Sherry Robinson

All She Wrote

Social Security and the DOGE kids

At packed town halls held recently by New Mexico’s three U.S. House members, the defining feature of attendees was grey hair, and one of their most urgent worries was Social Security.

In New Mexico, 468,000 people get a Social Security check. Another 55,000 receive Supplemental Security Income. For a great many of them, missing even one check wouldn’t just be inconvenient, it would be disastrous – the difference between housed and unhoused, fed and hungry, as U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez learned when he surveyed constituents.

No recipient, myself included, considers Social Security an entitlement. “I paid in,” they will tell you.

Elders’ alarm over Social Security has festered for months. The president promised he wouldn’t touch Social Security except for “waste, fraud and abuse” and then turned Elon Musk and his DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, loose on the Social Security Administration (SSA).

In February Musk claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 were receiving a

Social Security check, when he had, in fact, misunderstood the agency’s aged record keeping system. DOGE staff, without training or security clearances, embarked on a “major cleanup” of SSA records. Since March DOGE moved 10 million records to SSA’s Death Master File over the objections of SSA staff, according to the Washington Post. But DOGE itself was so unsure about its actions, according to Newsweek, that it advised SSA offices to reinstate people who came in with identification. That can take months.

The Washington Post reported last week on one man who learned he was added to the Death Master File when he couldn’t use his credit card to buy lunch. The government told financial institutions he was dead, clawed back his last Social Security check, and ended his pension checks and Medicare. Months later, he’s still trying to recover pension checks.

The undead have been showing up at Social Security offices, where they may or may not find somebody to help them. The Trump administration fired 7,000 people from SSA’s 57,000-person workforce, despite staffing at a 50-year low, and plans to lay off thousands more and close offices. At the same time, DOGE began requiring people without internet access to prove their identity with an in-person office visit.

The result was website crashes, hours’ long wait times by phone, and few actual humans still working in field offices.

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury told a town hall this month that she was denied entry to the Albuquerque Social Security office, even though she had an appointment. She said the office, a regional call center normally staffed by 600, had around 250 to 300 employees.

She joined more than 100 members of Congress in asking SSA’s Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to keep local field offices open.

Dudek, previously a mid-level data analyst, welcomed and enabled DOGE as other agency professionals resisted or resigned in protest. At DOGE’s direction, he has “pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems,” the Washington Post reported. In a recording obtained by ProPublica, Dudek urged co-workers to be patient with “the DOGE kids,” as he called them.

“They’re learning. Let people learn. They’re going to make mistakes.”

Former Deputy Commissioner Jason Fichtner has compared DOGE’s Social Security cuts to a drunk operating a wrecking ball. His boss, former Commissioner Martin O’Malley, has warned Social Security recipients to save their money to prepare for future missed checks. He has explained that SSA’s overhead is far below commercial insurers. In his view the administration is trying to dismember the agency by breaking its ability to serve. Once broken, it can be privatized.

Which is what Stansbury said in her town hall. “They are trying to dismantle Social Security. The GOP has dreamed of privatizing it for years. A lot of major financial institutions can make a lot of money,” she said.

Project 2025, the administration’s 900-page blueprint, doesn’t address Social Security, but one of its authors, economist Stephen Moore, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme long before Elon Musk did, and Moore has long proposed deep cuts and privatization.

The debate over privatizing Social Security is long standing. Two thoughts: First, with a private account the broker gets paid whether the market is up or down, whether you make money or not. Second, we all deserve to make our own decisions about what happens to Social Security and not be forced into an outcome because the powers that be drove it into the ground.

As a Vasquez constituent told Source New Mexico, “It’s my money.”

Sherry Robinson is a long-time New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.

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Trip Jennings

This weekend I saw Sinners, the latest movie from director Ryan Coogler. Coogler is best known for the Rocky sequel, Creed, and the two Black Panther films.

Some people have described Sinners as a vampire horror flick. OK, sure, there are bloodsuckers and copious amounts of the red stuff, with plenty of jump scares. But saying Sinners is a horror flick is like saying Chinatown, the 1970s noir classic, is simply a movie about a private eye hired to trail a husband who is believed to be cheating on his wife. Inspired by the early 20th century water wars between a growing Los Angeles and the water-rich Owens Valley,

Chinatown also is about money, power, and corruption — and how the country’s second-largest city came to be.

Like Chinatown, Sinners is about many things all at once — not the least of which is American history, Western civilization, and the many moral questions we should wrestle with as beneficiaries of this complicated legacy.

This sounds overly grandiose, I know. I am open to the suggestion that I am so bewitched by the film that I have lost all perspective. But in the days since seeing Sinners, I can’t shake it as a stream of novels, histories and cultural studies I’ve read over the years have leapt to mind as I’ve ruminated on Coogler’s film.

Some of these books are famous, some are not. I am thinking of novels such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley, White Tears by Hari Kunzri, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

The histories loom just as large: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, South to America by Imani Perry, How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill and Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang.

Here’s my confession: This column is as much about how reading can enrich one’s appreciation of a particular film, musical piece, artwork, or sculpture, as anything.

As I watched Sinners, scene after scene evoked a period of American history I’d read about, or an idea I’d encountered in a novel, or deep, uncomfortable questions I’d encountered in essays about the many influences that shape a musical genre, and who has the power to name it and, in turn, benefit financially.

Set in the 1930s Jim Crow South, Sinners is, of course, a commentary on White supremacy in the United States. But it is also about a particular time and place. As a native Southerner, I felt a twinge of homesickness for the heavy, humid air of summer and the idioms and cadences with which Southerners often speak to one another (Living around the country has taught me that White and Black Southerners have more in common than many people suspect, even if our politics sometimes separates many of us.)

But it is not just about Southern racism. It is about race in America as told through the lens of the Great Migration. From 1915 through 1970, millions of Blacks escaped the harsh conditions of the South — the terror of lynching, the backbreaking work and limited economic and educational opportunities — for a better life in the North, Midwest and West only to find that the utopia they expected north of the Mason-Dixon did not exist (Two major characters in Sinners set up the story when they return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Miss. after several years in Chicago.)

It also is about the tug-of-war between religious faith and the outside world (A major character in Sinners must decide between a peripatetic lifestyle of a blues musician and his father’s wish that he follow in his steps as a preacher. As a child of a Presbyterian minister who wondered why her seminary-trained son never followed her into the pulpit, I felt this storyline acutely).

It is, unexpectedly, also about Christianity’s destruction of and intermittent integration of Indigenous belief systems into its cosmology over the past 20 centuries as it spread across the globe. (This is represented in Sinners both by a female root doctor, a traditional healer in the rural Black South, and a 1,000-year-old vampire who remembers Christian priests taking his father’s land as they destroyed the pre-Christian culture made up of a mixture of pagan and Celtic influences.)

And it is also about music and its transcendent power to transport us to another plane of existence. At the same time, it is about who has the power to commodify this potent human creation.

I apologize if my musings give the impression that Sinners was dull, an exposition of complicated historical and sociological ideas. It is anything but. It is a fast-moving, entertaining film. After seeing it, in fact, I was shocked to learn its running time is longer than two hours. It felt much shorter.

And that is a mark of great filmmaking, when a movie chock full of this many ideas feels this tight.

That is my way of saying, I hope you’ll give Sinners a chance. It’s worth your time,

Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.