Trump Memo Reveals Plan to Throw Social Security Into Chaos

The Trump administration plans to upend and cripple the Social Security claims process, according to a memo obtained by Popular Information.

An internal  Social Security Administration memo, sent on March 13, outlines changes to the agency that would cause processing delays and prevent Americans from applying for as well as receiving benefits, ostensibly to reduce “fraud risks” according to its author, acting Deputy Commissioner Doris Diaz.

The changes include requiring that people seeking benefits provide proof of identity over the internet for benefit claims made over the phone. If someone is “unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation.”

Right now, Social Security claims and identity verification can be done over the phone thanks to staffers answering calls on its toll-free number. Actual fraud is rare, because people have to provide multiple pieces of personal information, checked against medical records, bank statements, pay stubs, and tax returns, depending on the type of claim. 

Beyond that, if there are any discrepancies, an applicant might have to mail their birth certificate to the agency. This entire process allows people who are elderly or disabled, and thus have difficulty accessing the internet or visiting a physical office, to apply for and collect Social Security benefits. 

Introducing internet verification would be a significant hardship to the 40 percent of Social Security beneficiaries who depend on the phone service. If they can’t use the internet system, they would also have to visit a physical location. Diaz’s own memo estimates that 75,000 to 85,000 people would have to visit Social Security offices under the new policy. 

But even before the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive cuts to the agency, the SSA’s physical offices had an average wait time of more than a month. They don’t accept walk-ins and would not be able to accommodate such a large increase in foot traffic. 

The Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, recently announced further cuts of 7,000 employees, or about 12 percent of the agency. Physical offices around the country are being closed, and some people are more than 100 miles away from the nearest location. On top of that, one day before the memo was issued, the agency was reportedly considering ending its phone service altogether due to misguided concerns from DOGE over widespread fraud.

After an outcry over ending the phone service, the SSA denied that it was being eliminated, with this memo appearing to be a workaround. Even still, if these changes go through, many disabled and elderly people will have major difficulties in getting their benefits and may end up losing them altogether. The memo foresees this, stating there will be “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls.” All of that is a euphemism for causing irreparable damage to Social Security.

Abortion providers are now being arrested in Texas.

Maria Margarita Rojas, a 48-year-old Houston-area midwife, was arrested in the Lone Star State Monday on allegations that she had provided illegal abortions.

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the charges against Rojas Monday afternoon. It’s the first instance in which an abortion provider has faced criminal consequences in the wake of Texas’s 2022 abortion ban.

“In Texas, life is sacred. I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws, and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted,” Paxton said in a statement.

“Texas law protecting life is clear, and we will hold those who violate it accountable,” he added.

Paxton’s office charged Rojas, known locally as “Dr. Maria,” with operating a network of clinics between Waller, Cypress, and Spring in the northwest Houston area. The clinics allegedly “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals,” according to a press release.

The consequences for Rojas could be extreme: Under Texas law, she could face life in prison and have her state medical license revoked.

Texas permits abortions only in the most rare and dire circumstances in order to save the life of a pregnant patient, and even then, they’re not guaranteed. Last year, Kate Cox was forced to flee Texas for emergency care even after a court ruled that the 31-year-old mother of two should have access to an abortion under the ban’s medical emergencies clause. But Paxton intervened in the court ruling, threatening that any Texas abortion provider believed to help Cox would face felony charges.

Even out-of-state abortion providers have been threatened by the wide-reaching Texas law. In December, Paxton sued a New York doctor for prescribing the abortion pill to an in-state resident, demanding that the provider pay $100,000 for every violation of the state’s ban. The lawsuit was the first attempt to enforce a state abortion ban beyond its borders.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development ended up halting efforts to clean up Agent Orange in Vietnam, leaving thousands of Vietnamese people living near the Bien Hoa air base, the site of a major chemical spill, at risk of poisoning.

After Trump issued an executive order halting all foreign aid in February, cleanup efforts at the base suddenly ceased since workers weren’t being paid. Open pits contaminated with dioxin—a toxic by-product of Agent Orange, which the U.S. military used in the Vietnam War—were left exposed. For weeks, the pits were covered with tarps, which at one point even blew away with the wind.

U.S. diplomats stationed in Vietnam frantically contacted Washington on February 14 to relay the news, and also pointed out that Vietnam’s rainy season was soon coming, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica. If enough rain fell, they warned, contaminated soil could flood into nearby communities and poison water and food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live near the base, only yards away from contaminated sites in some cases. A major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, with a population of nine million people, is only 1,500 feet away from the contaminated area.

The diplomats’ letter warned that “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe,” but received no response from Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with Trump staffer Peter Marocco, then ordered the cleanup efforts to stop and froze $1 million in payments to contractors working on the cleanup before canceling the contracts altogether on February 26.

While Rubio and Marocco abruptly reversed their decision a week later, the companies still have not been paid as of Thursday. With a looming disaster, the companies are now scrambling to secure the area at their own expense before the rain arrives, according to ProPublica. And the USAID staff who would be providing oversight have either been placed on leave or barred from traveling.

