MAGA Report Cards — Social Security

Twelve Republicans Posed for Photos With a Group That Wants to Privatize Social Security. They're Calling It an Endorsement.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:49:54 +0000

There is a simple test for whether a politician is on your side about Social Security. Look at who is handing them awards.

American Journal News reported on August 13, 2026 that a dozen House Republicans — nearly all of them in races they could lose — have been collecting an award from the 60 Plus Association and posting the photos.

The 60 Plus Association is not a seniors group in the way most people mean it. It is a group that has spent three decades trying to take Social Security apart.

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

It was created in 1992 to be a conservative alternative to AARP, with seed money from the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

In 1997, it boasted that it was "the first national senior citizens group to endorse privatization of the Social Security program." That is its own description of itself, not an attack from an opponent. It has pushed that position since the 1990s, and its leaders have called private retirement accounts "the only real answer" for the program.

Privatizing Social Security means taking the money you paid in over a working lifetime and putting it into the stock market. When the market goes up, you do fine. When it goes down — 2008, say — you do not. The guarantee is the whole point of the program, and privatization is the thing that removes the guarantee.

The group did not stop at Social Security. It also backed the plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system — while acknowledging that the plan would "phase out Medicare" for younger generations. Instead of Medicare paying your medical bills, you would get a fixed check to go buy insurance yourself. If the check doesn't cover the premium, that's your problem.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is old news the group has walked away from. Its president, Saul Anuzis, has also argued for repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The money behind it has never been public. 60 Plus is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means it never has to say who funds it. DeSmog's accounting found the group took in more than $42 million between 2010 and 2012 from organizations, many of them tied to the Koch network.

Who took the award

The award is called, in the group's own words, "Guardians of Senior Citizens." It functions as an endorsement — and the lawmakers who received it treated it like one, posing for photographs with Anuzis.

Taking it this year:

Kevin Kiley, California — who took the award in both 2025 and 2026
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa
Zach Nunn, Iowa
Bill Huizenga, Michigan
Tom Barrett, Michigan
Mike Lawler, New York
Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania

Past recipients include Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Monica De La Cruz of Texas. Rob Wittman of Virginia got it in 2025.

Every one of them is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of the most vulnerable incumbents on the ballot this November. That is not a coincidence — it is the point. These are the members who most need to look like protectors of seniors, and they went and got a certificate from the people who want the program privatized.

The vote that already happened

An award is a photo. A roll call is a record.

On July 3, 2025, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by 218 to 214. Eleven of these twelve Republicans voted yes: Kiley, Miller-Meeks, Nunn, Huizenga, Barrett, Lawler, Mackenzie, Perry, Kean, De La Cruz and Wittman. Fitzpatrick was the one who voted no.

That bill cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. And because of a budget law called Statutory PAYGO — a rule that forces automatic spending cuts when Congress passes something that adds this much to the deficit — the Congressional Budget Office found the bill will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to 2034 unless Congress acts to stop it.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that sets off automatic Medicare cuts, then accept an award from a group that wants Medicare phased out anyway, then put the photo online.

The one who wouldn't answer the question

The most useful thing about this list is that we already know how some of these members behave when a real person asks them about Social Security.

In June 2026, a reporter asked Rob Wittman about Republican proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare. Wittman put a phone to his ear and pretended to be on a call for 90 seconds. The camera could see his screen. There was no call.

Bill Huizenga's approach was different but no more honest. When a poll showed him trailing, he deleted whole sections of his own campaign website — including the page about the national debt and the page about health care. He didn't change a single vote. He just stopped telling voters about them.

Monica De La Cruz has never held an in-person town hall since taking office. Tom Kean Jr. skipped more than 100 votes in four months while a New York Times reporter went looking for him at his house.

These are not people eager to explain a Social Security position to their constituents. They are people who found a group willing to certify one for them.

This is a pattern, not an accident

The 60 Plus award is one piece of a larger push that has been running all year.

Ron Estes, the congressman who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Social Security, went on Newsmax to say he was looking forward to what DOGE would find at the agency he is supposed to be protecting. It then lost 6,645 employees in eleven months.

Tom Cole has pushed a bill for seven Congresses that would hand Social Security to 13 appointees and then force Congress to vote yes or no on whatever they write — no amendments allowed, four hours of debate, no filibuster. It is a machine for passing cuts that no member would have to sponsor by name.

That is what makes the photographs matter. Nobody in Congress is going to introduce a bill titled "The Privatize Social Security Act." What happens instead is quieter: a commission with no amendments, a budget rule that fires automatically, a staff cut here, an award ceremony there.

You get 65 once. There is no second try if the money isn't there. When twelve members of Congress in tough races decide the safest thing to be seen with is a group that spent thirty years trying to privatize the program, that tells you something they would rather explain in a press release than at a town hall.

Source

House Republicans embrace group that wants to privatize Social Security — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: American Journal News.

Rob Wittman Faked a Phone Call for 90 Seconds Rather Than Answer One Question About Social Security

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:57:48 +0000

On June 8, 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on a Louisiana radio station and said something that got everyone's attention. As the Washington Post reported, Johnson said:

"The reason we are in trouble is because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot, mandatory spending. That's your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed."

