Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast.
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your support. So the defenders of the bureaucracy, who apparently
don't believe anybody should get fired at the federal government
apparently moved to fire a bureaucrat themselves because he helped
to identify waste and fraud.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This story by Luke rosiach Over at the Daily Wire
daily wire dot com tells the story of Leland do Deck.
Du Deck was an obscure bureaucrat from the Social Security
Admin who had dedicated his career to stopping fraud.
Speaker 1: But when he worked with the Doge.
Speaker 2: Musketeers to do just that, he came close to being
fired himself. He wrote a now deleted post on LinkedIn.
He said, at four point thirty pm, my boss called
me to tell me that I had been placed on
administrative leave pending an investigation. They want to fire me
for cooperating with Doge. Then a stunning reversal occurred. It
was Acting Social Security Commissioner Michelle King who was out
of a job, and Dudek was reinstated with a promotion,
taking her job leading the agency on an interim basis.
Speaker 1: Right, this is so awesome.
Speaker 2: The guy identifies some areas that Doge can look at
to find waste and fraud. That's his expertise inside the
Social Security Administration. And when he says, hey, I do fraud.
You guys are looking for fraud. Here's some stuff you
should look at.
Speaker 1: And his bosses.
Speaker 2: Put him under an investigation, suspend him, and look to
fire him. And the DOGE crowd's like, whoa, whoa, whoa,
what's happening here? The top dog gets fired and they
bring in do Deck to take her job. Two words
for you, people, force multiplier. Force multiplier. There are people
inside these agencies, inside the federal government. There are people
who care about this.
Speaker 1: I played a.
Speaker 2: Social media video post by a former federal worker. She
no longer had been in the I think she was
in apartment of Agriculture, and we played this clip a
couple of weeks ago, and she talks about how all
of her colleagues, not all of them, but she mentioned
the number of instances with her colleagues that were gold bricking,
basically riding the clock right. They would one guy would
go off every day and sleep in his car for
a couple hours around lunchtime, and or sleep in the
company car or the government car. There are people on
the inside that know where the waste and the fraud
and the abuse is occurring. They know, and if they
tell DOGE people, that is a force multiplier. Because the
guys that are showing up with their laptops and ai
that are going through all of this stuff and identifying
the problems, they could really use some help from people
on the inside who can tell them where to focus.
So the Washington Post reported that the acting Social Security Commissioner,
and there's a reason why she's just acting as the commissioner,
and I'll get to that in a bit, but she
was the acting commissioner and King exited the agency after
refusing to let DOGE access agency data. So she's out
and Dudek is in. But it was not reported previously
that the managers at the agency had tried to punish
this guy because he cooperated with the efficiency zars as
they are referred to by Luke Rosiak at The Daily Wire.
The LinkedIn post said the following quote, I confess I
helped DOGE understand SSA Social Security administration. I mailed myself
publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. I confess
I moved contractor money around to add science resources to
my anti fraud team. I confess I asked where the
fat was and is in our contracts so we can
make the right tough choices. I confess I bullied agency executives,
shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command
to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.
Everything I have ever done is in service to our country,
our beneficiaries, and our agency. Okay, here's the thing. If
you are genuinely concerned about social Security not being there, Okay,
if you are, and I'm talking to Democrats and media,
but I repeat myself, if you are genuinely concerned that
somehow or another, social Security is going to go away,
It's going to get cut. People are going to get
their benefits. If you are worried about this, you should
be helping DOGE. You should be helping them. You should
be doing what Leland Dudek is doing, because the program
is going to collapse if you don't clean this thing up,
the money will be gone and everybody will suffer. So,
if you actually believe the things that you are saying
and you want to protect Social Security, the way to
protect it is not to shield it from DOGE. It's
to welcome Doge in to find the misspent money, to
find the misappropriation of funds, to find the waste and
the fraud and the abuse. The SSA and the White
House did not return requests for comment. One employee, speaking
on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Wire that the
person who put Dudeck on leave was a woman by
the name of Gina Clemens, the Deputy Commissioner for Analytics,
Review and Oversight, and she is still on the job
after the publication of the story, despite a spokesman for
US Senator Mike Lee Fellow by the name of Billy
Gribbon said quote, I hope we see more of this.
