Ron Wyden Accuses Social Security Nom Of Purposely Withholding DOGE Ties

2 days ago

At a Senate Democratic press briefing on Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) spoke about Frank Bisignano, President Trump's nominee to be Commissioner of Social Security Administration.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you, Leader Schumer, and I'm going to be brief and just touch on a couple of key

00:09issues.

00:10First, this nominee for Social Security is up to his eyeballs in DOJ, and today we demonstrated

00:19that he did not tell the truth about his track record with respect to Social Security.

00:25He claimed, for example, that he had no involvement with DOJ in terms of insisting that people

00:31be embedded who are close to DOJ and be part of watering down people's protections for

00:37their data.

00:38And a very senior ex-Social Security person basically said that he lied.

00:44We're happy to make that statement available to all of you.

00:48We made it part of the record today.

00:51But the reality is that there are some areas where seniors are just terrified right now,

00:59and it starts with the phone system.

01:01And I asked him repeatedly, for example, if he would take some of the common sense steps

01:07that are necessary to get phone service, you know, back.

01:11And as far as I can tell, he thinks that AI is a silver bullet.

01:16And I pointed out to him when he came in as well that a lot of seniors are not exactly

01:21signing up for chatbots and looking for all these so-called fixes, and my God, I wouldn't

01:27want to see somebody like UnitedHealthcare involved in this particular area of services.

01:34So what this is really all about in terms of Musk and this nominee is they want to hollow

01:43out Social Security.

01:45They want to hollow out the essential functions that the government has performed and then

01:50say, oh, my goodness, we've got to get some private contractors in.

01:55So what I can tell you is what the Senate Finance Committee heard today was what I call

02:01a prelude to privatization, because what you do is you set it up this way, you start dismantling

02:09the government functions, then you go to private contractors.

02:12All of a sudden, you've got something that's completely privatized.

02:16This nominee said he knew nothing about privatization.

02:20I urge all of you to look at the statement from the whistleblower, because that statement

02:26indicates that we've got big problems with DOJ right now in terms of they're looking

02:31at private data that is basically the Fort Knox of American data systems, and we're not

02:40going to have the ability to protect people as we ought to.

02:44So this is a crucial kind of time.

02:46I'm doing everything I can to mobilize attention to this, because in terms of phone systems

02:52and offices and personnel, I asked him again and again if he would take some common sense

02:59steps to actually help terrified seniors, and he basically said he was too busy.

03:04He said we're going to have to do that another time.

03:07Thank you, Senator Schumer.

Ron Wyden Accuses Social Security Nom Of Purposely Withholding DOGE Ties

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