And then, in the same interview: "We have a plan to do that next year."

Next year. Not this year — after the November election. Johnson did not say what was in the plan.

Two days later, a reporter for MeidasTouch caught Rob Wittman on Capitol Hill and asked him the obvious question: what is the Speaker's plan for Social Security?

The 90 seconds

Wittman took out his phone, put it to his ear, and started talking to nobody.

Here is what he said into it, as Common Dreams transcribed it:

"Hey, how you doing? I'm good. I'm good with that. I'll be there in just a few minutes. I've got some efforts that I want to talk to you about. There are actually more things we have to be working on."

He kept it up for well over a minute — MeidasTouch, which shot the video, put it at roughly 90 seconds — while the reporter kept asking, walking past parked cars with the phone pressed to his face until the questions stopped.

The problem was the camera angle. The screen was pointed at the lens the whole time, and it never showed an active call. As he walked, his cheek kept tapping the display and changing what was on it.

MS NOW's Steve Benen, writing the next morning, called it "an unintentionally funny scene," and noted that Wittman "really committed to the bit."

It wasn't even the first time. Julian Andreone, a Capitol Hill reporter for Drop Site News, posted his own video showing Wittman pulling the same move on him the week before, when Andreone approached him about a military spending proposal.

Why the question was fair

Wittman's dodge would be a small story if the question were a gotcha. It wasn't. It was the most basic question a constituent could want answered: your party's leader says he has a plan for Social Security and won't show it until after the election — do you support it?

Wittman represents Virginia's 1st District. Social Security is not an abstraction there or anywhere else. It goes to retirees, to widows and widowers, to disabled workers, to children who lost a parent.

And Wittman is not a bystander in this fight. He voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill, which — according to the Social Security actuary's own numbers, cited by Sen. Ron Wyden — "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" and moved the trust fund's exhaustion date up from 2033 to 2032.

He has a record on this. He just didn't want to talk about it on camera.

What he said when a reporter he couldn't dodge asked

Wittman eventually did give an answer — to The Daily Beast, in writing, after the video had gone around. He said he and his colleagues were "working to strengthen the integrity of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by improving eligibility verification" and making sure "resources are targeted to individuals who are truly eligible."

It is worth noticing what that answer does not say. It does not say he opposes raising the retirement age. It does not say he opposes cutting cost-of-living increases. It does not say he opposes means-testing. It says "eligibility verification," which is a phrase about paperwork, not about protecting anybody's check.

If the real answer were "I will not vote to cut a single benefit," that sentence takes four seconds to say. It would have taken less time than the fake phone call.

He does this in person, too

The phone call is a small, vivid version of how Wittman handles his constituents generally.

He has not made himself easy to find. In April 2025, after the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee advised Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls, Wittman skipped the recess window. His constituents held one anyway — about 150 people gathered in Henrico County for an event they mockingly named "Where's Wittman?"

Asked about it by Virginia Mercury columnist Roger Chesley, Wittman pointed to telephone town halls, noting one had reached over 9,000 constituents. As Chesley wrote: "that's not the same as facing people in person."

On a phone town hall, staff screen the calls. On the sidewalk outside the Capitol, they can't. So he brought his own phone.

The pattern this fits

Wittman is running in one of Virginia's most competitive races this fall against Shannon Taylor, the Henrico County commonwealth's attorney, who won the Democratic primary on August 4, 2026 with 53% of the vote in a seven-way field. A member in a safe seat can afford to answer hard questions. A member in a tight one, apparently, cannot.

Other Republicans have found other ways to avoid the same conversation. Kansas Rep. Ron Estes, who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Social Security, went on Newsmax and talked about "efficiency" while the agency shed the largest share of its workforce in its history. Oklahoma's Tom Cole has spent seven Congresses pushing a bill that would hand Social Security to a commission Congress could not amend.

Wittman's version was the least dignified and the most honest. He didn't have an answer he was willing to give out loud, so he pretended to be busy.

The video is still up. His cheek is still tapping the screen.

Source

Steve Benen's June 10, 2026 piece for MS NOW, Speaker Johnson eyes a new 'plan' for Social Security and Medicare to be shared in 2027, which embeds the MeidasTouch video.

Ron Estes Is the Congressman in Charge of Protecting Social Security. He Told Newsmax He Was Looking Forward to What DOGE Would Find.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:54:52 +0000

In January 2025, House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith named Ron Estes chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security.

That is not a ceremonial post. It is the single job in the House of Representatives whose entire purpose is to watch over the Social Security Administration — the agency that sends a check every month to more than 71 million Americans. When the agency stops working, the subcommittee chairman is the person Congress has designated to do something about it.

Two months into the job, with DOGE already inside the agency, Estes went on Newsmax to explain his priorities.

"Efficiency"

Newsmax's March 18, 2025 write-up opens like this:

"The new chair of the House Social Security Subcommittee, Ron Estes, R-Kan., told Newsmax on Tuesday that his focus is on making the Social Security Administration more efficient and that he also looks forward to any discoveries the Department of Government Efficiency uncovers in aiding that effort."

