AMY GOODMAN: We begin today looking at how the Social Security Administration is considering drastic new measures that could disrupt benefit payments to millions of Americans. This is according to an internal memo first obtained by the political newsletter Popular Information.

Authored earlier this month by Acting Deputy Social Security Administration Commissioner Doris Diaz, the changes proposed in the memo would force millions of customers to file claims in person at a field office rather than over the phone. According to the memo, customers applying for retirement and disability benefits would be required for the first time to verify their identity through an online system. If their identity can’t be verified online, they would have to visit a field office in person.

A day before the memo was sent, The Washington Post reported Social Security Administration was considering ending telephone service for all claims, under pressure from DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Hours after the Washington Post report came out, the agency issued a press release claiming telephone services would not be eliminated. The proposed changes to Social Security come as DOGE is targeting the agency for staff cuts of more than 12%.

Meanwhile, Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has sparked outrage after repeatedly suggesting only fraudsters would complain if Social Security checks don’t go out on time.

COMMERCE SECRETARY HOWARD LUTNICK: Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as self-professed DOGE person, former corporate CEO Frank Bisignano was grilled for more than two hours Tuesday by the Senate Finance Committee at his confirmation hearing to lead the Social Security agency. This is one exchange with him and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Suppose this same 65-year-old calls the help line to apply for Social Security, but he’s told about the new DOGE rule, so he has to go online or in person. He can’t drive. He has trouble with the website, so he waits until his niece can get a day off to take him to the local Social Security office. But DOGE closed that office, so they have to drive two hours to get to the next closest office. When they get there, there are only two people who are staffing a 50-person line, so he doesn’t even make it to the front of the line before the office closes, and he has to come back. Now, let’s assume it takes our fellow three months to straighten this out, and he misses a total of $5,000 in benefits checks, which, by law, he will never get back. So, Mr. Bisignano, is that a benefit cut?

FRANK BISIGNANO: Well, first of all, Senator, I enjoyed —

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Is that a benefit cut?

FRANK BISIGNANO: I enjoyed.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: I’m sorry, my time is limited here. That’s an easy question. Yes or no? Is it a benefit cut?

FRANK BISIGNANO: I have no intent to have anything like that happen on my watch, Ma’am.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: I understand that. Is it a benefit cut?

FRANK BISIGNANO: I’m not sure what to call it. It sounds like a horrible situation.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Is the person getting the $5,000 they were legally entitled to?

FRANK BISIGNANO: That was your scenario. And so — 

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: So, are they getting $5,000 they were legally entitled to?

FRANK BISIGNANO: I don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: Social Security provides crucial economic security to more than 70 million people and accounts for over half the income of most people over age 65.

In one of many protests nationwide, dozens of mostly older adults protested Friday outside a Nashville, Tennessee, field office they say is already understaffed, with long wait times, is on a list of 47 field offices DOGE plans to close.

PROTESTER: We’re being told, and everything that they say that they’re trying not to do — and one of the things they’re saying is that they’re not going to attack Social Security. And yet all the actions they’re taking is attacking Social Security.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Chicago, Branko Marcetic is with us, Jacobin staff writer, where his recent piece is headlined “Trump’s Nominated Social Security Head Knows How to Cut.”

But we begin in Washington, D.C., with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, chair of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition, the co-author, with Eric Kingson, of Social Security Works for Everyone!: Protecting and Expanding the Insurance Americans Love and Count On. Altman has spent the last half-century working on Social Security. After our interview, she’ll be at a rally near the Capitol about defending Social Security.

Nancy Altman, welcome to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with you before you go off to this rally. It looks like the commerce secretary, the billionaire Lutnick, who says that his 94-year-old mother wouldn’t complain if she didn’t get her Social Security check — she’s the mother of a billionaire — only fraudsters would, is laying the groundwork for people to start to expect, perhaps, that they won’t get their checks. Can you explain what’s happening?

NANCY ALTMAN: It’s really outrageous. Donald Trump has a problem. He ran around the country, flooding the swing states, saying he would not cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, but in his first term he proposed cuts to those programs every single year. Now, those cuts didn’t go through. So what’s he doing now? He’s claiming that there’s enormous amount of fraud, which is a lie — there is vanishingly small amounts of fraud — so when he cuts your benefits, he’ll be saying he’s cutting fraud, he’s not cutting the benefits that you have earned.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what is happening at this point. You have, first, the threats of phone service. And who are the people who use Social Security, and what it means not to be able to speak on the phone? Then you have to go to a satellite office. Perhaps that office is going to be closed or understaffed. You have to wait maybe a month to be able to go in. And the issue is they’re closing these offices all over. What’s happening to Social Security as we speak?

NANCY ALTMAN: You know, it’s all being done behind closed doors. And what’s being done — because we’re following it very closely and talking to the people who work at Social Security — is they are destabilizing the program. The agency could wind up collapsing. You’ve got the DOGE minions, Elon Musk’s, you know, 20-year-olds, running around Social Security. They’ve been doing it since this new administration. They’ve been forcing people out, firing people, hollowing it out. And, frighteningly, they have all of our most personal data, and no one knows what they have in store for that.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Nancy Altman, this is going to alienate, you know, MAGA Americans who get Social Security. We’re talking about tens of millions of Americans, as well as Democrats, progressives, independents. So, what is the response to — for example, you’re organizing. Who’s going out and protesting around the country right now at these over — understaffed, overworked folks at these field offices, and the possibility of them closing?

NANCY ALTMAN: Yes, it’s really hard to imagine what they have in mind, what their endgame is, other than destroying our Social Security system. As you said, there are over 70 million Americans who receive monthly benefits, that they have earned. They tend to be — they are seniors, people with disabilities. It’s the nation’s largest children’s program. Many of them have mobility issues. If they can’t use the phone, they really are excluded from getting those benefits. It’s really an outrage.

