Outrage and exposure halts Trump's plans for Social Security service cuts

Congressman John Larson represents Hartford, Connecticut, and he's an old guy, and I say that with affection. He's in his mid to late 70s.
He's held this seat in Congress from Connecticut for more than 25 years. And he may look familiar to you.
He may not. He's not one of the more famous longtime members of Congress.
That said, if you have seen news about him recently in the past few weeks, it was for a not good reason. There was worrying news about him just about a month ago now.
He was speaking on the House floor and he froze up. He stopped speaking suddenly and awkwardly.
And then he seemed to really have a hard time starting up his speech again. He just froze.
It was clearly some kind of medical incident. It was definitely scary to see.
He did not pass out or anything. He went to the Capitol physician.
They ran some tests on him. His office says the conclusion was that they think basically he just had an adverse reaction to a new medication he had just started.
The good news is by later that day, he was back at his office. He was having regular meetings and was apparently okay.
But again, that health scare, that little point of alarm about Congressman John Larson, that was only just about a month ago. That said, here tonight, I'm happy to report that Congressman John Larson is definitely back and at full strength.
He has been eating his proverbial Wheaties. He appears to be very hydrated, very energized.
And may I suggest you get out of his way. Watch this.
Men and women on this committee are good people. They're honest and caring people.

And that's why I do not understand why you would relegate this committee to no longer being of significance and resort to saying you will do whatever Elon Musk and Donald

Trump tell you to do.

Where's the independence of the committee? Where's the legislature? We're an equal branch of government and you start off with a blather and yet look at the empty seats here. Where's Elon Musk? I'm sure he's a genius and is a very credible person because of the wealth he's accumulated.
But that does not put him above the law or the responsibility to come before this committee in this Congress. If he's so great, if these plans and all the fraud and abuse that he found are so eminent, why isn't he here explaining it? You know why.
Because he's out to privatize Social Security. He's been on television the last couple of days talking exactly about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,

and what he intends to do.

Privatize it.

The American people, some of them may have been born at night,

but not last night.

People are aware of this.

Every single one of your districts. Now you have someone coming in to privatize a system,

something you have longed to do going back to 1982. Because Elon Musk thinks that this is the best thing to do.
President Trump has called Social Security a scam. Elon Musk, as Mr.
Neal said, called it a Ponzi scheme. Ask that of the people in your district.
ask that Mr. Neal said called it a Ponzi scheme.
Ask that of the people in your district. Ask that, Mr.
Smith, of the more than 198,000 people in your district who rely on Social Security, and you won't even let the person who's planning to privatize it, who's telling the big lie in front of everyone, as bold as he possibly can, saying, this is what we're going to do. The Congress is in our back pocket.
We don't even have to come before them and testify, because we control the House, we control the Senate, and we control the presidency. And it's the tyranny of the executive.
It's why these revolutions were first adopted back in 1789, because the founding fathers knew that the executive branch does not have total authority over the legislature unless you have a willing party that says, no, we're going to do exactly what you tell us to do, Mr. Musk and Mr.
President. It doesn't matter to our constituents.
It doesn't matter how much money they are not going to receive. We're not even going to tell them the truth about what's going to happen to them.
They administer to over 70 million people in the nation's number one anti-poverty program for the elderly and children. Shame! Shame! Can't bring people in front of this body if he's right, if they're so good, if they're so just, why aren't they here telling the American people about it? They're not because you know the truth.
It's about privatization. I yield back.
That is veteran Democratic Congressman John Larson of Connecticut just ripping the bark off today about Social Security and what Republicans are really doing here. And indeed, as he was ripping that bark off in Congress, look at what the Washington Post was publishing just down the road.
Quote, Social Security facing pressure from Doge weighs big cuts to phone service. Agency considers ending phone program that is used by millions of elderly and disabled Americans.
One gobsmacked Social Security administration employee told the Post today that this radical change, this radical cut to services that they were moving on in the Trump administration, quote, would be the single largest service disruption in agency history ever. The single largest service disruption in Social Security ever.
Elon Musk's plan for Social Security was to, quote, end telephone service for claims processing, instead directing elderly and disabled people to the Internet and to in-person field offices. Quote, the agency's toll-free number is a mainstay for older customers who do not have online access or who have trouble navigating the internet.
About 40% of the claims that get made to Social Security are made over the phone, using this phone line that Elon Musk now wants to kill. 40% of the claims at the agency.
And naturally, this move to close the phone line and instead force old people and disabled people to go in-person to in-person field offices, naturally that comes as Donald Trump is firing 7,000 people who work at Social Security and closing tons of the aforementioned field offices. President Biden's Social Security administratorrator, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, ripped the bark off himself in his comments to the Post on this planned cut.
Quote, it would certainly appear, he said, that they're trying to break the capacity of the agency to serve its customers. And I suppose if they're trying to dismember the agency, liquidate its assets, sell pieces of it to their billionaire friends to run,

