As DOGE Mauls Social Security, Profit-Hungry Private Equity Is Swooping In

The Social Security Administration (SSA), an irreplaceable lifeline for 73 million people, is only the latest venerable U.S. institution to be hit with a campaign of media falsehoods and startling internal sabotage efforts, all on the orders of Trump and the reactionary right. This has taken its most visibly outrageous form in the bureaucratic pillaging committed by Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), the widely loathed advisory body with a meme-derived name as juvenile as its staffers.

But this week, a still-more ominous threat appears to be circling. Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns — firms in an insidious financial industry intent on harvesting anything that can rake in a profit for the ultrarich — have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.

This should be of grave concern to all, but the public at large is not widely aware of these threats. Private equity is just that: private, and opaque by design. These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy; estimates vary, but the industry’s combined assets run, at minimum, into the several trillions.

Predatory firms have made startling headway at acquiring, exploiting and flipping companies “across every imaginable sector, from housing and hospitals, to fossil fuels and retail, to pet shops and music catalogs,” as Derek Seidman writes for Truthout. “Private equity has a reputation for being perhaps the most ruthless arm of Wall Street.”

Most infamous are its firms’ parasitic takeovers: buying out a corporation, saddling it with debt to enrich themselves, then brutally cutting costs, often starting by firing many workers and squeezing the rest for every cent and second. Eventually, they strip the whole thing to a husk and sell off whatever assets remain. Despite the astonishing extent of private equity’s incursions into civil society, our sense of the scale, and the damage involved, has lagged behind this industry’s aggressive pace.

And now, private equity’s sights are turning to the Social Security Administration. Privatization of the retirement market has been a long-standing goal of capital. If the SSA really were dismantled, a vast retirement market — over a trillion dollars — would open up, into which could be shoved all sorts of new corporate profit models and plans. Yet the social results, at least for those who aren’t wealthy investors, are easy to imagine if you’ve had the essential U.S. experience of grappling with health insurance. There would be the familiar labyrinths of complexity, deception and usurious charges — but the harms inflicted could easily multiply, as the market for retirement programs is, of course, retirees: older people, disabled people and those in deepest need. Privatization for profit would target the savings and last hopes of all these communities.

Storming the Bastion of the New Deal

Social Security, everyone likes to say, is the political “third rail.” Millions depend on it, and so targeting it is career-ending, according to conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, upending conventional wisdom and conventional decency alike come naturally to the current president and his allies, and they have a particular talent for goading people to vote against their own interests.

This Trump administration’s increasingly brazen seizures of power, civil rights violations and sprees of civic destruction have been streaming forth at what has felt like an impossible rate. The SSA was more or less raided; it was an invasion of the self-appointed “fraud investigators” of DOGE. Turmoil followed. Already understaffed and overworked, the SSA has now been beset by mass firings, funding cuts and the invasive and capricious changes dictated by DOGE.

Meanwhile, a media smear campaign against SSA has been taken up eagerly by the president himself, aided by unctuous crony Musk. Despite promising that SSA won’t be cut, Trump has declared the Social Security Administration riddled with fraud. Musk, too, has touted several falsehoods, including that the SSA is essentially “a Ponzi scheme,” in need of rescue from the world’s richest government handout recipient.

Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.

The frontline work of Musk’s DOGE is to press for ways to tear apart public systems from within their own offices. At the SSA, DOGE, trying to get in through a side door of sorts, found an ally in a mid-level anti-fraud manager, Leland Dudek, who corresponded with them officially — an inappropriate assumption of authority that won Dudek an investigation and administrative leave. However, soon after that, the acting interim commissioner, Michelle King, refused to disseminate citizen data to DOGE and resigned. Then Dudek would experience quite the reversal of fortune. To reward his unthinking loyalty, Trump named the bumbling Dudek the interim head of the entire Social Security Administration. In turn, under Dudek’s watch, DOGE has been entrusted, inexplicably, with some extremely valuable data.

Nancy Altman, a policy and legal expert and president of the major SSA advocacy nonprofit Social Security Works, spoke with Truthout and shared her expert insights into what she feels are some extraordinary and outrageous developments.

DOGE, Altman said, demanded “total access to everything, including the source codes.” The SSA’s collaborating experts had never been granted “the kind of access [DOGE] wanted.” SSA data, she explained, is very securely protected — it contains the Social Security numbers, identities, financial and personal information, immigration status, etc. for 70 million people. It is the ultimate scammer’s treasure trove. Yet DOGE staffers insisted on being allowed to freely view and copy this data and take it off-site. The neophytes of the “anti-fraud” task force have quickly become the most likely vectors of SSA data theft, scams and fraud. And they’ve now had every chance to tamper with or copy data themselves.

DOGE can certainly report that it has successfully “disrupted” the SSA. According to a transcript of sworn testimony by a 30-year veteran who was forced out, DOGE’s ignorance about the most basic functions of the SSA was immediately apparent.

After the first culling of senior leaders (who took with them “literally … a thousand years of collective leadership and knowledge,” Altman said with chagrin), the understaffed SSA now intends to fire another 7,000 of its 57,000 workers — as the thinning workforce reached a 50-year low.