And we’re trying to get the word out. And I’m so appreciative that you’re having this segment, because it’s really important. I don’t want to scare people, because people are dependent on those benefits to pay their rent, to pay their food. And I don’t want to scare people, but I do want people learned. Everyone should be rising up and saying, “Hands off Social Security.”

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, grilling Frank Bisignano at his confirmation hearing to head the Social Security Administration, Wyden citing a tip from a whistleblower and asking Bisignano if he was bringing on DOGE team members who could access Social Security beneficiaries’ personal information.

SEN. RON WYDEN: So, according to the whistleblower, you personally intervened to get key DOGE officials installed at the agency who have masterminded this shipwreck that we’re dealing today. Did you talk to anyone at Social Security about these changes?

FRANK BISIGNANO: I have never talked to Mr. Dudek. I have talked to Mike Russo, and I’ve said that to your staff when they asked me. I know Mike Russo. He was the CIO of Shift4, and he was the CIO at Oracle for Mark Hurd. And I know him for 20 years. I don’t know him as a DOGE person; I know him as a CIO.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, can you respond to what the nominated head of Social Security Administration is saying, Frank Bisignano?

NANCY ALTMAN: He’s bobbing and weaving. Here’s the truth. He has described himself as a DOGE guy. Now, what that means is, although it’s the government of efficiency, it’s bringing in inefficiency, it’s bringing in waste, and it’s opening the possibility of massive fraud through identity theft and so forth.

He, from the very beginning, has been very aggressive. He’s still a private citizen. He’s been nominated. He has no role in the government. But he has been all over the Social Security Administration. He’s been working hand in glove with Elon Musk to hollow out the agency and to make these changes, where you can’t — where you no longer can change your routing number, and you can’t finish your claims by phone. You have to go into field offices, which, of course, they’re trying to terminate all the field offices. And he is really a part of what is going on, and is bobbing and weaving so he can get confirmed.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring in Branko Marcetic into this conversation, the Jacobin staff writer. Your recent piece, Branko, is “Trump’s Nominated Social Security Head Knows How to Cut.” Tell us who he is.

BRANKO MARCETIC: Yeah, Bisignano was the CEO of Fiserv from 2020 to now. Before that, he was the CEO of a different payment processing company, First Data. It was a credit card payment processor. I think people, when they think [inaudible] brought on because he has experience in terms of payments, large amounts of payments every single day, every second being processed, therefore he’ll be good for something like the Social Security Administration, where that is so much of the responsibility.

But the thing about Bisignano is that his record as CEO of these companies is relevant in another way. He was responsible for massive cuts to staff levels, to offices, to benefits for workers at these companies — basically, very much the same kind of thing that we’ve been seeing DOGE doing at the Social Security Administration already. So, anyone who was thinking that if Bisignano is going to be brought in as the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, that there was going to be a change in direction from what we’ve seen, that the administration, the Trump administration, was going to make good on the president’s promises to leave Social Security untouched, I think, should be very worried by his appointment.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could talk about Bisignano’s corporate time as CEO of Fiserv? You write, “Fiserv’s Glass Door reviews are riddled with bitter personal animus to Bisignano specifically: 'The decision making in this company has been extremely erratic since Frank Bisignano took over as CEO.'” Another one, “Once Frank took over, it became a horrible place to work for.” Another said, “Frank and his squad, not the greatest tbh” — to be honest. Another one, “The CEO is a micromanager and only cares about the stock price.” Another, “Replace Frank with a leader who listens.” Another, ”CEO could care less about employees. They are all a widget and an expense to him. Mr Scrooge at his finest,” concluded one. And other said, “Frank, please go buy an island and move there, never to return.” Talk about the significance of this, and then how it fits in, Branko, to being the head of the Social Security Administration.

BRANKO MARCETIC: I mean, there is a deep, deep dislike, to put it mildly, for Bisignano among the workers of Fiserv. I mean, what comes up in these Glass Door reviews, I’d recommend people go and look at them. There’s thousands upon thousands, most of them well before anyone knew that he was going to get nominated for Trump’s administration.

And they all paint a pretty similar picture. Not only do they think that Bisignano is a terrible CEO, someone who has done all these massive cuts so that he can just pour billions of dollars of profit back into stock buybacks — and by the way, he’s a massive shareholder in Fiserv and actually sold $25 million worth of shares, so he is the one profiting directly from this — but they also talk about the kind of effect that these cuts have had on them as workers, as people trying to make Fiserv, you know, do what it’s meant to.

And what they say is that experienced people, some of the most capable workers, have either been fired because they didn’t want to relocate when offices were closed and consolidated in places that were advantageous for tax incentives, or they left because they found that the working [inaudible] were so inflexible and so inconvenient that they may as well just go somewhere else. And so you had this massive brain drain from Fiserv, while at the same time people complained about their working conditions getting worse, their benefits being cut. They talked about having to take on a much bigger workload and having to make that work, even though they had now a far smaller staff.

All of that is a pretty grim portent, I would say, if this is what Bisignano is being brought into the Social Security Administration to do, which I think he is. It suggests that the people who are left, who are not fired from this massive cost-cutting operation by DOGE, are going to be left trying to scramble and keep their heads above water despite the fact that they have far less capability to do so. And the people that are going to be hurt by it are the actual Social Security beneficiaries.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, but ask Branko to stay with us for our next segment. Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer. We’ll link to your piece. And Nancy Altman is president of Social Security Works. She’s going off to a rally to preserve Social Security.

Next up, Democratic lawmakers demand Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz resign, after they discussed plans to bomb Yemen on an unsecure Signal group chat and included a journalist in that chat. Stay with us.