Social Security, now 90, is in GOP’s crosshairs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the program as protection against life’s hazards.

- By MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a clear mind about the value of Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935, the day he signed it into law.

“The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more tomake life insecure,” he said in the Oval Office. “We cannever insure 100 per cent ofthe population against 100 per cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame alaw which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against ... povertyridden old age.

He called it a“cornerstone ina structure which is being built but is by no means complete.” FDR envisioned further programs to bringreliefto the needy and healthcare for all Americans. Some of that. happened during the following nine decades, but the structure is still incomplete. And now, as Social Security observes the 90th anniversary of that day, the program faces acrisis.

Ifthere are doubts about whether Social Security will survive long enough to observe its centennial, those have less to do with its fiscal challenges, the solutions of which are certainly within the economic reach of the richest nation on Earth. They have more to do with partisan politics, specifically the culmination ofa decades-long GOP project to dismantle the most successful, and the most popular, government assistance program in American history.

From a distance, the raids on the program’s customer service infrastructure and the security ofits data mounted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year looked somewhat random.

Fueled by abject ignorance about how the program worked and what its data meant, DOGE set in place plans to cut the program’s staff by 7,000, or 12%, and to close dozens of field offices serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries. This at atime when the Social Security caseload ishigher than ever and staffinghad already approached a 50-year low.