they have to discredit the agency in the eyes of its customers, and they do that by breaking its ability to serve.

The post says, quote,

The Doge-driven proposal to shift all claims processing online and to in-person offices has spurred pushback internally, employees said, and from outside experts, for the same reasons, that it would be likely to imperil millions of Americans' ability to receive their earned benefits. This is what they're doing.
This is what's going on. And so this is what happens today.
Congressman John Larson, who I just showed you, screams his freaking head off in Congress about it this morning. Screams at them.
And then at noon, the Washington Post publishes this horror movie script about their plan, indeed, to rip the guts out of social

security. Beyond firing everybody, which they're already doing, right? Beyond closing the field

offices, they're now making it so that old and disabled people literally cannot call anyone

to find out what's going on. But then you know what happened? They caved.
They decided not to do it. Don't let anybody tell you that pushback doesn't work.
Don't let anybody tell you that yelling and making a fuss doesn't matter, or that journalism doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't always matter, but honestly, it's the only thing that ever does.
Every single time you don't try, you lose. But sometimes when you try, you win.
It's the reason it's worth trying. And so now this is the headline at The Washington Post as of 7 o'clock tonight.
Quote, Social Security scraps far-reaching cuts to phone services after Post report. Quote, the Social Security Administration late Wednesday abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after the Washington Post reported that Elon Musk's U.S.
Doge service team was weighing the change. The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the Internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades, for decades, to access earned government benefits.
They were going to do this. We did good journalism exposing that this is what they were

planning on doing. And the resulting eruption scared them and made them not do it.
Pushback matters. Exposing what they are doing matters.
demanding Republicans fill the chair, show up, invite the witnesses in, let us question people. Demanding that Republicans actually answer for what Trump is doing.
Republicans actually explain themselves, try to justify what it is he's doing. It turns out those demands can have an effect, which is why you see people all over the country pushing everywhere to get answers out of these guys.
Central Georgia voters say their congressman does not hold town halls, so they plan to hold one without him. They plan to gather outside Congressman Austin Scott's Warner Robins office.
Hunter King spoke with organizers who say the congressman has not held a public town hall in more than a decade. Some central Georgia voters say they want to be heard by their congressman.
I can't imagine that he's going to be there. I could be really surprised, but we have a lot of questions for him and that we would like some answers.
The fact of the matter is they work for us and we should not have to scream and yell and jump up and down and hold town halls for them on their parking lot in order to get their attention. Organizers are planning on gathering here at Congressman Scott's office in Warner Robins just outside of the building and holding their own town hall.
This will all go down on Monday morning. Their concerns range from voting rights to potential cuts at Robbins Air Force Base.
The two groups planning the town hall event are organized via Facebook and comprised of around 200 people. They hope other people will also join them too.
Reporting in Warner Robbins, Hunter King 13 WMAZ News. That's Republican Congressman Austin Scott of Georgia, who apparently has not held an in-person town hall in more than a decade.
He's now refusing his constituents' request that he hold one. And so they're going to be holding one themselves in the parking lot of his district office on Monday, hoping that he shows up.
That's in central Georgia. As Republican members of Congress continue to refuse to meet with their constituents, you are seeing local news like that package and like this account in Green Bay, Wisconsin today, where Republican Congressman Tony Wheat is being criticized by his constituents for refusing to meet in person and for only taking what the constituents described as pro-Republican carefully screened calls on a recent teletown hall that he held because he didn't want to hold one in person.
Same thing unfolding in the local press in Colorado with Republican Congressman Jeff Hurd. Tonight, Republican Congressman Jeff Hurd is defending his decision to hold a town hall by telephone instead of taking questions in person from the Coloradans he represents.

