We knew it was coming, but we didn’t know it would be this quickly. America is less than two months into Trump’s second term, and the long-held fear that Republicans were coming for Social Security is being realized.

A report out of Washington state in the Seattle Times on Saturday told the story of Leonard “Ned” Johnson, an 82-year-old man in Seattle, who was determined to actually be dead by Elon Musk’s DOGE team. That was news to Johnson, who was interviewed by the Times for the piece.

Columnist Danny Westneat writes that Johnson’s wife got a notification in February from their bank (not the Social Security Administration) that the SSA had directly requested a return of benefits paid out after the supposed death of her husband Ned.

She thought she might have been getting scammed; seniors are the victims of so many scams these days that it was her immediate assumption, especially since her husband is very much alive. In fact, that request turned out to be a formality: The SSA simply took the funds out of the Johnsons’ bank account in the amount of $5,201.

Ned Johnson himself made a number of calls to the SSA, where he was “put on hold and then eventually disconnected,” he says, before he finally made an appointment which he was quickly told was rescheduled for next week. Fed up, he went to the ninth floor of the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood in the heart of downtown, walked up to the desk, and demanded to be seen.

From Westneat’s column:

After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”

Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.

“When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now,” he said.

You read that right — the money that Musk sucked out of their account was for what was being deemed an overpayment in January. So even after getting that back, the Johnsons are still out $10,402 right now from not having been paid for February or March as they were fighting to get Ned Johnson’s heartbeat recognized again by the agency.

Political consultant Matt Herdman posted a link to Westneat’s article with his own commentary:

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are stealing seniors’ hard earned benefits.

It’s already happening, and it’ll get worse if they go through with closing branch offices and cutting staff.https://t.co/Jt5iGfg1kS

— Matt Herdman (@MattHerdman) March 15, 2025

Closing offices is exactly what they’re already doing. In fact, the building that Johnson visited in downtown Seattle is one that’s on the chopping block, and if it had been closed before Ned Johnson made it down there to dispute his erroneously documented disposition, he may have had no recourse but to wait for the federal government to respond by mail.

That may never have happened at all.

But lest you think this is happening just to some poor octogenarian in liberal Seattle, there’s also the story of James McCaffrey, a retired 66-year-old in Oklahoma City. McCaffrey only learned that his Social Security had been choked off after finding out he was also about to lose his Medicare benefits.

McCaffrey was told he needed to pay $740, but after a number of calls and several hours spent on hold, he too was finally able to get through. He did get his SSA payment relatively quickly, but nothing by way of explanation to go with it, and definitely no apology. The SSA refused to even speak to the Oklahoma City NBC affiliate KFOR that first reported McCaffrey’s issue.

McCaffrey had a hunch that it all may have been because of the fact that he was born on an American military base in Germany, and he cited Musk’s erroneous belief that undocumented immigrants are receiving Social Security benefits.

KFOR reports:

He worries about people who may not have the time and resources he had to get to the bottom of what happened and get his benefits back.

“I’ve been a diligent Boy Scout type, I prepared,” he said. “But, no, I shouldn’t have to.”

He also worries about people who may not share the same savings or the same financial cushion [that] he had to fall back on. “And you interrupt that for seven days, two weeks or even longer, and they’re in bad trouble,” he said. “They could be out of the house. They could be out of food. I don’t know.”

All of this leads many to believe that the ultimate goal of Trump and Musk is to privatize Social Security, with Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse even laying out a five-point potential GOP “attack plan” to do just that.

In truth, there’s no telling what they plan to do. Everything so far in this term has been, to put it mildly, chaos. Just ask Ned Johnson and James McCaffrey.