— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) December 22, 2025 “The three day hold for telephone retirement claims has reduced field offices' ability to process these claims timely by 25 percent. The result is fewer retirement claims processed overall, at a time when our agency is seeing record high new retirement claims,” a Social Security deputy commissioner wrote in the above unearthed document. “The three day hold for telephone claims has produced no appreciable results in terms of actual fraud.” Additionally, the New York Times has a tour de force today proving how DOGE did not eliminate any waste and saw the federal government actually spend more money. We’ll go into some details, but your main takeaway here should be that the graph below depicts real savings in bluish-gray, and those savings that appear in orange were all just made-up horseshit. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. — Annie Karni (@anniekarni) December 23, 2025 “The group did not do what Mr Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October,” the Times writes. “ On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. How is that possible?” Well gang, the main way that is possible is that DOGE simply published flat-out lies on their DOGE “Wall of Receipts.” “In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect,” the Times reports. They point out that DOGE listed two “canceled” $8 billion Department of Defense contracts, though both contracts are still very much alive and currently being paid. “Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined,” the Times points out. “Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate.” The Times found many other examples of double-counting eliminated costs, counting Biden-era cuts as if they had happened under Trump, and complete falsehoods presented as budget cuts that had actually happened, but never really did. Your reminder that Elon Musk’s DOGE gutted the agency in charge of investigating and regulating vehicle safety. https://t.co/lD78HPhxLo