The critical effort is one of the many casualties of Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has made massive cuts across the federal government and decimated foreign aid projects. This cut is particularly bad not only because of the toxic consequences but also because the dioxin is only there thanks to the U.S. military spraying large quantities of Agent Orange across Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Trying to minimize environmental and public health consequences from that spraying is very much America’s responsibility, but it seems that Trump, Musk, and Republicans couldn’t care less. They fail to realize that such international aid projects, including efforts to fund global public health, boost America’s “soft power” and improve the country’s image, particularly in a region where the U.S. caused lasting destruction.

The Trump administration continues to move the goalposts as backlash mounts against its recent deportation actions. 

On Friday, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants, alleging they were all gang members. The following day, a federal judge ordered any planes departing the U.S. on these grounds to return to the country. Still, two planes with Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration claimed that while the judge sent a verbal order before takeoff, the written order came too late, as the order was electronically filed 45 minutes after the planes left U.S. airspace.

Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended this nonsense position at a press conference on Monday. “Does the White House feel the need to reply with a verbal order from this judge?” a reporter asked Leavitt.

“As I said, all of the planes subject to the written order of this judge departed U.S. soil, U.S. territory before the judge’s written order.”

“But what about the verbal order, which of course carries the same legal weight as a written order, and said for the planes to turn around if they were in the air?”

“Well there’s actually questions about whether a verbal order carries the same weight as a … written order, and our lawyers are determined to ask and answer those questions in court.”  

The White House is offering up petty, measly excuses to justify its complete rebuke of the checks and balances system.

Republican lawmakers are going after the judicial branch, claiming that the legal appointees are attempting to usurp Donald Trump’s power for merely ruling against the president’s agenda.

“These far-left Resistance™ district court judges are under the impression they were elected president,” Senator Tom Cotton posted on X Monday. “The idea of ordering the President to turn around a plane filled with violent criminal illegal aliens is outrageous.”

Fox News also pitched in on the effort to condemn the judge, broadcasting a photo of James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Washington, D.C., District Court, to its millions of viewers.

The Trump administration ignored a judge’s order to turn around two planes carrying hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members on Saturday. In a verbal order, Boasberg demanded that the government cancel the flights immediately.

“You shall inform your clients of this immediately. Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said during a hearing. “However that’s accomplished, turning around the plane, or not embarking anyone on the plane.… This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

Regardless, the planes did not turn around.

Trump had invoked a Japanese internment-era wartime policy—the Alien Enemies Act—early Saturday to deport noncitizens he believed to be a part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.”

But hours later, when the emergency court hearing had taken a brief pause, the planes were skybound. Once Boasberg’s directive was received, Trump officials made the calculated decision to keep the planes en route to Honduras, alleging “operational” and “national security” reasons for their continued flight while claiming that the judge’s order was out of bounds since the planes had supposedly passed over international waters by the time the verbal order was given.

The following day, Trump had his explanation for the blatant infraction, claiming that the nation’s immigration constituted an “invasion” while describing the current era as a “time of war.”

“These are criminals, many, many criminals,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions.”

Donald Trump chose to threaten Iran Monday morning, warning the country the “consequences” will be “dire” if the Houthi movement in Yemen continues its attacks.

“Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN. Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there,” Trump said in a long, rambling post on Truth Social.

“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!” Trump’s post continued, with the president uncharacteristically signing off with “DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

Trump’s saber-rattling comes after he ordered airstrikes on Houthi areas on Saturday following the Houthi movement’s announcement that it would attack Israeli-linked ships passing through the Red Sea on their way to the Suez Canal. That threat came in response to Israel blocking all aid from entering Gaza for more than two weeks.

The Trump administration said that the airstrikes killed multiple Houthi leaders. The deputy head of the Houthi media office, Nasruddin Amer, said that they would retaliate against the U.S. and continue their support for Gaza.

“Our position is clear and our demand is simple: lifting the siege on Gaza and saving the people of Gaza from starvation,” Amer posted on social media.

Trump’s threats toward Iran come two weeks after he sent a letter to Iran’s leaders offering a path to restart negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program. Trump infamously abandoned the 2018 landmark nuclear deal reached between the U.S., Iran, and five other countries during his first term. Monday’s threats will undermine any prospect for talks between the U.S. and Iran, if Trump was even serious about them in the first place, and further increase tensions in an already unstable Middle East.

Trump’s border czar proudly proclaimed that their administration could care less about what federal judges have to say about their hard-line immigration policies. 

“I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we’re gon’ make this country safe again. I’m proud to be a part of this administration,” Tom Homan raved on Fox News Monday morning. “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care what the left thinks, we’re comin.’” 

This comes after a weekend of the Trump administration ignoring court orders to deport immigrants in two high-profile cases. On Saturday, a federal judge ordered two planes of Venezuelans  being deported to El Salvador to return to the United States. The Trump administration, however, claimed the order came too late and the plane was already out of U.S. airspace, citing the time the order was filed in the court’s electronic docket instead of the verbal order, which came 45 minutes earlier. On Friday, Brown University doctor and legal visa holder Rasha Alawieh was also deported, despite a court order blocking her removal from the country.