DOGE staffers “created complete chaos,” Altman said. “In the guise of efficiency, they’ve created so much inefficiency. They got rid of probationary workers who had just been trained for 11 and a half months.… They’ve been closing field offices, they’ve been getting rid of regional offices.”

“People are out of a job — goodbye, you’re gone — and told they were fired for performance, which is a lie,” she went on. “But [an employer citing that cause] keeps [an employee] from being able to get employment insurance.”

Since the mass firings, the arms of the SSA that now answer to the Trump administration’s whims have helped the president explore even lower lows of cruelty and pettiness — though, at least in these two cases, they immediately backtracked when challenged.

Bad Omens

The presumptive incoming SSA commissioner, pending Senate confirmation, is Frank Bisignano, on whose appointment Truthout previously reported. He is known as a Wall Street “fixer” — a cost-cutter, profit-booster and workforce-slimmer. His inexperience in the field, his pugnacious style and his billion dollars made him a baffling pick, unless slashing everything is the goal. It seems that the SSA is receiving unsolicited help from quite a few such “fixers,” who are so intent on “fixing” things that are not broken.

Dudek will remain a largely disempowered figurehead until Bisignano’s appointment. Then, during his tenure, Bisignano may well usher in private equity in full force. Altman also said she knows him to be receptive to dubious ongoing proposals to replace workers with AI chatbots — another looming threat to SSA employees, many of whom staff roles that are premised on the nuanced use of human communication and understanding, claims adjusters chief among them.

Again, per Bloomberg, private equity has just gained a “beachhead” in the SSA. An infiltrating “team of veterans” — for now, limited to Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners; Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital; and Michael Russo, formerly of Shift4 — will execute their mission. Russo has stepped right up into the role of agency chief information officer. According to Altman, Russo is operating on the direct orders of Bisignano. Apart from that, it’s not yet clear what the trio’s full roles will entail — but it’s certainly worth noting that Gracias was an early investor and close collaborator in Tesla and SpaceX, as well as a private equity resource whom Musk has called upon: another “fixer.”

These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy.

Altman, citing knowledge of the matter, remarked that Bisignano may be jumping the gun more than a little when it comes to giving orders in advance of his prospective appointment. She said Dudek has admitted as much in a private meeting: He takes all his marching orders from the not-yet-commissioner.

As Altman said, “They’re trying to make it look like [Bisignano’s] got clean hands, but he’s conferring with the acting commissioner [Dudek] five times a day.… [Bisignano’s] the guy calling the shots.” A commendable start to a new job: sent in a goon squad to ransack his own agency, then hid from responsibility — a “fixer” indeed.

A Monstrous Entity

Private equity, in addition to swallowing up and digesting the aforementioned family homes, hospitals, daycares, beloved publications and cultural institutions, and plenty more of the decent things in life — is, of course, just as happy to profit from the nefarious ones too. The industry invests heavily in private prisons, prison services and police (including Atlanta’s Cop City), alongside defense, oil and gas, and other extractive and exploitative systems. Private equity firms are certainly not above finding ways to help themselves to the public coffers, either: siphoning profit, to give just one quite recent example, from affordable housing assistance funds.

It’s not for nothing that the private equity acquisitions are often considered hostile takeovers. One example (also noted by Derek Seidman in Truthout), is the infamous dissection of Toys “R” Us by top firms KKR and Bain Capital. A rapacious and ethics-optional seeker of profit above all, private equity can seem like one of the purest distillations of the inhumane logic of capital.

Right now, sensing favorable conditions, private equity interests are making plans to further enter 401(k)s and get into defined contribution pension plans. “How can we not give investors more access to that asset class?” one CEO mused aloud at a conference. That arrangement has already been a disaster for retirement — many public pension funds were pressed to bet on risky assets and lost. But the firms collect their massive fees either way.

To capital, perhaps Social Security appears like nothing but wastefulness, wasted opportunity. In truth it’s not wasteful — far from it. In fact, Altman noted, not only is real fraud so rare as to be totally negligible (0.00002 percent), the SSA is also exceptional in that “less than a penny of every dollar spent is spent on administration. You can’t find that level of efficiency in the private sector.”

In the U.S., facing a retirement without Social Security would resemble the experience of our current health insurance system: paying top dollar for inferior outcomes, all while contesting with frustrating, indifferent or outright malicious corporations.

We’ve seen what vulture capitalists have done to hospice, retail, medicine and nursing homes — in the latter, brutal cost-cutting under private equity ownership has resulted in 20,000 premature deaths. Figures like this — which would ultimately be far, far more numerous if Social Security were lost, to say nothing of the poverty and homelessness that would ensue — help drive home the true stakes of this struggle. Our present condition is one of class warfare — as unsubtly literalized by the pawns of billionaires, swarming the major bulwark of U.S. social welfare.

“These people are really destroying everything that’s been built — that is there to support all of us.… This is the reason we have a government,” Altman said. “It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.”