There are many good civil servants who have been quietly
frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement, who possess an
encyclopedic knowledge of the problems within their agencies. Put them
in charge. Hand them scalpels and flamethrowers. All right, So
I mentioned why this woman that was shown the door,
Michelle King, why she was just the acting commissioner. So
usually it's a six year term, and that allows the
SSA commissioner to you know, to carry on through presidential transitions. Okay,
but the norm protecting Joe Biden destroyed that when he
fired the person that Trump had appointed in his first term.
Biden's designated relief was Martin O'Malley.
Speaker 1: Remember that guy.
Speaker 2: The dynamo made it like two seconds in the presidential
Democratic primary. Martin O'Malley. I think he's out of like
Maryland or something. I forget, but he's very forgettable. So
he seemed to view agency employees, perhaps even more than
taxpayers and beneficiaries, as his constituency. He signed a last
minute deal with the employee union in November of twenty
twenty four, granting them telework for five years so they
could so they didn't have to come into the office,
remember that. And then after he did that deal, he
quit so he could run for the chairman of the DNC.
That led King to assume their top role on an
acting basis. Now Dudeck will serve in that role until
Trump's nominee is confirmed by the US Senate. A fellow
by the name of Frank Bisignano. I gotta believe Dudek
will stay on in some capacity. They would be They
would be foolish to let the guy go after, you know,
after he has done what he has done and proven
his worth. Oh, by the way, cash Patel has passed
his first round of Senate confirmation, the full Senate confirmation.
They got to do another vote. I think there was
only one opponent.
Speaker 1: I think it was.
Speaker 2: Murkowski or no, it may have been Collins. Sorry, I forget.
There was one Republican defector basically who voted no against
cash Patel. But he made it through the first round.
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Wired dot Com piece by David Gilbert. He's gone both
barrels at Elon Musk, who has repeatedly claimed that his
so called Department of Government efficiency project had uncovered massive
government fraud when it alleges that one hundred and fifty
year olds were claiming Social Security benefits.
Speaker 1: But Musk has provided no.
Speaker 2: Evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed
out that this is very likely just a quirk of
the decades old coding language that underpins the government payment system,
so no problem, say it's just a.
Speaker 1: It's a coding quirk.
Speaker 2: Computer programmers quickly claimed that the one hundred and fifty
year old figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather
there was of a weird quirk of the Social Security
Administration's benefits system, which was largely written in Coobyl, not Cobolt,
as Kevin O'Leary called it, Cobol. Cobol, which is a
sixty year old programming language that under it's not used
anymore really, that undergirds sssay's databases as well as systems
for many other government agencies. Cobol is rarely used today,
and as such, Musk's cadret of young engineers may well
be unfamiliar with it, and because COBOL does not have
a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system
whereby all dates are coded to a reference point, and
the most commonly used reference point is May twentieth, eighteen
seventy five, as this was the date of an international
standard setting conference held in Paris known as the Colvin
Chon du mate Uh. These systems default to the reference
point of May twentieth, eighteen seventy five if there is
a birth date that is missing or incomplete. See, there's
no problem here. There's other people who are one hundred
and fifty years old. We actually don't know how old
they are. Take that, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Hah, this is this is like this is an own
for them.
Speaker 2: Like you guys think you're making a point here, it's
the same thing. That's actually worse because at least if
they said they were one hundred and fifty years old,
we actually have a birth date. But the fact that
it's coded to this reference point because you don't have
any date, that makes.
Speaker 1: It even worse.
Speaker 2: Musk could also have simply looked up on the SSA's
own website, which explains that Since September twenty fifteenth, the
agency has stopped automatically paying those benefits when anybody reaches
the age of one hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 1: Whew, oh, thank goodness. This makes it so much better too.
