Messing with Social Security

 Washington Post - Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.

Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.

But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.

They walked Pearre out of the building, capping a momentous internal battle over the novel strategy — pushed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security — to add thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File. The dataset is used by government agencies, employers, banks and landlords to check the status of employees, residents, clients and others.  More