Republicans BLOCK Whitehouse Bill to Keep DOGE Out of Private Social Security Data

[WHITEHOUSE] As I said at the very beginning, we have reason to believe that Elon Musk and his little gang of frat boy tech bro miscreants, call them the muskrats, call them the Doggy Boys, whatever you want, that they went into Social Security with bad intent.

The cover that they went in under was they were going to look for waste, fraud, and abuse. But I think we know that the waste, fraud, and abuse veil in which the Doggy Boys wrapped themselves was a fake. Because if you were actually concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, you wouldn’t fire all the inspectors general. You’d actually probably try to recruit the inspectors general into your so-called government efficiency effort because what inspectors general do all day is actually look for waste, fraud, and abuse. And you could go through their files and say, “Here, what are the biggest areas that we should be paying attention to?” And you’d work with the inspectors general. Instead, they were fired. That whole apparatus to actually seek waste, fraud, and abuse was set aside.

And in came the Doggy Boys. A little bit like in Cat in the Hat “Thing One and Thing Two,” except there were a hundred more of them running around doing considerable damage to government agencies and government systems. And to a very significant extent, I think doing damage to government agencies and systems was the point. This was not the bug. This was the feature. They went in to try to wreck stuff and it became particularly dangerous around Social Security, because first of all there was a propaganda campaign to talk down Social Security, to pretend falsely that it was riddled with fraud [which] took place … right over on the House floor when the President came to speak to Congress and repeatedly lied about social security fraud.

Then you had the infiltration of people who were from tech bro world and from private equity world. Exactly. Who would want to take over Social Security?

And then you had people talking up benefit interruptions like that was an okay thing. Well, a benefit interruption would be the excuse to go in and take over Social Security to privatize it with tech bros and with private equity people.

So, I think the noise that we made about that headed it off.

But there remains the lingering danger that when they got into Social Security’s data systems, they exfiltrated data because data has enormous value, or they infiltrated bugs to do damage to the old systems of Social Security. Or worst of all, perhaps they left back doors so that Elon Musk or other folks who were interested in getting access to massive amounts of Americans data can find their way in to Social Security’s data systems secretly.

So this is a very simple measure. It asks for an audit of Social Security data systems to make sure that those things did not happen. That really ought to be a bipartisan if not unanimous expression of Senate intention. And that’s why I hoped that we could generate unanimous consent for it today. With that, I yield the floor to the distinguished ranking member of the committee on finance, Senator Wyden.

* * *

Lambert here: Thing One and Thing Two: