The Trump administration is planning to further cripple the Social Security Administration by making it easier to fire thousands of the agency’s employees.

The agency’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, told SSA staff earlier this month that many of their jobs would be converted to Schedule F positions, a new classification that would strip these workers of civil service protections. The move has prompted litigation from one of the unions representing SSA employees, the American Federation of Government Employees, who argue that the new classification is misplaced.

“We are line employees to use the phrase in the Administration’s fact sheet, and we should have been excluded from any Schedule F plan,” an AFGE representative wrote in an email to its members. “This is a massive overreach by the Agency that is inconsistent with the Administration’s own guidance.… In the meantime, employees should continue to do great work on behalf of the American people, as they have been.”

The move would make it easier for thousands of employees to be terminated, according to the AFGE representative’s email. It’s the latest blow to the SSA, which provides $1.5 trillion in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans.

In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has made deep cuts to the agency, resulting in website crashes, regional office managers being forced to answer phone calls at front desks, and millions of benefit recipients being prevented from accessing their oline accounts.

Over 7,000 SSA workers were laid off in February thanks to DOGE, sending the agency into a death spiral. The gutting of Social Security has terrified Americans, with polls showing worry about the benefits program at its highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.

It’s all part of Musk and the Trump administration’s plans. The tech oligarch has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and spread lies that the program is a magnet for waste and fraud. The conservative manifesto Project 2025 also lays out plans to scale back the program and cut its benefits. With Republicans controlling Congress, can anything stop the destruction of a lifeline to millions of Americans?

Donald Trump’s administration is now attempting to smear the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”

During an interview on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Thursday, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin criticized Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who’d been forced to move her family to a safe house after the DHS posted a document that included her full address.

McLaughlin tried to claim that the government hadn’t done anything wrong by posting the documents.

“These were publicly accessible documents,” she said. “It wasn’t just the Department of Homeland Security that had them, it’s any member of the American public can go out to a courthouse and get these documents. So to try to lay that at our feet is just inaccurate.”

But McLaughlin took it a step further, attempting to sow doubt about Vasquez Sura’s “sob story.”

“I think it’s important to point to her credibility, a number of times, including that in her own written testimony she said she feared her husband,” McLaughlin said. The document the government had posted containing the family’s address was a protective order that Vasquez Sura had sought against her husband but then abandoned.

“She said that he abused her, that he ripped off her shirt, that he slapped her, that he was scratching her, that she was trying to take her children away. And now she’s pushing this sob story that they had a wonderful relationship, that they never fought,” McLaughlin said. “I think most couples fight, so, I unfortunately think this woman is burning down her own credibility as well.”

In reality, it’s McLaughlin who has undermined her own credibility in her crusade to see Abrego Garcia remain in El Salvador. Last week, she claimed in a post on X that when Abrego Garcia was arrested in 2019 for loitering, he was found with “rolls of cash.” But anyone who actually bothers to read the uncompelling police documents would know that the hoodie he was wearing at the time had cash printed on it.

It should come as no surprise that McLaughlin was completely mischaracterizing Vasquez Sura’s statement about the abandoned protective order against her husband.

“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution following a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order, in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement to multiple outlets Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process. We were able to work through the situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling.

“Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. But that is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from removal. Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him,” the statement read.

Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, is currently staying in an undisclosed location with her three children as the U.S. government makes continued attempts to flout a Supreme Court order requiring that it “facilitate” the return of her husband. Vasquez........

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