Here is what Estes himself said on the air:

"My first goal is to make sure that we have good operational efficiencies — that the processes work — that when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled; if unfortunately their spouse dies, they're able to get the survivor benefits; if they're disabled, that they're able to get those benefits."

"We want to make sure that the agency works well. And so that's our first process: making sure that there's efficiency and that we don't have improper payments or waste, fraud, and abuse in there."

Read that list again, because it is a good list. Retirement enrollment. Survivor benefits. Disability benefits. Those are the three things the agency does that people cannot live without.

Now look at what happened to them.

What DOGE actually did

Estes wasn't a bystander watching this happen to him. He'd signed up early. In November 2024 he joined the DOGE Caucus. In January 2025 he published an op-ed welcoming it:

"With Trump back in the White House as of Jan. 20 and Musk and Ramaswamy heading DOGE, there's hope that Republicans in Congress will have allies in reforming our government."

The "allies" got to work. Between January and November 2025, the Social Security Administration lost 6,645 employees — more than 11% of its workforce, according to a January 2026 analysis by Molly Weston Williamson at the Center for American Progress. She calls it the largest one-year drop in SSA staff in the agency's history.

It wasn't spread evenly, either. In 33 states the agency had at least 10% fewer staff in fiscal 2025 than the year before. Some individual field offices lost a quarter of their people or more.

The federal employees' union put the ratio in plain terms: after the cuts, one SSA staff member was left to serve every 1,480 beneficiaries.

That is the "efficiency" Estes said he was after — an agency doing the same work for the same 71 million people with thousands fewer people to do it.

The subcommittee chairman's job description

There is a specific reason this matters more for Estes than for the average member.

Any of the 435 members of the House can complain about a federal agency. The chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee has tools nobody else has. He can hold hearings. He can subpoena documents. He can put the Commissioner of Social Security under oath in public and make him answer for a wait time. He can hold a bill hostage. That is the whole point of the gavel.

Estes had that gavel the entire time this was happening. He had also, two months earlier, publicly welcomed the people doing the cutting as "allies." When the largest one-year staff loss in the agency's history was underway, the chairman charged with overseeing that agency was on cable television saying he looked forward to what DOGE would turn up.

And then there's what happened to the data

Staffing was only half of it. The other half was the agency's files — the Social Security numbers, birthdates and parents' names of essentially every American who has ever had one.

In August 2025, the agency's own chief data officer went public. Charles Borges, who had held the job since January 2025, disclosed to Congress that DOGE staff had placed a live copy of the Social Security data of more than 300 million Americans in a "vulnerable cloud environment" that circumvented the agency's standard oversight.

SSA's answer was that the data was "walled off from the internet" and that it was "not aware of any compromise."

Three days later, Borges resigned. He called it a constructive discharge, writing to the commissioner that the agency's actions against him made his duties "impossible to perform legally and ethically," and describing "exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear."

Then, on January 20, 2026, the Justice Department confirmed a version of it in a court filing. A DOGE staffer had shared Social Security data through Cloudflare — a service, in the filing's words, "not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols." Agency officials didn't know it had happened. And because the server sits outside SSA, the agency cannot determine what was sent, or whether it's still there.

Buried in the same filing was something else. In March 2025, a political advocacy group approached two DOGE members at the Social Security Administration and asked them to analyze state voter rolls — with the stated aim, per the filing, of finding "evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." One of them signed a "Voter Data Agreement" in his official SSA capacity on March 24, 2025. Nobody at the agency reviewed or approved it. SSA discovered the arrangement in November and made two Hatch Act referrals in December.

Every one of those events happened inside the agency Ron Estes was appointed to oversee. He welcomed the people who did it as "allies" two months before the first of them.

The bill for all this comes due in 2032

The other half of Estes's record on Social Security is the money.

He voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. Sen. Ron Wyden, citing the Social Security actuary's own numbers, said in August 2026 that the bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved up the date the trust fund runs dry.

That date is now the fourth quarter of 2032, per the trustees report released in June 2026 and reported by CNBC. When it arrives, benefits get cut across the board unless Congress acts.

So the chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee voted for a bill that pulled the deadline closer, while the agency that administers the program was being hollowed out on his watch.

Meanwhile his colleagues are lining up behind a plan to hand the whole question to a 13-member commission whose recommendations Congress would have to vote on without being allowed to amend a word.

What Kansans get

Kansas's 4th District covers Wichita and most of south-central Kansas — a lot of retirees, a lot of people on disability, a lot of small towns where the nearest Social Security office is already a drive.

When a field office loses a quarter of its staff, nobody sends a letter announcing it. You find out when you call and stay on hold, or when the appointment you need is six weeks out, or when a survivor benefit that should take weeks takes months and the bills don't wait.

Estes told Newsmax he wanted to make sure that "when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled." He had the gavel that could have made that true. He used it to cheer on the people cutting the staff who do the enrolling.

