What happened
Former President Joe Biden Tuesday criticized the Trump administration's "damage and destruction" to Social Security, telling a conference of disability advocates in Chicago that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE crew have "taken a hatchet" to the federal retirement program and Americans' broader well-being.
Who said what
"In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction," Biden said in his half-hour speech, his first major public address since leaving office in January. "It's kind of breathtaking."
Trump — who Biden did not mention by name — and Musk's DOGE operation are "taking aim at Social Security now" in accordance with "that old line from tech startups" to "move fast and break things," he said. "They're certainly breaking things. They're shooting first and aiming later." And "they want to wreck it so they can rob it," Biden added, "in order to give tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations."
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The "drastic" staffing and service cuts by Musk — who recently called Social Security the "biggest Ponzi scheme of all time" — and DOGE have led to "website outages, technical glitches, unanswered phone lines, attempts to access private data and other problems" at the agency, The Washington Post said.
The Social Security Administration said on its official X account that Biden "is lying to Americans." White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump has pledged to protect Social Security benefits "for law-abiding, taxpaying American citizens." She also mocked Biden's age, telling reporters "I'm shocked that he is speaking at nighttime. I thought his bedtime was much earlier than his speech tonight."
What next?
Biden will continue to speak up about topics that are "real to people" and "matter to him," a former Biden administration official told Politico. "No one would be talking about Social Security tomorrow if Joe Biden wasn't giving this speech."
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