By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

April 15th is tax day in the United States, when most of us – the wealthiest excepted – pay our share of taxes to fund the government. This includes three key pillars of the social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These three, like almost every federal government department, are being gutted by President Trump and his main funder, a man often called “the co-president,” billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).

For generations, politicians couldn’t touch Social Security. The immensely popular program was the “Third Rail” of politics, that electrified rail that powers subway lines, potentially fatal if touched. Now, as Trump approaches his 100th day of his second term, it appears that even Social Security is being targeted.

April 15th, in addition to being Tax Day, was also the Hands Off Social Security National Day of Action, convened by the advocacy organization Social Security Works. Participants organized rallies across the nation with signs like “Protect, Defend, Expand Social Security” and “Social Security Works, Billionaires Don’t!” These protests are part of the rapidly growing grassroots movement to block the Trump/Musk attack on government and against draconian deportations.

“Donald Trump has a problem,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, said on the Democracy Now! news hour, before heading off to a protest. “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, which didn’t go through. [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.”

This strategy was most clearly expressed by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, another billionaire, who said in a recent interview, “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.” Obviously, there are very few mothers-in-law of billionaires among Social Security’s beneficiaries.

According to Social Security Works, around half of all seniors rely on Social Security for most of their income, while 25% of seniors rely on it for virtually all of their income. The average annual payout to these seniors is just $20,000.

“It’s really hard to imagine what their endgame is, other than destroying our Social Security system,” Social Security Works’ Altman added. “There are over 70 million Americans who receive monthly benefits that they have earned. [S]eniors, people with disabilities. It’s the nation’s largest children’s program. Many of them have mobility issues.”

In an explosive exposé, The New York Times recently reported that 6,300 immigrants who had legally received Social Security numbers had been transferred to the agency’s “death master file,” to declare these living, working, tax-paying people as dead. The Times report, “the goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits,” to encourage them to “self-deport.”

Social Security was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 90 years ago, on August 14th, 1935. The program was championed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member in US history. The sweeping law provided not only Social Security’s pension for seniors, but also unemployment insurance, when unemployment amidst the Great Depression was over 20%, as well as financial assistance to mothers and children in need, to the blind, and to those with disabilities.

Frances Perkins was a consummately savvy politician and a brilliant public communicator. In a January, 1935 op-ed in the New York Times, she wrote,

“It is only beginning to be recognized in the United States that social insurance is a fundamental part of another great forward step in that liberation of humanity which began with the Renaissance…the world-wide move toward social security marks another great step along the road of that development we call civilization.”

Republican politicians know that to promote the elimination or even the privatization of Social Security is political suicide. Instead, the DOGE plan seems to be to render it dysfunctional, by shuttering field offices, massively reducing its workforce, thus abandoning the most vulnerable among us, who have the least political influence. This is what Trump and Musk clearly intend. The urgent work now is to stop them.