'Already happening': Outrage as seniors claim Trump is already 'stealing' benefits

"DOGE is a disaster of incompetence."

That's how one political scientist responded to Saturday reporting about a Washington state man fighting for his Social Security benefits as U.S. President Donald Trump and the head of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk, attack the federal bureaucracy, including the agency that administers payements to seniors like Leonard "Ned" Johnson.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat shared the story of 82-year-old Johnson. In February, his wife received a notification from their bank that the Social Security Administration (SSA) requested a return for benefits paid out after the supposed death of her husband. She figured it was a scam—as Johnson was alive—but the request was real and $5,201 was pulled from their account.

As Westneat detailed, after making multiple calls to SSA, during which Johnson was "put on hold and then eventually disconnected," and securing an appointment that was ultimately rescheduled for next week, "he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown," one of several sites across the United States that DOGE wants to shut down.

According to the columnist:

After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: "I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention."

Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn't received February or March's benefits payments.

"When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now," he said.

Author Jeff Nesbit, the public affairs chief for five federal agencies or departments—including SSA—under four presidents, shared the article on the Musk-owned social media site X, saying: "So incredibly sad that Musk/DOGE are now preying on people like this. I hope older Americans understand the assault underway against Social Security right now."

Progressive political consultant Matt Herdman similarly said: "Elon Musk and Donald Trump are stealing seniors' hard-earned benefits. It's already happening, and it'll get worse if they go through with closing branch offices and cutting staff."

Johnson isn't the only senior who has had to fight for his Social Security since Trump returned to office in January and installed various billionaires to key positions in the federal government. James McCaffrey, a 66-year-old retiree in Oklahoma City, told his story to NBC affiliate KFOR earlier this week.

McCaffrey learned that his Social Security benefits were suspended when he received a notice saying that he needed to pay $740 or he was going to lose Medicare, health insurance for seniors. After multiple phone calls and hours on hold, he finally got through. He then quickly received the missing payment, but never got an explanation—and SSA refused to give one to the news station.

However, McCaffrey believes his trouble may stem from the fact that he was born on a U.S. military base in Germany—and Musk's recent Fox Business appearance, during which he claimed that undocumented immigrants are receiving benefits. That came shortly after a podcast interview, during which a billionaire called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme."

McCaffrey is now concerned about other seniors facing similar issues. As KFOR reported:

He worries about people who may not have the time and resources he had to get to the bottom of what happened and get his benefits back.

"I’ve been a diligent Boy Scout type, I prepared," he said. "But, no, I shouldn't have to."

He also worries about people who may not share the same savings or the same financial cushion [that] he had to fall back on. "And you interrupt that for seven days, two weeks or even longer, and they're in bad trouble," he said. "They could be out of the house. They could be out of food. I don't know."

In response McCaffrey's experience, Ashley Schapitl, a public relations professional who previously worked for Senate Democrats and the U.S. Treasury Department, said, "Picture thousands of Social Security beneficiaries having their benefits canceled with no explanation and limited recourse to get them reinstated."Trump and Musk's recent moves and remarks have fueled fears that they are working to privatize Social Security.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) laid out a potential GOP "attack plan" for the program on X Friday:

One: Trump and his vassals tell lies that there's no plan to cut Social Security.

Two: Trump and Musk lie loudly about imaginary Social Security "fraud" to lower public confidence in the program.

Three: Musk sends his nasty Musk-rats in to Social Security to damage administration of the fund, leading to "interruption in benefits."

Four: Trump then declares emergency and hands administration of Social Security to private equity and tech bros to fix problem they created.

Five: Republicans declare victory that they "saved Social Security" by handing it to private equity/tech bros, and put Trump's name on checks.

The advocacy group Social Security Works took note of Whitehouse's thread and said: "Everyone needs to read this. Musk and Trump are breaking Social Security so they can turn it over to Wall Street."

Vice President JD Vance recently traveled to Bay City, Michigan to speak at a manufacturing plant to tout President Donald Trump's economic agenda, and was welcomed by a crowd of protesters.

But once he was inside the event at Vantage Plastics, Vance ridiculed the protesters — many of whom carried signs bearing messages like "protect Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security" and "fascists not welcome in Michigan" — and suggested that they were only protesting him because they didn't have anything better to do. Some of the protesters' signs were also focused on South African centibillionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has repeatedly called for cutting Social Security by hundreds of billions of dollars, and recently railed against the New Deal program as a scheme by Democrats to entice undocumented immigrants to get free money and vote for them in elections (undocumented immigrants don't qualify for Social Security benefits and are not able to vote).

"I'm sure all of us saw there were a few protesters outside," Vance said. "And I can't be the only person wondering, you know, it's a cool afternoon, on a Friday, and don't you all have jobs?"

The impact of Trump's tariffs is projected to cost the average American household anywhere from $1,600 to $2,000 more per year, according to Yale University's Budget Lab. Vance stressed that the tariffs wouldn't impact American companies that made their products domestically — and issued what could be interpreted as a veiled threat to companies still relying on imports.

In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.

“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”

They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.

Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.

The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. But the botched situation at Bien Hoa is a stark example of the whiplash, conflicting messages and dire consequences that aid organizations worldwide have faced since early February.

Since 2019, the U.S. government has collaborated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense to clean up the Bien Hoa air base and agreed to spend more than $430 million for the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place. “The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,” a State Department official told ProPublica, “a country that should by all rights hate us.”

During the war, the U.S. sprayed more than 10 million gallons of the herbicides across vast swaths of the country, exposing U.S. soldiers as well as millions of Vietnamese people and their future children to the deadly toxic substance.

Over the decades, dust has blown the contaminated soil off the bases and abundant rains have pushed the dioxin into waterways and the densely packed surrounding neighborhoods, contaminating fish as well as ducks and chicken that people raise for food. Soil samples at the Bien Hoa base have shown dioxin at levels as high as 800 times the allowed amount in Vietnam.

For decades since the war, and despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among people who had been exposed to the chemicals, the U.S. denied the mass toll Agent Orange had taken on Vietnamese people — as well as on American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported.

With enough contaminated soil to fill about 40,000 dump trucks, the Bien Hoa air base is the largest deposit of postwar pesticides remaining in Vietnam after a decadeslong cleanup campaign. Human rights groups, environmentalists and diplomats consider the cleanup work — along with disability assistance that the U.S. has provided to Agent Orange victims across the country — to be one of the most successful foreign aid initiatives of all time.

“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”

Every president since George W. Bush — including Trump — has made good on the American promise to repair relations with Vietnam by cleaning up Agent Orange and helping those sick or disabled from dioxin poisoning. In 2017, Trump landed at Danang Airport, a prior cleanup site, ahead of a free-trade meeting with Asia-Pacific countries. The U.S. now conducts $160 billion in annual commerce with Vietnam, which has also become a key partner against China’s growing influence in the South China Sea. The Pentagon and Vietnamese military now work together as well, including efforts to locate the remains of soldiers missing in action from the war 50 years ago.

“All of this is underpinned by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the country’s relations with the U.S. in the wake of the war. “It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool.”

The Bien Hoa project was formally launched and initial contracts signed during Trump’s first presidency. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a Feb. 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. About half of the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, though it’s funneled through USAID, so it was also caught up in the foreign aid freeze.

Environmental consultants, foreign policy experts and government officials said the episode in Bien Hoa shows the administration did not do a thoughtful audit. “One might imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.

“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”