Letter to the Editor: Is this what you want?
Published 5:12 am Tuesday, March 25, 2025
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Nobody elected or asked Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to our democracy. But for the last two months, the billionaire has been wrecking federal agencies and firing public servants by the tens of thousands. He says he’s rooting out waste and fraud. But what he and his DOGE gang have done is hack your social security numbers, medical records, tax information, bank account information, work history, and much else and downloaded it onto their private servers. The biggest national security breach in history.
Every agency and institution is under attack. A former SSA head says Musk’s extreme cuts to Social Security which Musk calls “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” could lead to “system collapse” within the next 30-90 days. Massive firings of FAA air traffic controllers will make air travel less safe. Cuts to NOAA will cripple its ability to warn people of tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, and cuts in FEMA will make it harder for communities to then recover from these disasters. The loss of 83,000 employees of the Veterans Administration will make it harder for veterans to get health care. Privatizing the post office will hurt rural communities. Musk doesn’t care. His word for Americans who use federal services is “parasite.”
Why would someone want to destroy agencies and fire public servants, putting American lives at risk? The short answer is there’s money to be made in breaking the government, then saying it’s broken, then “fixing” it by privatizing it. And it makes even more sense when we understand that Musk’s plan is to replace federal workers with AI. To him, people are an inefficiency, so to make government more efficient you get rid of people.
But Musk’s real aim is not to make our government more efficient. His aim is to make himself and his fellow billionaires richer and more powerful.
Our parents and grandparents fought and died to defend our democracy and now we must do our part in standing up, speaking out, calling our representatives, demanding that they too take a stand against this ongoing destruction of our democracy. Much is lost already. We must do what we can to save the rest.
Joy Cunningham
Blackstone