Source

Estes's remarks are from Nick Koutsobinas's March 18, 2025 report, Rep. Estes to Newsmax: Social Security to Focus on Efficiency.

Tom Cole's Social Security Bill Has Four Words That Should Worry You: 'Amendments Are Prohibited'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:47:22 +0000

On June 8, 2026, Tom Cole introduced H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026. He is the lead sponsor. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York signed on as the first cosponsor, which is where the word "bipartisan" in the title comes from.

Cole has been pushing this same idea for a long time. His own office says he has led or co-led it for seven Congresses — fourteen years of trying.

Here's how he described it:

"I am going to tell you the truth that many of my fellow politicians in Washington refuse to acknowledge: the solvency of Social Security is at a critical point... doing nothing on Social Security is not an option."

That sounds reasonable. Social Security really does have a money problem. The 2026 trustees report projects the trust fund that pays retirees, their spouses, and survivors may run out in late 2032. At that point, benefits get cut across the board.

So the problem is real. The question is who gets to fix it, and whether you get any say.

Read the bill and you find out the answer is no.

What the bill actually does

Cole's bill creates a 13-person group called the Commission on Long-Term Social Security Solvency. Nobody elects them. Every single one is appointed:

1 by the President, who also chairs it
2 each by the Speaker, the House minority leader, the Senate majority leader, and the Senate minority leader
1 each by the chair and top Democrat of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee

Only two of the thirteen are required to be experts from outside government. The rest can be politicians.

Within one year, those 13 people have to hand Congress a plan to keep Social Security solvent for 75 years — plus the actual bill text to do it. Nine of the thirteen have to sign off.

The bill requires the commission to hold exactly one public hearing. Not one a month. One, total, in the whole year. Everything else can happen behind a closed door.

Then comes the part that matters.

"Amendments prohibited"

Normally, when Congress writes a law that touches your retirement, the process is slow on purpose. Committees hold hearings. Members offer amendments. Bad ideas get stripped out. Good ideas get added. You get time to call your representative.

Section 9 of Cole's bill throws all of that out. Here is the language, word for word from the bill:

"Amendments prohibited.—No amendment to, or motion to strike a provision from, an approval bill considered under this section shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives."

That is not a summary. That is the text.

The rest of Section 9 is just as tight:

Any committee the bill is sent to must report it "without amendment" within three days — and if it doesn't, the committee is automatically discharged and the bill goes to the floor anyway.
House debate is capped at four hours, split between one supporter and one opponent.
"All points of order against the approval bill and against its consideration are waived."
In the Senate, debate is capped at 30 hours. A motion to recommit is not allowed. That cap means no filibuster — the 60-vote threshold that normally protects a program like this simply doesn't apply.

So: 13 appointed people write a plan in private. Nine of them approve it. Congress gets four hours in the House to talk about it, cannot change a comma, and then votes yes or no.

If you don't like one piece of it — say, the piece that raises your retirement age — there is no mechanism to take that piece out. It's the whole package or nothing.

The model Cole picked actually proves the opposite

Cole's own press release says the bill is "Modeled after the 1983 Social Security Commission." That's the Greenspan Commission, the one everybody in Washington points to as the time this worked.

Here's the problem with that comparison: the 1983 commission didn't finish the job. Congress did — by amending it.

Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, walked through what happened in a paper for the Urban Institute. The commission, he wrote, "was rather cautious," and "its proposals did not solve Social Security's financial problems for the entire 75 year period."

What closed the gap was an amendment offered on the House floor:

"During the House debate Congressman J. J. Pickle, Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee that dealt with Social Security, added a provision that would very gradually raise the normal retirement age (NRA) from 65 to 67... This provision did more to improve the financial health of Social Security than any single recommendation of the Commission."

Penner's conclusion: "It took courageous actions by the Congress to enhance the report and make it much more meaningful."

Two things follow from that.

First, the single biggest change to come out of 1983 was a benefit cut. Raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 means people work longer for the same check. Everyone born in 1960 or later lives under it.

Second — and this is the part Cole doesn't mention — that amendment would be illegal under his own bill. Pickle's provision was added during floor debate. Section 9 of H.R. 9187 says no amendment "shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives." The one move that made the 1983 deal work is the exact move Cole's bill bans.

So the precedent he's invoking is a case where open debate mattered. His bill would prevent it from happening again — while leaving the door open for the same kind of cut, just written by people you never voted for.

Cole also listed who is cheering the bill on. His press release names the Peterson Solutions Fund, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the American Action Forum, and the American Enterprise Institute among the groups praising it. These are the organizations that have spent decades arguing that the answer to Social Security is spending less on it.

They are not going to be the ones locked out of that room.

Who is against it

This isn't a fringe objection. The people whose entire job is watching out for retirees have been saying the same thing for years about bills like this one.

In January 2024, Reps. John Larson and Jan Schakowsky led 116 House Democrats in a letter opposing fast-track commissions. Their words:

"The goal of these commissions would be to produce legislation that cuts benefits and calls for an up or down vote without hearings, and that is unamendable. This is not a simple debate over process."

