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Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to ask unanimous consent on a very simple measure to make sure that the data systems of Social Security were not compromised--that no data was exfiltrated, no bugs were infiltrated, and no back doors were left in when Elon Musk and his little gang of miscreants went into Social Security.
I will talk more about this afterward, but the chairman of the Finance Committee has elsewhere to be. So I will speak after I have offered this, and he has responded. I will go directly to my unanimous consent request.
As if in legislative session, and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of my bill, S. 1943, introduced earlier today; that the bill be considered read three times and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. These remarks would ordinarily precede the exchange we just had, but as a courtesy to the distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee, we are going a little bit out of order. I will now fill in the statement that I would have made.
Senator Crapo is obviously well aware of my concerns here. As I said at the very beginning, we have reason to believe that Elon Musk and his little gang of frat boys, tech bros, miscreants--call them the ``Muskrats,'' the ``DOGE Boys''--whatever you want. They went into Social Security with bad intent.
The cover that they went in under was they were going to look for waste, fraud, and abuse. But I think we know that the waste, fraud, and abuse veil in which the ``DOGE Boys'' wrapped themselves was a fake, because if you were actually concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, you wouldn't fire all the inspectors general.
You would actually try to recruit the inspectors general into your so-called government efficiency effort because what inspectors general do all day is actually look for waste, fraud, and abuse.
And you could go through their files and say: Here, what are the biggest areas that we should be paying attention to?
And you would work with the inspectors general. Instead, they were fired. That whole apparatus to actually seek waste, fraud, and abuse was set aside and in came the ``DOGE Boys,'' a little bit like in ``The Cat in the Hat''--``Thing One'' and ``Thing Two''--except there were 100 more of them running around doing considerable damage to government Agencies and government systems.
And to a very significant extent, doing damage to government Agencies and systems was the point. This was not the bug. This was the feature. They went in to try to wreck stuff, and it became particularly dangerous around Social Security because, first of all, there was a propaganda campaign to talk down Social Security, to pretend, falsely, that it was riddled with fraud. That took place, including right over on the House floor, when the President came to speak to Congress and repeatedly lied about Social Security fraud.
Then you had the infiltration of people who were from tech bro world and from private equity world, exactly taking over Social Security. Then you had people talking up benefit interruptions like that was an OK thing. Well, a benefit interruption would be an excuse to go in and take over Social Security to privatize it with tech bros and with private equity people.
I think the noise that we made about that headed it off, but there remains the lingering danger that when they got into Social Security's data systems, they exfiltrated data because data has enormous value, or they infiltrated bugs to do damage to the old systems of Social Security; or, worst of all, perhaps, they left back doors so that Elon Musk or other folks who were interested in getting access to massive amounts of Americans' data can find their way into Social Security's data systems secretly.
So this is a very simple measure. It asks for an audit of Social Security data systems to make sure that those things did not happen. That really ought to be a bipartisan, if not unanimous, expression of Senate intention. That is why I hoped we could generate unanimous consent for it today.
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