Speaker 2: In September of twenty fifteen, they finally figured out, you
know what, maybe we shouldn't be paying these benefits to
anybody who's older than the oldest person on earth. That's
a good call, guys. Yeah, I don't know why it
took until September of twenty fifteen to figure that out,
but they did. Kudos to them, right, shouldn't be paying
people that are, you know, older than the longest ever person,
the longest living person ever. So that's a good thing,
but it still doesn't correct the problem.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And we saw this same thing occur with the voter
ID issue, where people were like, they don't have birth
dates listed because you know, they don't have they are
one hundred and something years old in our system. It's like, well,
that's just because we don't have birth dates, Like, that's
not that's not better. You'd think this is like some
sort of an explanation, but your explanation.
Speaker 1: Is not better.
Speaker 2: The fact that the Social security system contains millions of
entries from people who are dead, is likely distinct from
a potential Cobyl coding caused error, and also not news.
See here we go. Take this elon. A report written
by the SSA Inspector General in twenty twenty three found
that ninety eight percent of those one hundred years or
older in their databases are not in receipt of any benefits.
Their report added the database would not be updated because
it would cost too much money to do so, say
in your face, musk ha again, guys, this is not
better either. Why do you have all of these people
still in your database for benefits? And they're like, well,
they're not getting any Yeah, but shouldn't they be I
don't know, closed out or something. Why would you still
have them in there if they are no longer getting
benefits and they're dead? In your own Inspector General highlighted
this problem and you're like, yeah, we really do need
to update the systems, but no, we can't do that
because we don't have any money. We know we need to,
but we're not going to. It's just a mess, all right.
If you're listening to this show, you know I try
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as they make the media landscape more transparent. So there
was a very lengthy piece that was written in twenty
twenty two, actually by Mark Hemingway and Ben Weingarten. We
had been on the program a couple of days ago.
This was over at Real Clear Investigations, and it was
about social security benefits. And what's a really interesting thing
in all of this discussion is essentially like Musk Elon
Musk and his doge dudes, the Musketeers, like they're like,
look at all these social Security numbers. These are probably
fraudulent being used to you know, send money to to
fraudsters bilking the social Security system. And the response has
been weird in that it's like, no, no, no, that's what.
Just that they're going to illegal aliens. That's all they
you know, they're used, they're just committing identity theft with
that so they can work like wait a minute, that's
that's your explanation. And this is a huge problem. And
I heard today that now they're directing all of the
agencies to start looking for the for signs of this
kind of fraud inside of all federal departments. Three years ago,
almost three years ago at Real Clear Investigations headline willful
blindness Feds ignore illegal alien ID theft plaguing Americans. As
US coffers fill I have heard this argument as well
that you know. Oh no, Well, look a lot of
the times illegal aliens will get these ID cards or
they'll get fake you know, social Security numbers, and they
pay into the system and they don't even collect the benefits.
So we should keep allowing this, Like well, whoa whoa,
whoa whoa whoa whoa. No, first off, Like, so you're
okay with extracting money from these people's paychecks, taking it
from them, and then them never getting it back. Like
that's that's not exactly a law and order kind of
approach to any of this.
Speaker 1: It's not ethical.
Speaker 2: From the piece, the historic surge of illegal immigrants across
America's southern border is fueling a hidden crime spree. Few
in Washington seem willing or able to address widespread identity theft,
victimizing unwitting Americans, perpetrated by migrants who need US credentials
to work. And by the way, you know who is
most often affected here, It is American citizens, some of
whom have been naturalized. They are immigrants themselves, but they
are legal, and they have names that illegal immigrants from
particular countries want to have. They tell stories of Let
me see here, I think I highlighted some of their names.
They went through a couple of these examples. Yeah, Marcus Calvio,
Adrian Gonzalez, Linda Trevino. These are people that are getting victimized.
And sometimes the people that steal their identity, they're not
just coming to work. I mean they're using the documents,
they're using these identities and they're committing crimes. And then
you get pulled over and like you got outstanding warrants on.
Speaker 1: You wait, what.
Speaker 2: Ruining people's lives is what they're doing. But you don't
want to crack down because you need people to clean
your house, right, you need people to watch your kids, right?