The next month, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, AFGE, the AFT, the NEA, the Alliance for Retired Americans and other unions stood at the Capitol to oppose a similar commission bill. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it "a power grab that is trying to bypass the regular democratic process by hiding behind closed doors."

AARP has taken the same position on fast-tracking. In a July 21, 2026 letter about a different Senate fast-track bill, AARP's chief advocacy officer Nancy LeaMond wrote:

"We strongly object to fast-tracking Social Security changes through Congress... If regular order is the gold standard for routine legislative matters, it certainly should be the standard for something as important as Social Security."

And on August 5, 2026, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on exactly this idea, Sen. Ron Wyden put it bluntly:

"Republican members of this panel will claim they have the solution: an unaccountable 'commission' that will rubber stamp benefit cuts like increasing the retirement age."

He added that such commissions "are designed to smuggle in benefit cut plans with minimal public scrutiny or debate."

The part Cole leaves out

Cole says the crisis means "doing nothing is not an option." He does not mention that he helped make the crisis worse.

Cole voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. According to the Social Security actuary's own numbers, cited by Wyden, that bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved the trust fund's exhaustion date up a year, from 2033 to 2032.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that drains Social Security faster, then point at the faster deadline as the reason Congress must hand the program to a commission that answers to nobody, on terms that forbid Congress from changing a word.

There is another way to do this, and it isn't complicated. Members could introduce bills, hold hearings, take amendments, and vote in public where their constituents can see them. That is what Congress is for. It's the same argument Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson made about spending before walking it back and voting the other way — Congress decides, or it doesn't. It's what Cole gets paid to do — and he has been getting paid to do it for 23 years.

He chairs the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful spending gavel in Congress. If anyone in the building has the standing to run a real, open debate on Social Security, it's him.

Instead, the bill he keeps reintroducing would hand the job to 13 appointees and tell the rest of Congress — and you — to take it or leave it.

Social Security pays out to more than 71 million Americans every month, and plenty of them live in Oklahoma's 4th District. They deserve to know what's in a plan before it becomes law — and they deserve a representative who will fight for the right to change it.

Source

The bill text quoted here is H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026, as introduced in the House on June 8, 2026.

Paul Gosar's Plan to Save Social Security: Drill, Mine, Graze and Log Your Public Lands

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:03 +0000

On the very first day of this Congress, Paul Gosar introduced a bill numbered H.R. 34. He called it the Land And Social Security Optimization Act. LASSO.

The pitch is simple enough that it fits on a bumper sticker: take 10% of the money the federal government earns off public lands and put it into Social Security.

The problem is what has to happen for that to mean anything.

What the bill actually says

Per the nonpartisan summary from the Congressional Research Service, the bill "requires 10% of revenue generated by public lands, including submerged lands on the Outer Continental Shelf, under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service to be deposited into the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund."

That revenue does not appear from nowhere. It comes from leases and royalties — oil and gas drilling, mining claims, timber sales, grazing permits, offshore energy.

Gosar is not shy about this. It is the point. Here is his own announcement, in his own words:

"This legislation is a win-win. The LASSO Act shores up the component of the Social Security trust funds that pays Social Security benefits to retired workers... It also unlocks domestic energy potential by encouraging activities that generate revenue on public land, including onshore and offshore energy development, livestock grazing, and timber harvesting. This maintains the federal government's obligation to promote the highest use of public lands. Despite this obligation, our public lands are underperforming, and more than 1.6 million acres of public lands were locked up under the Biden Administration."

"Underperforming." "Locked up." Those are the words of someone who looks at a canyon and sees an unmet quarterly target.

The math does not work, and a conservative said so first

Gosar put a number on it. If the LASSO Act had been law in fiscal 2023, he said, "nearly $2 billion would have been deposited into the OASI Trust Fund, reducing the Trust Fund's FY 2023 shortfall of $70.4 billion by 3%."

That claim got checked — not by an environmental group, but by Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia, who write the fiscal-policy newsletter The Debt Dispatch. Boccia is the Cato Institute's director of budget and entitlement policy, and before that ran the federal budget center at the Heritage Foundation. She is about as far from a critic of spending cuts as it is possible to get.

Their finding, in February 2025:

Gosar understated the shortfall by half. "The real annual shortfall was $133.4 billion — double Gosar's estimate."
He did it by counting money that isn't there. Gosar's smaller number treats the trust fund's interest income as revenue. But that "figure represents interest on trust fund assets that exist only on paper" — when Treasury pays interest to Social Security, it borrows to do it.
So the bill covers a rounding error. "The $2 billion in land revenues would cover just 1.5 percent of the annual gap."

They also flagged the bigger risk: Social Security's long-term funding gap "exceeds $25 trillion," and bolting on a general-fund revenue stream normalizes the idea that the program gets bailed out from elsewhere rather than fixed.

One and a half percent. That is the whole bill.

What 1.5% buys you

If the LASSO Act did nothing, it would just be a wasted bill number. But it does something, and the something is the part worth paying attention to.

It permanently ties Social Security's funding to how aggressively we extract from public land.

