Sheldon Whitehouse Accuses Musk Of Using DOGE To Undermine Social Security In Push To Privatize It
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Madam President, I'm pleased to supplement the remarks of our distinguished leader with respect to Social Security. Rhode Island has, I believe, the largest participation per capita of Social Security in the country. Social Security is what brought American seniors out of poverty into a distinguished and fair retirement.

and it really matters that we defend it and that Social Security remain unbroken. Threat is pretty clear. The president keeps talking about imaginary fraud. Why would you talk about imaginary fraud in the system unless you have some motive? And it wasn't just him. Elon Musk talked relentlessly about fraud in the Social Security system. The Secretary of Commerce went a mile out of his lane

to add a shot at Social Security being riddled with fraud. And then the president went to the other building, the other end of the building there, stood at the rostrum of the House and lied to the American people, flat out lied to the American people about Social Security fraud. He let Elon Musk call it a Ponzi scheme as well.

This is a battering ram of misinformation and disinformation, and it doesn't happen without a motive. The motive here is to degrade public confidence in Social Security. At the same time, you send what I call your little muskrats, you send your muskrats into Social Security to disrupt its operations.

so that you have the rhetorical attack happening over here, and then you begin to have Social Security fail because you broke it and get what has been referred to as an interruption of benefits. An interruption of benefits. And then you also have your private equity people and your tech bros over there so that when the interruption of benefits happens, they can come in, swoop to the rescue,

of the problem that the administration caused. And next thing you know, what have you got? Privatized Social Security with private equity guys and tech bros running the show because thousands of the employees who know how to run the Social Security Administration have been forced out. That's the concern, and it's a very real concern. I want to give Mr. Brisegnano good remarks, good marks.

for saying that he's not going there. He said that he will not privatize the agency, will not. He said that under his leadership, the Social Security Administration will remain a government agency and remain an agency that is run for the benefit of the American people and benefit recipients. Now, the problem is I find nominations statements hard to believe up against the power

of that pressure from the White House and from Musk and from the Secretary of Commerce and from whoever else is trying to accomplish the Republican extremist goal for decades of getting rid of Social Security. So I was a no vote in committee. I'm going to be a no vote out here. I hope very much that I'm wrong. But I also hope very much that Secretary Rubio would stand up for Ukraine and that he'd be an anchor as Secretary of State to defend Ukraine

against the predatory, brutal, criminal war crimes of Vladimir Putin. But what we've seen instead has been the Putinization of our strategy to Ukraine. And the Secretary of State has been entirely complicit in it from all the signs that I see. So when you have somebody who says one thing, and in the case of Secretary Roubaix, who actually lived it, he was actually an ardent advocate for defending Ukraine.

And then you get into Trump zone and suddenly all your principles disappear, all your commitments disappear. Everything just becomes, you just become a tool of the Trump political operation. I've seen that too often, so I'm going to vote no. We need as a Senate to send a clear message that Social Security is inviolable.

That it is a promise amongst us all as Americans to protect our seniors, to protect ourselves when we get to that age, and that no one will be allowed to break it. And one of the things I'm going to ask is to make sure that we go into Social Security's databases and make sure that those muskrats, when they went in there, didn't do any permanent damage, didn't set off missiles.

mines to go off later and didn't leave back doors for the information to be exfiltrated out to private sector folks for whom it's as good as gold. I'll say one last thing, and that is that Mr. Brasignano said he would work with me on the benefit cliffs.

where you're fine at full benefits and then one little thing happens, you miss one little mark, and it's a complete crash. There's a better way to deal with it. Benefit cliff smoothing is a technical thing. He promised he would work with me. I intend to hold him to that promise. And my friend Mr. Cornyn, the senator from Texas, has been patiently waiting, so I'll yield the floor now to him. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

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