I feel pretty certain that today is the last day to have any impact on what Democratic senators will do on the upcoming vote on the House-produced “continuing resolution.” There was apparently a pretty intense argument yesterday in a caucus meeting about what to do. (I’ll say more about that shortly). But I think Democratic senators have made a collective decision to keep their constituents in the dark about what they plan to do. That is part of a larger culture of opacity that has seemed to me to be an increasingly consequential part of the failure of civic governance in the country as the drama has played out. If you’re able to get any answers from your senator, please let me know.
On a related front, my sense is that the situation within the federal government is much more dire than many of the senators actually understand. I don’t say this to excuse them. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t want to know. DC is it’s own bubble, not simply in terms of conventional wisdom but also in informational terms. I recommend this genuinely breathtaking article from ProPublica. It’s about a recording made of interim Commissioner Lee Dudek in a meeting with senior SSA executives. This is the mid-level IT and fraud investigator who was picked out as a Trump ringer and elevated to be acting administrator. Even he seems to be afraid and/or ambivalent about what the President (directly) and DOGE is ordering him to do. You get the sense this is not the most sophisticated person and not someone with experience in a leadership role anything like this one. It’s a shocking read. It’s been a given since DOGE started at SSA that the whole system of disability insurance is just going to grind to a halt, certainly on the intake front. But it seems clear they’re making changes or simply breaking things now that make a breakdown of the retirement check system a very real possibility.