Speaker 1: Is that the argument you're making.
Speaker 2: Measuring it with precision is difficult to find out how
big of a problem this is, how many people there
are doing this because the lack of data that's provided
by the authorities. A telling indication, though, of the scope
of the criminality, is provided by a little known government
accounting book. It's called the Social Security Administration's Earnings Suspense File,
or the EESF. It reflects the earnings of employees whose
W two wage and tax statements have names and Social
Security numbers that do not match official records, so they
actually run reports on this called the ESF. The total
logged in the file has increased from about one hundred
eighty nine billion at the beginning of the millennium, so
around nineteen ninety nine two thousand it was at one
hundred eighty nine billion to now one point nine trillion dollars.
Officials have historically ascribed a high proportion of the file's
growth to wages reported by illegal immigrants, and it has
swelled alongside their population, which and by the way, that
one point nine trillion number is from twenty twenty one,
so this doesn't even capture all the fraud that's occurred
in the last four years under the Biden administration. Among
those doings that working on the books, federal authorities have
found well over one million or one million people are
using Social Security numbers belonging to somebody else, either stolen
or shared with a relative or acquaintance, or numbers that
are just completely fabricated. The data that's held in the
ESF would enable authorities to pursue many of the fraudsters,
but the IRS and other agencies responsible for enforcing the
law have been reluctant to investigate, and regulations have prevented
meaningful information sharing among them. I keep saying this, This
is a choice.
Speaker 1: People.
Speaker 2: People are making these decisions on purpose. A twenty seventeen
study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform or FAIR,
found that the federal government collects about twenty two billion
dollars annually in tax receipts from illegal aliens, with the
bulk going towards Social Security and Medicare. The fraud has
the effect of bolstering these financially shaky federal programs. In
one of the agency's rare direct statements on this issue,
the Social Security Administration Chief Actuary Stephen Goss told CNN
over a decade ago that quote, without undocumented immigrants paying
into the system, social Security would have entered persistent shortfall
of tax revenue to cover payouts starting in two thousand
and nine. Again, it's a choice. They're looking the other way.
They're not enforcing the law, they're not investigating because of
the money. Given Washington's bipartisan willingness to tolerate a legal immigration,
whether driven by the multicultural left or business interests seeking
cheap labor, authorities have focused on this apparent windfall to
the US Treasury, but they have largely ignored the costs.
As Thomas Sole says, no solutions, only trade offs. Right,
So what's the trade off? Well, it includes significant strain
illegal immigrant households placed on public finances, which fair and
others other groups estimate vastly outweigh their tax contributions, their
impacts on crime and the job market, and of course
on the victims of the identity theft. Right, people say, oh,
they pay, they pay more, they contribute more to the society. Oh,
they're paying twenty two billion dollars a year. See that
they're net positive. What is the cost to build all
of the schools and hire all of the ESL teachers?
Speaker 1: What are those costs?
Speaker 2: Right? There is another side of the ledger here that
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defenders of the status quo are saying that the identity
theft that is funneling money into Social Security and Medicare
is a net positive, right, So therefore we shouldn't be
looking into any of this, like, hey, you know what,
they're just paying into a system they're never going to
collect out of the system is still unsustainable, though it's
not enough. They just look at it as an additional
revenue stream reports. According to Real Clear Investigations, reports dating
back over a decade show hundreds of thousands of Americans
are unknowingly sharing their Social Security numbers with illegal immigrants.
Such victims may face tax bills for income that they
did not earn or even depleted benefits. Worse, some may
experience the burden of bad credit histories even criminal records
inaccurately attributed to them after being issued social Security numbers
that illegal aliens have previously invented and used. The overall
impact on American citizens is largely unknown. Biggest federal, state,
and local governments, as well as financial institutions, have generally
failed to notify them even when fraud is suspected. I
cannot stress this enough. People locked down or freeze your credit.
Speaker 1: You can do it.
Speaker 2: Very easily online with the three major credit rating bureaus.