Both cases follow the kidnapping of green card holder and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil and, along with Homan’s statement, finally confirm what many already knew: The “rule of law” has no power over this administration.

Several nuclear scientists, bomb engineers, and safety experts critical to national security were among the cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The New York Times reports that more than 130 members of a top secret agency, the National Nuclear Security Agency, either took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation “buyout” or were fired in the past six weeks, putting an effort to upgrade the American nuclear arsenal at risk.

These cuts include at least 27 engineers, 12 program or project managers, 13 program or project analysts, five scientists or physicists, six budget analysts or accountants, as well as multiple attorneys, safety experts, and compliance officers. The job losses are coming despite the NNSA being in its busiest period since the Cold War, according to the Times.

The agency is modernizing the country’s nuclear stockpile, comprising 3,748 bombs and warheads, an effort costing $20 billion a year to arm new land-based missiles, bomber jets, and nuclear submarines. The agency had built itself up to 2,000 workers in January, still short of what it said it needed, but the new cuts undo those gains and undermine the agency’s attempt to build up its staff to handle the workload.

The NNSA is part of the Department of Energy and usually stays out of the news. But it goes to show that even those most critical agencies have been subject to the wanton, haphazard budget cuts championed by Musk and the GOP in the supposed quest to find waste, fraud, and abuse. Many people who left the agency held top-secret security clearances, and it will be tough to train replacements.

“Who’s going to teach those new people?” one anonymous senior official who took the buyout told the Times. “Who’s going to mentor them, and who’s going to bring them up to speed?”

What is Chuck Schumer hiding from?

The Senate minority leader has postponed several tour appearances this week in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia for his upcoming book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning.

“Due to security concerns, Senator Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled,” said a spokesperson for Schumer. The new dates have not yet been announced.

The cancellations may have something to do with the intense backlash he’s facing after he voted for Republicans’ destructive budget last week, gifting them the funding and power to continue to ravage the federal government and carry out mass deportations.

There is palpable outrage throughout the Democratic establishment with Schumer’s decision. It wouldn’t be surprising if that same outrage was shown by the public. Schumer was publicly excoriated by Hakeem Jeffries and even Nancy Pelosi for the move—and there are plenty of scared, angry Democratic voters itching to show up to his town halls to do just the same.

Even still, Schumer has defended his position, insisting that a government shutdown was the worst option.

“If we go into a shutdown—and I told my caucus this—there’s no off-ramp. The total off-ramp of a shutdown, how you stop a shutdown, is totally determined by the Republican House and Senate,” he told reporters last week. “They’ve shown complete blind obeisance by Trump, DOGE, et cetera. They could keep us in a shutdown for months and months and months.”

One month before the election, 70 percent of Americans felt that foreign affairs comprised either a “very important” or “extremely important” component of their vote. But as it turns out, Donald Trump’s repeat campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” were just gas.

In an interview with Sharyl Attkisson broadcast Sunday, the president revealed he never actually intended to follow through on that.

“Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” Trump told Attkisson on her show Full Measure. “What I really mean is I’d like to get it settled, and I think I’ll be successful.”

It’s one of the rare occasions where Trump has actually admitted that he was wrong. But dressing up the blatant lie as a “little bit” of sarcasm is an awfully convenient way to circumnavigate blame for failing.

Trump had harped on the vow to instantaneously end the war for more than a year before taking back the White House. While speaking about the ongoing deaths of Ukrainians and Russians at a CNN town hall in May 2023, Trump claimed that he would “have that done in 24 hours.”

He amped up the proposition the next year. While debating former Vice President Kamala Harris in September 2024, Trump claimed that he would “get it settled before I even become president.”

The Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week to advance talks on the Ukrainian-approved ceasefire terms. Negotiators in Washington and Moscow are reportedly discussing how to divvy up assets between Russia and Ukraine to bring a close to the three-year war. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies have insisted that they intend to keep the land they’ve carved out of Ukraine’s borders for the Kremlin. They are also expected to stipulate that Ukraine never joins NATO, the strategic Western trade and military alliance that had promised in 2008 to absorb the Eastern European nation into its fold.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. But the Trump White House has proved remarkably hostile toward Ukraine in negotiations to close the conflict.

During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s short visit to Washington late last month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance repeatedly attacked the wartime leader while verbally defending Putin. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries. In the weeks that followed, the White House ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv and suspended military aid to the war-battered nation in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. and the U.K. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons. The aid and intelligence resumed last week after Zelenskiy publicly apologized for getting attacked.

Speaking with Attkisson on Sunday, Trump said that it would be “bad news for this world” if Putin refused the ceasefire terms.

“Bad news for this world because so many people are dying,” Trump said. “But I think, I think he’s going to agree. I really do. I think I know him pretty well, and I think he’s going to agree.”