Once that link exists, every fight about a drilling lease, a mine, a timber sale, or a grazing allotment gets a new argument attached to it: this is for seniors. Every acre protected becomes, on paper, money taken from retirees. Gosar has already written that framing into his own press release — 1.6 million acres "locked up," public lands "underperforming."

That is not a side effect. It is the mechanism. You cannot generate more revenue from federal land without more drilling, more mining, more logging, and more grazing on it. The bill's own sponsor lists all four.

He is on the committee, and he wants the hearing

This is not idle messaging. Gosar sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, per the House Clerk's official member roster — the committee with jurisdiction over exactly these lands and exactly this revenue.

On February 10, 2026, the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands held a hearing on the LASSO Act. The National Association of Counties, which tracks these revenue formulas closely because counties depend on them, noted that the bill is written so no state or county payment gets reduced — the 10% comes off the federal share.

So the counties are held harmless. Seniors get 1.5% of one year's gap. And the public lands get a permanent new reason to be opened up.

Naming it after Social Security is the tell

Read Gosar's own statement again and count the sentences. One is about retirees. Three are about energy, grazing, timber, "highest use," and acres locked up.

The LASSO Act is a public lands bill wearing a Social Security nametag. It moves a small amount of money and a large amount of political cover: any future vote to open protected acreage can now be described as protecting your grandmother's check.

Arizona seniors who are worried about Social Security are worried about a real thing. The answer their congressman offers covers one and a half percent of a single year's gap, according to a conservative budget analyst who ran the numbers and found Gosar's own figure was off by a factor of two.

The other 98.5% is still there. So is the argument he has now attached to every acre in the state.

Source

H.R. 34, the LASSO Act — Rep. Paul Gosar's announcement, January 3, 2025
LASSO Act preserves county revenue sharing, directs public lands funds to Social Security — National Association of Counties. Photo: Getty Images via NACo.

Tommy Tuberville Called Social Security a 'Ponzi Scheme.' He's Collected About $93,000 From It.

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:06:00 +0000

On Wednesday, July 29, Tommy Tuberville stood on the floor of the United States Senate and told Americans that the retirement program they've paid into their whole working lives is a fraud.

He called Social Security a "government-approved Ponzi scheme."

He said it was "set up to fail from the beginning."

Here's the part he left out of the speech: he's been collecting from it.

Income tax records show Tuberville has received nearly $100,000 from Social Security over three years — about $93,000 — according to Lagniappe, the Mobile-based newspaper that reviewed the records. That money came in on top of his U.S. Senate salary and his other retirement benefits.

So while Alabama seniors were being told by their senator that the program keeping their lights on is a scam, that same senator was cashing the checks.

What a "Ponzi scheme" actually accuses people of

Words matter here, and Tuberville picked a big one.

A Ponzi scheme is a crime. It's fraud — a con where early investors get paid with money taken from later victims, and someone eventually goes to prison. Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme.

When a sitting U.S. senator uses that phrase about Social Security on the Senate floor, he is telling every retiree in Alabama that the check in their mailbox is the product of a swindle, and telling every working person that the money coming out of their paycheck is being stolen.

Tuberville put the same message on X: "The D.C. swamp doesn't want to talk about Social Security, but here's the truth: It was set up to fail from the beginning."

But he isn't refusing the money. He isn't donating it back. He isn't declining to enroll. He's calling it a scam and taking it.

Lagniappe asked his campaign about exactly that — how he squares collecting benefits with calling the program fraudulent. The campaign did not acknowledge the questions.

His own campaign is how we know

The most remarkable part of this story is how the records got out.

Tuberville's gubernatorial campaign volunteered his tax returns on June 1 — handing them to a political opponent. But the campaign botched the redactions. Each page still carried a visible PDF417 barcode, the dense square barcode that tax software prints on returns.

Those barcodes aren't decorative. When scanned, they render the data from the entire tax return: Social Security numbers, driver's license information, wages, deductions, investment earnings. Everything the black boxes were supposed to hide was sitting right there in machine-readable form.

Lagniappe scanned them and reported what was inside.

Nobody hacked anything. Tuberville's own campaign handed over the documents, and his own campaign failed to redact them properly.

Then he threatened the newspaper

Tuberville's response to being caught was not to explain himself. It was to try to make the reporting disappear.

His attorneys sent Lagniappe a cease-and-desist letter demanding the article be taken down. They accused the outlet of "unlawfully accessing" the information, said it had been published illegally without his consent, and argued the reporting was not protected speech under the First Amendment.

That last claim is a striking thing for a candidate for governor to put in writing about a newspaper covering his finances.

Lagniappe didn't fold. Co-publisher Rob Holbert called the letter "full of falsehoods and assumptions," said the paper "did absolutely nothing illegal" in verifying data that the Tuberville campaign "failed to redact properly," and said the reporting was "absolutely protected by the First Amendment."

This wasn't reported only by outlets unfriendly to Tuberville. Two conservative Alabama news organizations covered the cease-and-desist as well — Yellowhammer News and 1819 News.

This is a pattern, not a slip

The same trove of tax records already produced one broken promise.