Put a freeze on your stuff, you will not be
able to get Nobody will be able to get access
to anything if it's got to go through one of
the credit agencies because it's frozen. Now, if you want
to do something, you got to unfreeze it. But you
can do that very easily on the websites as well.
You can unfreeze it for like a set period of time,
do your application.
Speaker 1: And then have it locked down again.
Speaker 2: Ironically, this is another instance of regulation becoming the mother
of criminal innovation. In nineteen eighty six, Congress made it
explicitly unlawful for employers to hire I llegal immigrants right
the Immigration Reform and Control Act the IRCA. It required
people who were seeking employment to fill out I nine
forms attesting to citizenship or work authorized immigrant status, and
provide corroborating documentation and a valid Social Security number. The
law did not slow the pipeline of immigration because enforcement
was never done. Border security wasn't done right. That was
the hoax that the demo crats played on Reagan. According
to the libertarian Cato Institute, the nineteen eighty six law
spurred the creation of a large scale black market for
legal documents in America. The value of document fraud increased
after this law passed because false documents became necessary for
illegal immigrants to fill out an I nine form to work.
Aliens can procure these numbers in several ways. They could
simply just make up a nine digit number. Others use
the numbers of kids who were born in the US,
their own kids, or other kids. Still others steal them
directly from individual individuals, or they could purchase them from
dealers for anywhere from eighty to two hundred dollars along
with a green card, or you go on the dark
web and you can find them for as little as
four bucks. The most common form of ID theft where
fraudsters create an entirely new identity by stealing the social
Security number of children's or were p moore adults with
very little credit history. While some illegal immigrants work off
the books, the Social Security Administration has previously said seventy
five percent are using fake or stolen numbers. This fraud
can be detected, as I mentioned, they just don't want
to look for it. The existence of that ESF that
report means the Social Security Administration and the IRS with
which it coordinates have a database containing a substantial population
of fraudsters against American citizens, and for the better part
of two decades, government watchdogs have encouraged these agencies to
put that data to use, but they don't. In two
thousand and six or twenty years ago, GAO report recommended
that SSA, IRS DHS share the data to address the problem,
but federal law severely limits the Social Security Administration and
the other irs from sharing information from tax forms, in
part because of privacy concerns. The ACLU called attempts to
coordinate information sharing between the SSA and immigration enforcement authorities
during the Trump administration quote an all out assault on
our legal rights and our immigrant communities, right, so you
can't even look.
Speaker 1: For the fraud.
Speaker 2: According to the ACLU, that's an assault on our rights
to look for fraud where the victims are American citizens.
Speaker 1: It's astounding. George W.
Speaker 2: Bush, during his administration, started doing the SSA No match letters,
which were notifications that would go to employers saying, hey,
your employee has a Social Security number that does not
match government records like your I nine or whatever. Obama
comes in puts an end to the no match letters.
Why for DACA for the Deferred Action for Childhood or
rivals for the Dreamers to allow I legal immigrants brought
to the US as children to be exempt from deportation
and eligibility for work permits. Trump gets in and they
resume sending the no match letters. Biden gets in and
they discontinue the no match letters once again.
Speaker 1: Right. You see the pattern here.
Speaker 2: The IRS has enforcement powers that the Social Security Administration lacks,
but has historically disavowed any responsibility for dealing with illegal
alien ID theft. In twenty sixteen, then the IRS Commissioner
John Coskinen, remember that guy, faced impeachment hearings for defying
Congressional subpoenas as well as the destruction of evidence, and
he told Congress we have Social Security and immigration authorities
and others who enforce that part of the law, and
if we start looking behind the system and doing their
job for them, we're going to discourage a lot of
people from paying the taxes they owe. We can't possibly
enforce the law.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: The IRS Manual, which governs employee policies and practices, refers
to those engaged in ID fraud as borrowers. They call
them borrowers that people may be borrowing a Social Security
number from somebody else, rather than calling it identity theft.
As I said, this is a choice. Hopefully DOGE can
make a different one and correct the problem. All right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
for listening. I could not do the show without your
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