“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”
That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
Archived copies of the article:
This is just fuckin’ sad.
Conservatives get so up in arms about folks “taking advantage” of the system. When the reality is that there’s always going to be someone taking advantage of anything that can be taken advantage of. The percentage of the system being taken advantage of pales in comparison to those it truly helps. To cut off, or otherwise make difficult, the benefits to those that truly need it is horrendous, inhumane, cruel, and, to say the least, shortsighted.
To anyone in support of this and squaring it away with something like “it serves them right” - do something with that cold, dead brain of yours like thinking just a little bit.
Easy to say people are dead and collecting benefits when you are the one that marks them as dead when you know they’re still alive and will continue to collect.
I don’t believe for a second that people at DOGE didn’t do this on purpose a few times to have examples to point to.
The fact that there was a significantly large line and the agents overwhelmed tells you all you need to know about that.
I’m on disability and the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking that I haven’t been thinking rationally about this situation and that I’d be homeless if my SSDI suddenly disappeared or was clawed back. My therapist considers it catastrophizing.
Turns out my fears ARE rational, we’re just living in a completely irrational timeline.
Your therapist isn’t paying attention. It’s one thing to obsess over theoretical what-ifs. It’s another to have evidence that a what-if is being directly threatened.
I’m still trying to get disability. I doubt there will be enough staff left to process claims in the very near future. Again, very real possibility.
Fingers crossed for both of us.
