BY MARION HILL
There’s a reason Social Security is referred to as the “Third Rail of Politics.”
Trains powered by electricity, including some subway systems in the U.S. and England, use a third rail that runs beside other train rails to deliver power to the system. If humans touch that highlycharged third rail, they get electrocuted or at least severely burned.
In this metaphor, most American politicians have learned not to even suggest changing Social Security in any way that would lessen the revered entitlement program’s value to its elderly recipients. Any politician who did so would presumably have a short life in politics.
The reason it’s called an “entitlement program” is that people in this country pay into the Social Security system during their working years and are thus entitled to receive benefits from it once they retire.
Elon Musk, the unelected person whom Donald Trump is allowing to attack our federal government, is illegally firing workers right and left and unlawfully trying to end departments without regard to the harm that doing so will have on us all (including many of Trump’s most ardent supporters).
Federal workers are protected from such sudden and unjustified firing by many federal laws and rules, including the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Especially egregious is the fact that about a third of the federal workers being fired are military veterans (Melissa Chan, “Mass federal layoffs deliver a gutting onetwo punch to America’s veterans,” February 21, 2025, www.nbcnews. com).
If anyone deserves to have their job protected from unfair termination, someone who has fought for this country should be at the top of that list.
Besides the unfairness of Musk’s slash-and-burn tactics, it looks sus- piciously like he is targeting for destruction the government departments that are investigating one or more of his companies, including Tesla.
“’Trump’s election, and the bromance between Trump and Musk, will essentially lead to the defanging of a regulatory environment that’s been stifling Tesla,’” according to Daniel Ives, a veteran analyst of Wall Street technology and the automobile industry (Kimberly Kindy and Brian Slodysko, “How Elon Musk’s Anti-Government Crusade Could Benefit Tesla and His Other Businesses,” February 11, 2025, https://time. com).
What will it take to make Trump get rid of Musk?
Who knows? The Orange One has endured Musk’s preening and behaving as if he’s the “real President” far longer than I would have predicted, given Donald’s narcissistic insistence on having other people bow before him. The answer is probably as simple as the fact that Trump likely owes his presidency to the billions of dollars that Musk dumped into his campaign. Trump seems to be afraid of Musk, or at least feels he needs to keep him close, no matter the harm he causes others.
Of course, there’s no real evidence that either Trump or Musk gives a fig about harm to others. Each is all about himself, and about people who could help him in some way.
But back to Social Security. Musk has stepped in it, I think, by saying we need to get rid of Social Security. He has actually called it a Ponzi scheme, which is an investment fraud that pays its earliest investors with funds collected from new investors and then leaves later investors holding the bag.
Social Security is anything but a Ponzi scheme. Musk apparently doesn’t know (and probably doesn’t care) how the venerable retirement program operates and how, over the years, it has raised many millions of older Americans out of poverty.
Social Security began in 1935, paid out its first benefit check in 1940, and has never failed to pay benefits in the more than eight decades since then (www.cnbc.com).
Musk’s taking a chain saw to the federal government as he is doing has proved unpopular with the public. Tesla stocks have plummeted, and protests have happened at Tesla dealerships all around the country (Dan Pfeiffer, “Trump and Musk’s Very Unpopular Plan to Slash Government,” February 12, 2025, www. messageboxnews.com/p/ trump-and-musks-very-unpopular- plan.
Trump likes to say he pays no attention to polls. But we’ve all seen him back down when the stock market takes a plunge in response to some action or tweet from him, and we know he pays attention to crowd size at his speeches. He’s not invulnerable to public opinion, however it’s expressed.
I’m convinced there will come a point when Trump can no longer stand having Musk around, especially as his swaggering makes Trump look weak by comparison. And if the attack on Social Security produces the blowback from voters that I anticipate, that time could come fairly soon.
Musk may need to book a seat on one of his own rockets to Mars. Whatever will take him out of this country and get his grubby little hands off Social Security and the rest of our federal government.