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- A Thousand Cuts
My Post subscription still hasn’t run its course so here’s their story about the DOGErs messing around with the death file at the Social Security Administration:
Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records.
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said.
The DOGE motto of “why use a scalpel when a machete will work” is on full display, since they decided to use this ability to mark people as dead to mark some number of immigrants as dead. Of course, being DOGE, they probably also marked some non-immigrants as dead.
The story gets a little more complicated, here’s a Politico piece on how the DOGE control of the Social Security database is used in conjunction with the DHS database.
Their first mission: implement parole terminations for 6,300 undocumented immigrants who either have criminal records or are on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. That effort required coordinating with the Social Security Administration to have their Social Security numbers effectively canceled by adding them to a database that tracks dead people, the New York Times and the Washington Post first reported. Their theory is that without effective Social Security numbers – needed for bank accounts and loans, among other things – these people would “self deport.”
This effort led to US citizens getting letters, including, no surprise, an immigration lawyer who’s apparently born in the USA:
Some personal news: the Department of Homeland Security has given me, an immigration lawyer born in Newton, Massachusetts, seven days to leave the U.S. Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?
— Nicole Micheroni (@nicolemicheroni.bsky.social)2025-04-11T23:11:13.848Z
A lot of the replies on BlueSky were wondering if this letter is fake, but Steve M has more details from other reliable sources saying it’s real. It’s just another dumb mistake by Big Balls and his crew of coding bootcampers.
Trump has also announced that he’s suspending tariffs on cell phones and computers.
The way this is going to work, or not work, is more and more of these tiny cuts. Some people will lose their Social Security checks. Some non-immigrants will be harassed by ICE, and perhaps even sent to gulags. Some good will be subject to tariffs, but not the ones that are visible and obvious (like cell phones). The point is for Trumpism to grow like an insidious cancer, and by the time it is discovered, the patient is all but dead.
I think some of Trump’s opposition in the Democratic Party thinks that Trumpists will break things so badly that it will be obvious to anyone watching who broke it and why. But at the moment, that’s not the case in the lived experience of the average American. Yeah, the stock market went kablooey for a bit, but it’s also going up some days. (Krugman makes the point that the 2008 stock market had multiple rallies before a huge decline.) Trump’s approval rating is going down but it’s by no means cratering.
No politician would like the direction those lines are going in, but he’s not Herbert Hoover or end-stage Dick Nixon by any means. An effort by the opposition will be required, I’m sad to report.
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