Larson Opening Statement at Joint Social Security and Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Hearing on Supporting Opportunity for Individuals with Disabilities

(As prepared for delivery)

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses for taking the time to come here today.

Republicans are dismantling Social Security from within, all while they have gathered us here today to claim that they care about our seniors and people with disabilities.

Here is how they are doing it.

They are cutting 7,000 staff while the agency deals with a customer service crisis, a record number of beneficiaries, and 10,000 additional baby boomers retiring a day.

They are gutting the phone service, making people talk to AI chatbots that cannot help them.

They are ripping half of seniors’ and disabled Americans checks out of their hands to recover no-fault overpayments.

They have closed regional offices, threatened to close field offices, and are mining the American people’s Social Security data.

Why are they doing this? They want to break your Social Security so they can privatize the system.

They admit it themselves! Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, called the Republican Budget a backdoor to privatize Social Security.

Really, we should be having a hearing on the fact that Social Security benefits have not been enhanced in more than 50 years.

That is ridiculous! Congress must act.

Yet here we are.

Just two weeks ago, a whistleblower, Charles Borges, came forward and revealed ‘DOGE’ employees copied and uploaded the private information of 300 million Americans onto a vulnerable cloud, putting their data at risk.

They took your private data - your name, your Social Security numbers, your addresses - from the agency’s secure NUMIDENT system and put it somewhere we do not know.

The agency has no oversight over where this data has been put and who has access to it.

We demand a hearing.

I wish ‘DOGE’ was here today, so they can explain to the American people why they are dismantling the Social Security Administration and cutting services.

I wish they were here so we could ask them what they are doing with the American people’s data!

Instead, two weeks have gone by since the whistleblower report. Every American’s Social Security data is potentially at risk, and all we hear are crickets from the Republican majority.

Well, not only crickets.

They are actively trying to silence Democrats’ efforts to expose what this Administration is doing.

They killed our Resolutions of Inquiry to bring Trump officials before us and even changed House rules so they would not have to vote on the issue ever again.

They do not want the truth out because they know exactly what is going on. 

And they will not stand up for their constituents if Donald Trump tells them to sit down and shut up.

They want to break this agency, so they can privatize and sell off your hard-earned benefits to the same people on Wall Street who ran the economy into the ground in 2008.

Republicans want to use this hearing to tell the American people that they care about people with disabilities, that they want to help them get back to work.

I will let the people decide. Republicans passed a bill to rip away 15 million Americans’ health care.

And they have not said a word while this administration targets the agency that delivers the benefits people with disabilities rely on just to make ends meet.

Some of the American people may have been born at night but not last night, and they deserve real action from Congress, not these games.

So, I am asking you today, Mr. Chairman. Will you commit to bringing ‘DOGE’ before us and holding a hearing on this whistleblower report?

Thank you. I yield back.