
I spoke to a bunch of Social Security workers in field offices who are really ringing the alarm about what the staffing cuts are doing to their ability to serve the American public. They think it’s effectively stretching the system to what feels to them to be almost a breaking point. Do you worry about systemic failure, given what the Trump administration is trying to do?
James Roosevelt: I worry a great deal about what the Trump administration is doing from the inside. They’ve given up attacking it from the outside. They’re trying to undermine it from the inside.
Again, the taxes collected on workers and employers, they do not impact the federal budget. Social security is not allowed to borrow, so it doesn’t affect the deficit either. But because of our three equal branches of government, the actual expense for running the program have to be appropriated by Congress. They’ve underappropriated for years, so that they were down, before Trump, to the lowest number of employees ever working for Social Security, with the greatest number of beneficiaries being served because of the growth in the population.
Then Trump comes in with the DOGE kids and has them do across-the-board cuts, getting rid of institutional knowledge, expertise, and just access for people.
Alex Wagner: There’s also the purge of people who believe in the mission of the Social Security Administration. Do you think that there are enough people with the institutional knowledge that’s necessary, who can protect both the workers who remain and also the project of the administration itself as envisioned by FDR??
James Roosevelt: The previous Commissioner Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland, who was the commissioner until the day before Trump took over, had improved morale and improved productivity, so that the wait time for calls was reduced from almost an hour to 10 minutes during his one year as commissioner. It’s now gone back way over an hour, and that is a combination of understaffing and very low morale.
Alex Wagner: Right. People are, it sounds like from the inside, stretched to the breaking point. They feel exhausted. They feel depleted. They’re in anguish over what’s happening.
James Roosevelt: So I believe that the goal, if I may extrapolate for a minute, of the acting Commissioner Mr. Dudek, and of Trump and Musk, and the DOGE kids is to get people so unhappy about the lack of access and the lack of service, when they apply for benefits, when they apply for disability coverage, and so on, that people will say, “Government can’t run this. It has to be turned over to private business.”
And what I think the goal together with that is to take the assets, the trust fund, even the short-term trust fund, and invest it in the market and collect fees for doing that. That’s what I’m afraid the goal is. And you might say that it was wild speculation, except that 20 years ago, they tried to privatize it.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
James Roosevelt: That failed from the outside. Now, they’re trying to create a demand for that from the inside. It simply would take the assets that people have earned and contributed to the Social Security Trust Fund and turned them over to Wall Street, including management fees.
Alex Wagner: In the meantime, though, it also feels like they’re weaponizing the Social Security data to go after perceived enemies of this administration, whether they’re, you know, allegedly undocumented migrants who are receiving Social Security benefits, which isn’t happening, but also anybody that the president and his allies deem problematic for their agenda. I mean, what worries you most about that scenario in terms of privacy and security and, well, I mean democracy?
James Roosevelt: Well, the confidentiality and security of Social Security records has been religion at the Social Security Administration ever since 1935. When I was there even as an associate commissioner, I couldn’t look at your individual record unless I was authorized to work on your particular case.
So it’s actually a crime to take that data and use it for other purposes, even within the government, because people need the security of knowing that when they furnish their earnings and pay their taxes for Social Security, that’s not used for any other purpose. Nobody should be afraid of enrolling and receiving benefits from Social Security.
So what’s happening now is, again, another effort to undermine the program. I believe that there are heroes resisting it, but we are at the point of a constitutional crisis. And part of what is so scary is that the people in charge either don’t understand how an insurance program like Social Security works, or they mislead people intentionally.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
James Roosevelt: So for example, for years, we’ve heard Social Security is going to go bankrupt. Well, it’s never going to go bankrupt if we adjust it for the change in the economy, because now, for example, the adjustment needs to be people who are at the top end of the earning scale have started earning a lot more in comparison to people in the middle and at the bottom end. That’s when you make adjustments as President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill did in 1983.They adjusted it so that we built up a big trust fund to take care of the baby boomers.
Now, it needs to be adjusted again, but this shouldn’t be adjusted to cut benefits. It should be adjusted to collect revenue so that everyone is paying their fair share. It’s like your homeowners or your auto insurance. The people who are driving cars pay their premiums. The people who have accidents collect out of those premiums. Same thing in Social Security, it’s an insurance plan. So when Mr. Musk says it’s a Ponzi scheme, he either doesn’t know what a Ponzi scheme is, or he doesn’t know what Social Security is, one or the other, because it’s not that.
Alex Wagner: I have to ask as a Roosevelt, how do you look at the moment that we’re in, where in your direct, like, DNA lineage, we’ve gone from this huge sort of project to secure the futures of all Americans, to this very dystopian moment where we’re trying to disassemble what feels like nearly a century of progress? How do you look at it?
James Roosevelt: Well, when I got out of law school, I worked for a brief time for a Wall Street law firm, and then I went in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps for three and a half years. Then I went back to a law firm and started practicing healthcare law.
When President Clinton became president, I was recruited by the then commissioner, a great American named Ken Apfel, and he pitched to me, “You ought to be standing up for the future of the Social Security program that your grandfather started.” And that’s why I became associate commissioner for retirement policy, and that’s when I learned how it really works.
I learned about the dedicated employees, and I learned about the people who relied on it, both for necessities in retirement and for sustaining them with disabilities and their survivors. So, yes, it is a matter of legacy with me, but I’ve kind of gradually grown into it.
Alex Wagner: Are you optimistic about the program’s future?
James Roosevelt: I am long-term optimistic, but I don’t think it will happen by itself.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
James Roosevelt: People have to be informed. They have to wake up and they have to say, all right, we may not like this thing that is being done by the DOGE people and President Trump. We may like another one. But if they’re going to do this, that affects us in our daily lives so deeply, it’s got to stop.
Alex Wagner: Wow. Thank you for your expertise, and optimism, and belief in the American public. It’s really great to have, you know, your thoughts on all of this given both your history and your wisdom.
James Roosevelt: Well, Winston Churchill, I think said it succinctly, Americans will always do the right thing after they try everything else.
Alex Wagner: Sort of feels like that’s where we’re at now.
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Alex Wagner: We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode of “Trumpland with Alex Wagner.” To get this show and other MSNBC podcasts ad-free, be sure to subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts. As a subscriber, you’ll also get exclusive bonus content. And if you like what you’ve been listening to so far on “Trumpland,” please don’t forget to rate and review the show.
Also, we have some exciting pod news for us at MSNBC. Three of our podcasts are nominated for Webby Awards; “Into America,” “Why Is This Happening?” and “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” now known as “Main Justice.” They are all up for awards. Check out our show notes to see how you can vote for each show and help MSNBC take home some hardware.
“Trumpland with Alex Wagner” is produced by Max Jacobs, along with Julia D’Angelo and Kay Guerrero. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Additional production support comes from Hannah Holland. Our audio engineers are Bob Mallory and Katie Lau. And Bryson Barnes is head of audio production. Matthew Alexander is the executive producer, and Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m your host, Alex Wagner. We’ll see you next week.