DL Open Thread: Wednesday, March 25, 2025
Everything Falls Apart:
1. Trump Bozos Share War Plans With Journalist Over Unsecured Server. They, of course, had no idea they had invited a journalist. Will Waltz take the fall? Hegseth claims that the war plan wasn’t a war plan.
2. Social Security Office Melts Down:
And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday during a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s pick to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
Guess all those phone calls will be heading to Congress instead. Here’s more on the hasty unplanned screw-up:
The White House requested the rapid changes to phone service that the Social Security Administration plans to put in place next week, the agency’s leader said Monday.
In a meeting with advocacy groups that are stakeholders in the agency’s disability and retirement programs, Leland Dudek said the sweeping changes he’s pursued since becoming acting commissioner last month were dialed up by his superiors in the Trump administration.
“He said, ‘The reason that we’re on this timeline is because we received a request from the White House. The leadership above me believes that we should do a rapid rollout,’” a source in the meeting told HuffPost. Two additional sources confirmed the account.
Dudek last week announced that for any transaction requiring Social Security claimants to verify their identities, starting on March 31 they will no longer be able to do so over the phone. Instead, claimants who can’t use the agency’s website will have to verify their identities in-person by visiting a field office.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said simply, “Any American receiving Social Security benefits will continue to receive them.”
Going out on a limb: No they won’t.
Bernie Is Right. As usual:
“The problem is the Democratic party has no grassroots,” he said in the interview on Thursday. Gesturing to the overflow crowd that turned out to his rally with Ocasio-Cortez in Arizona, he said of his colleagues: “You tell me how many people are going out?”
In his view, the party’s descent traces the rise of money in politics, which over time made Democrats reliant on wealthy donors and inside-the-Beltway consultants. While he credited the party with ushering in progress on social issues such as civil rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, the senator said Democrats have for too long failed to champion an economic agenda that would meaningfully address the concerns of working-class people – an assessment many leaders roundly rejected.
Yet after decades of warning against the ills of corporate concentration and rising wealth inequality, Sanders, a big smile spreading across his face, said he was “noticing” that more of his colleagues were starting to adopt his populist pitch.
“My colleagues are not dumb people. They are by and large very, very smart people. And you’ve got to be deaf, dumb and blind, not to analyze the solution,” he said, noting that Democrats not only lost support among working-class voters, but saw their support decline with young people and Latinos – key parts of the party’s electoral coalition. “They see those things, they read the polls. And I think some of them at least understand that there has to be a turn around, and they’ve got to start addressing the needs of working-class people.”
In the interview, Sanders reflected on how much the movement had grown since he was first elected to Congress in 1990 and co-founded the Progressive caucus: “There are dozens and dozens of really strong progressives out there who are, I think, going to be the future political leaders.”
Delaware Democrats can elect a grassroots champion in Evelyn Brady as our new State Chair. It’s either her, or the visionless nepo corporadem who currently holds the position.
City Leaders Could Have Gotten Opioid Funding, But Didn’t Bother To Show Up And/Or Ask. Let’s let former Mayor Mike have the final word:
Former Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki — the most prominent absence from the committee meetings — said he didn’t have “any recollection” about being asked to participate in the Local Governments Committee.
If he was invited, he said, it must’ve “got lost in translation.”
Wilmington has one of the highest overdose rates in the state.
Mat Marshall, spokesman for the Delaware Department of Justice, said Purzycki had been invited to be a member of the Local Governments Committee.
A statement from Wilmington’s new mayor and former governor, John Carney, said “the City of Wilmington will actively participate and ensure we get access to the resources our communities need.”
What do you want to talk about?
This is the sane mayor that gave control of All the POSDC cash to his corrupt and or grossly incompetent Lt Gov? Now all of a sudden he’s gonna do the right thing? Guessing he hears footsteps from a new and improved group of City Council members. I guess being forced to do the right thing is something. The rot in our government is beyond description.
Remember–saying isn’t doing.
Yet another Trumpian contradiction: Invoking the State Secrets justification for refusing to give a judge information on immigrant deportations while demonstrating a high level of transparency in planning the Houthi attack.