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© 2024 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES  4/28/25

Social Security and the DOGE kids

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     At packed town halls held recently by New Mexico’s three U.S. House members, the defining feature of attendees was grey hair, and one of their most urgent worries was Social Security.

     In New Mexico, 468,000 people get a Social Security check. Another 55,000 receive Supplemental Security Income.  For a great many of them, missing even one check wouldn’t just be inconvenient, it would be disastrous – the difference between housed and unhoused, fed and hungry, as U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez learned when he surveyed constituents.

     No recipient, myself included, considers Social Security an entitlement. “I paid in,” they will tell you.

     Elders’ alarm over Social Security has festered for months. The president promised he wouldn’t touch Social Security except for “waste, fraud and abuse” and then turned Elon Musk and his DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, loose on the Social Security Administration (SSA). 

     In February Musk claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 were receiving a Social Security check, when he had, in fact, misunderstood the agency’s aged record keeping system. DOGE staff, without training or security clearances, embarked on a “major cleanup” of SSA records. Since March DOGE moved 10 million records to SSA’s Death Master File over the objections of SSA staff, according to the Washington Post. But DOGE itself was so unsure about its actions, according to Newsweek, that it advised SSA offices to reinstate people who came in with identification. That can take months. 

     The Washington Post reported last week on one man who learned he was added to the Death Master File when he couldn’t use his credit card to buy lunch. The government told financial institutions he was dead, clawed back his last Social Security check, and ended his pension checks and Medicare. Months later, he’s still trying to recover pension checks.

     The undead have been showing up at Social Security offices, where they may or may not find somebody to help them. The Trump administration fired 7,000 people from SSA’s 57,000-person workforce, despite staffing at a 50-year low, and plans to lay off thousands more and close offices. At the same time, DOGE began requiring people without internet access to prove their identity with an in-person office visit.

     The result was website crashes, hours’ long wait times by phone, and few actual humans still working in field offices.

     U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury told a town hall this month that she was denied entry to the Albuquerque Social Security office, even though she had an appointment. She said the office, a regional call center normally staffed by 600, had around 250 to 300 employees. 

     She joined more than 100 members of Congress in asking SSA’s Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to keep local field offices open.

     Dudek, previously a mid-level data analyst, welcomed and enabled DOGE as other agency professionals resisted or resigned in protest. At DOGE’s direction, he has “pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems,” the Washington Post reported. In a recording obtained by ProPublica, Dudek urged co-workers to be patient with “the DOGE kids,” as he called them. “They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

     Former Deputy Commissioner Jason Fichtner has compared DOGE’s Social Security cuts to a drunk operating a wrecking ball. His boss, former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, has warned Social Security recipients to save their money to prepare for future missed checks. He has explained that SSA’s overhead is far below commercial insurers. In his view the administration is trying to dismember the agency by breaking its ability to serve. Once broken, it can be privatized.

     Which is what Stansbury said in her town hall. “They are trying to dismantle Social Security. The GOP has dreamed of privatizing it for years. A lot of major financial institutions can make a lot of money,” she said. 

     Project 2025, the administration’s 900-page blueprint, doesn’t address Social Security, but one of its authors, economist Stephen Moore, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme long before Elon Musk did, and Moore has long proposed deep cuts and privatization.

     The debate over privatizing Social Security is long standing. Two thoughts: First, with a private account the broker gets paid whether the market is up or down, whether you make money or not. Second, we all deserve to make our own decisions about what happens to Social Security and not be forced into an outcome because the powers that be drove it into the ground.

     As a Vasquez constituent told Source New Mexico, “It’s my money.”

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© 2024 NEW MEXICO NEWS SERVICES 4/21/25

Tax package was short on planning and long on politics

By Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

     Few subjects inspire as much fuzzy math and fuzzier thinking as taxes. It was just one reason the governor not only vetoed House Bill 14 but stomped all over it and lambasted Democrats in a smoking veto message:

     “In a session where the Legislature found time to pass three separate license plate bills and designate an official state bread, it is deeply disappointing that they waited until the final days—indeed, the final hours—of the 2025 legislative session to take up a tax package. Even more troubling is the fact that what ultimately emerged lacked both strategic coherence and fiscal credibility. There was no plan and no preparation for how to pay for the tax relief in this bill. As a result, the Legislature had to delay any meaningful tax relief for working families until Fiscal Year 2027, despite the state sitting on more than $3 billion in one-time revenues and over 30% in reserves. That is not prudence—it is paralysis.”

     HB 14 was actually 16 previously tabled bills that Dems stitched together into a crazy quilt. Its sponsors were House Speaker Javier Martinez and Taxation and Revenue Committee Chairman Derrick Lente. It had something for everyone, but the major component was a tax credit that would have effectively eliminated income taxes for some working families. 

     The challenge, as usual, was how to pay for it. They seized on a new 0.28% oil surtax. That idea met strenuous objections from the industry and the business community. As Dems would learn, the president’s trade war has injured the state’s golden goose by driving down oil prices and driving up the cost of equipment and supplies. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil was $71 a barrel when the bill was introduced, $67 when it passed the House and $61 when the bill was vetoed. 

     That wasn’t the only hurdle. The oil tax would have raised $130 million. House Dems needed $72 million for their income tax proposal. The Senate’s tax committee added $70 million of its own tax breaks. You can see this doesn’t add up. And the Senate stripped out the oil tax.

     House and Senate were at loggerheads until the day before adjournment. During last minute meetings, the Senate refused to budge on the oil tax. The final compromise involved paring down tax breaks and pushing them into fiscal 2027, so lawmakers next year would have to figure out how to pay for them. It’s no way to run a railroad, although Dems said they could use the bill as a template for action next year.

     Fuzzy thinking also afflicted Republicans, who introduced HB 275 to do away entirely with personal income taxes. This would have cost $1.8 billion in fiscal 2026, according to legislative analysis. Their reasoning, backed by no studies whatsoever, seemed to be that with this big budget surplus, surely we can get rid of income taxes. Trouble is, the surplus is one-time money, not recurring money. The bill was never heard in committee.

     The governor accused HB 14 sponsors of “decision-making driven more by political self-interest than public good.” Seeing machinations in Congress to justify tax breaks for the rich, Martinez and Lente referred to their legislation as “the tax fairness bill,” one of many on a list of Democratic bills to help low-income and middle class people. 

     “Fundamentally, this tax package is about fairness and putting our values into action,” said Lente in a news release. “We are cutting or fully eliminating income taxes for 300,000 hardworking New Mexicans who power our economy, while also making sure that the prosperous multi-billion-dollar industry that profits from the extraction of our natural resources pays its fair share.”

     Its “fair share” is a third of the state budget.

     Lente insisted the tax would fall on Big Oil despite Republican arguments that it would also hit Small Oil. Not everybody here is Exxon. When the Rs argued that the tax would hurt the oil industry, Dems countered that the president’s tariffs, layoffs and mass deportations were hurting everybody. That’s all true, but it’s not the basis of tax policy.

     If either party was serious about meaningful tax change, they would have started long before the session in the interim tax committee. Then they could think and deliberate. They could make a plan, hear testimony and draft bills. Instead, HB 14 seemed to come out of nowhere and spring to life, like an accidental collision of cells in a petri dish.