When Tuberville ran for the Senate in 2020, he pledged to donate his entire Senate salary to Alabama veterans. We wrote about that promise here — his own tax records and his foundation's treasurer indicate it never happened, across six years and more than $1 million in pay.

Now the same records show him drawing from a program he publicly calls a criminal fraud.

Put the two together and a shape emerges. Tuberville is comfortable saying whatever plays well — I'll give my salary to veterans, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme — while his actual financial life runs in the opposite direction. He keeps the salary. He takes the Social Security. And when a reporter checks the paperwork, the lawyers show up.

Why this matters for Alabama

Tuberville is not just a senator anymore. He's running to be Governor of Alabama.

For a lot of older Alabamians, Social Security isn't a bonus on top of a pension and a portfolio. It's the floor — the money that covers rent, groceries, and medicine. Tuberville knows what that money means to the people whose votes he's asking for, because he's one of the people receiving it.

A politician who describes that floor as a criminal fraud is not making a narrow argument about trust-fund accounting. He's building the case for taking a hammer to it. And the people who would feel that hammer are the same people who just learned their senator collected about $93,000 from the program while calling it a scam on the Senate floor.

If Social Security is really a fraud, Tuberville is welcome to stop cashing the checks and give the money back.

He hasn't. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by Scott Johnson for Lagniappe (July 30, 2026). Photo: Lagniappe.

Brandon Herrera Calls Social Security 'a Joke' — After His Website Promised to Protect It

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:05:00 +0000

Brandon Herrera, the Republican running for Congress in Texas's 23rd District, spent July 23, 2026 defending two things no candidate for office should be defending: gutting Social Security, and a podcast bit where he and his co-hosts joked about killing old people.

This isn't a Democrat putting words in his mouth. It's Herrera, in his own posts, doubling down.

What he actually said

A resurfaced clip from a December 2024 episode of the Unsubscribe Podcast got attention this week. On that episode, as MeidasTouch reported, a co-host said, "Let's abolish social security," and Herrera answered, "I'm game." He called the program a "literal Ponzi scheme."

Then it got dark. When a co-host brought up "old people," Herrera said, "Yes, we should abolish old people." What followed was an extended riff where the hosts joked about killing elderly people — including with mallets, and a reference to the horror movie Midsommar. Herrera joked about putting a rubber chicken squeak toy on the end of a mallet so it makes a noise after crushing someone's skull.

Given the chance this week to say "that was a stupid bit and I regret it," Herrera did the opposite. He posted:

"We're talking about the movie Midsommar. I didn't realize the studio A24 wanted to kill the elderly lol."

And then, the part that actually matters for the people he wants to represent:

"And yes, social security is a joke. It's something that absolutely needs to be replaced with something solvent."

So he's not walking any of it back. He's confirming it.

His own website says the opposite

Here's the hypocrisy. Herrera's campaign website tells voters he "will oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits that seniors rely on."

You can't have it both ways. You cannot tell seniors on your campaign site that you'll protect their benefits and then tell a podcast audience that you're "game" to abolish Social Security and that the whole thing is "a joke." One of those is a lie to voters. And given that he doubled down on the "joke" comment this week — not the promise — it's pretty clear which version Herrera actually believes.

Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme. It's the money working Texans paid into their whole lives, with every paycheck, expecting it to be there when they retire. Calling it "a joke" tells you exactly how seriously Herrera takes the retirement of the people in his district.

Real people, real benefits — in his district

This matters in TX-23 specifically. Herrera has built his campaign on backing Trump's agenda — the same agenda that already triggered nearly $500 billion in Medicare cuts unless Congress steps in, and that brought longer waits, website crashes, and mass layoffs at Social Security offices under DOGE, making it harder for seniors to get the benefits they earned. More than 4.7 million Texans rely on Medicare, and millions more on Social Security.

Now the man asking to represent them in Congress is on record saying the program should be abolished and calling it a joke.

Not a one-off

Herrera's whole record is built on "jokes" that keep landing on the wrong side of decency. His own report card documents a candidate who filmed troll videos in Uvalde months after 19 children and two teachers were murdered there, who was denounced by the Republican Jewish Coalition as a "goose-stepping extremist" for his Nazi-gun "jokes," and who made a "joke" about veteran suicide that drew criticism from fellow Texas Republicans.

The pattern is always the same: say something cruel, then hide behind "it was a joke." But a person's values show in what they think is funny — and in what they'll actually vote for. Herrera thinks abolishing your Social Security is both.

Source

MeidasTouch: Brandon Herrera Doubles Down on Slashing Social Security, Defends Jokes About Killing Old People

Roger Williams Says 'Trump Accounts' Can Save Social Security. That's a Backdoor to Privatizing It.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:46:40 +0000

On Thursday, July 9, Texas Rep. Roger Williams went on Newsmax's "Wake Up America" and floated a big idea: the new "Trump Accounts" could help fix Social Security.

Asked whether the accounts could help with Social Security's "looming insolvency," Williams answered, "I think it certainly can."

"If we let people own their own accounts and spend their own money, I think you're going to see a lot of investment rather than going elsewhere," he said. "But we have to have a backup. ... This certainly is a backup that includes all the people, not just a few."

It sounds friendly. Who doesn't want people to build wealth? But strip away the sales pitch and here's what Williams is really talking about: taking a program that guarantees you a check for life and swapping it for a stock-market account that doesn't. That's not saving Social Security. That's the first step toward getting rid of it.

What is a "Trump Account"?

Trump Accounts are savings accounts for kids, created in Trump's 2025 tax law. Each child gets a $1,000 deposit from the government, and parents or others can add up to $5,000 a year. The money gets invested and grows until the child is an adult.

That's it. It's a starter investment account for a baby. It does nothing to pay the Social Security benefits your grandmother is collecting right now, and it does nothing to close the funding gap the program is facing. Williams is pitching a piggy bank for newborns as the answer to a retirement crisis for seniors.

Even the plan's author admits the real goal

Here's the part Williams left out on TV. The people who dreamed up Trump Accounts have already said out loud what they're for.

Sen. Ted Cruz — a fellow Texas Republican and the man who first proposed the idea — spelled it out at a conference this year. "Here's the dirty little secret. Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts," Cruz told the audience. His plan: start the accounts at birth, let them grow for decades, and eventually tell parents they can divert their own payroll taxes into private accounts too.

Trump's own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, said the same thing even more plainly, calling the accounts "a backdoor for privatizing Social Security." (After Democrats jumped on the comment, Bessent walked it back and said the accounts were only meant to add to Social Security, not replace it.)

So when Williams says these accounts let people "own their own accounts and spend their own money" instead of "going elsewhere," he's describing exactly the plan Cruz and Bessent laid out — replacing a guaranteed government benefit with a private, market-based one. Privatizing Social Security is an old Republican dream. President George W. Bush tried it in 2005 and failed. Trump Accounts are the same idea wearing a new costume, starting with babies instead of workers.

Who gets hurt when you put Social Security in the stock market

Williams says a private account "includes all the people, not just a few." The opposite is true. Social Security is the program that already includes everyone — and the people it protects most are exactly the ones a stock-market plan would leave exposed.

Social Security is the guaranteed part of retirement. It's a check for life, adjusted for inflation, with almost no fees. A private account is only worth whatever the market says on the day you cash out. If the market crashes right before you retire, that's your problem — not the government's.
For the poorest 20% of seniors, Social Security is about 79% of their income. Half of women 65 and older would fall below the poverty line without it.
Wall Street money managers charge fees on private accounts — fees that quietly eat away at savings, and hit low-income people hardest.

The real threat to Social Security isn't that people can't gamble their retirement on the stock market. It's that Congress keeps refusing to shore up the program's finances. Government projections say that if lawmakers do nothing, Social Security will hit a shortfall around late 2032 and benefits would automatically be cut to about 78 cents on the dollar — a roughly 22% cut. That would cost the average retiree several hundred dollars a month.

Williams didn't offer a plan to stop that cut. He offered a baby account and a pitch for privatization.

"Own your own money" — unless it's Roger Williams

Williams loves the language of self-reliance. On Newsmax he said the accounts would "teach them the value of a dollar, the value of money, which we're not teaching in our schools right now." He's built a whole brand on the idea that people should stand on their own instead of leaning on government.

Except when it's him.

Williams, a former car dealer, once scoffed that "a socialist wants you to get a check from the government... a capitalist wants you to get a check from the place that you work." Then his own Weatherford car dealership took a $1.43 million Paycheck Protection Program loan — a government check — that was later forgiven. And when the House voted on a bill to make PPP recipients public, Williams voted no — to keep that money hidden.

That's the pattern. Government help is "socialism" when it's a Social Security check for a retiree, but it's just good business when it's a seven-figure loan for his dealership. He wants seniors to trust the market with their retirement while he takes the sure thing for himself.

Follow the money

There's another reason to be skeptical of Williams cheering on a plan to move retirement savings into private accounts: look at who funds him. His top donors read like a list of the banks and financial firms that stand to profit when Americans are pushed to invest privately instead of relying on a government program — the American Bankers Association, Ally Financial, Citizens First Bank, and more. Williams sits on the House Financial Services Committee, the panel that oversees exactly that industry.

Privatizing Social Security is a windfall for Wall Street and a gamble for everyone else. Williams is on the side taking the fee.

The bottom line

Social Security is facing a real deadline, and the people of Texas's 25th District deserve a representative with a real plan to protect it. What they got instead was a TV hit where Roger Williams repackaged a scheme to privatize the program — one his own party's leaders have openly admitted is the goal — and sold it as a rescue.

A guaranteed check for life is not something you "back up" with a stock account. It's the thing that keeps millions of seniors out of poverty. Williams should be fighting to strengthen it. Instead, he's helping lay the groundwork to hand it to Wall Street.

Source

Rep. Roger Williams to Newsmax: Trump Accounts Can Help Save Social Security — Newsmax, July 9, 2026
Why the Trump Account Rollout Is Raising Questions About Social Security — Kiplinger