This comes days after NBC News reported that House Republican leaders are urging the members to stop having in-person town halls.

As appreciative as we are of a teleconference and as efficient as that can be for you,

is it possible to have schedules of times when you're going to hold in-person town halls to have a little bit more personable interaction? I think it's important for me to see folks face-to-face. What I would say is I want to make sure that it's a productive dialogue.
It's important for me to see folks face-to-face. Not that important.
Not so important that I'm actually going to do it. Last night, we talked about this newly emerging dynamic where Democrats are holding town halls for the constituents of Republican members of Congress who won't.
Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan was here on this show last night to talk about holding an in-person town hall in Wisconsin near the district of Republican Congressman Derek Van Orden, who apparently won't meet with people in his district in person. But hey, what do you know? After Mark Pocan did that this weekend, met with Congressman Derek Van Orden's constituents this past weekend, and then after he got a ton of local press coverage for having done that, after he was here last night to talk about having done that, wouldn't you know, hey, today, Republican Congressman Derek Van Orden did decide to hastily get on Facebook Live and call that a town hall today in the middle of the workday.

Maybe because it seemed to have been organized on quite short notice, it did not go great.

I'll show you what I mean. See if you can follow his logic here.
When the Doge group got together and they went with the different agencies and they said that they need to target, they need to try to target a certain amount of folks for employment, that was handed over to the agency. So all the people that you've heard about being released from different agencies, that was on the agency itself.
It had nothing to do with DOGE. So let's remember that.
And there's also a way to seek redress. If you think that there's somebody out there that should not have been terminated for employment, get a hold of the DOGE folks directly or through us, and we'll help try to rectify that.

So first of all, all these firings of people who have federal government jobs, that has nothing to do with Doge. It totally wasn't them.
Also, there's a system that if you think somebody's been fired who shouldn't have been, and the system is that you should call Doge. You should get a hold of the Doge folks directly, he says.
Go ahead. Or through us.
Congressman Van Orden says he can help you get in touch with the Doge folks directly because that's the redress system in case anybody has been fired from the federal government who shouldn't be. That's the system.
Congressman Derek Van Orden, the Wisconsin Republican whose constituents are right now only getting in-person meetings with a congressman when a nearby Democratic congressman decides to host them. But that was him today on Facebook Live.
We also recently covered California Congressman Kevin Kiley, who is also refusing to meet in person with his constituents after a group of his constituents protested at his office several days ago and announced that the local Indivisible group would hold their own town hall for him, whether or not he was going to show up and be there. Today, hey, what do you know? Congressman Kiley's office announced that he will do an online-only town hall on Monday.
We're expecting former Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski to hold a town hall in the New Jersey Congressional District. That's represented by Republican Tom Kane.
That'll be tomorrow night. Tom Malinowski is doing that because Cain is apparently too afraid to meet with his constituents in New Jersey.

So a Democratic former congressman will do it for him instead. We're expecting the same this weekend, Sunday, from California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who says he's going to do three town halls in one day in three different Republican districts.
Republican districts represented by California Republican Congressman David Valdeo, Young Kim, and Ken Calvert. These three Republican members of Congress from California will not meet with their own constituents right now, and so Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna will travel to each of those Republican districts and hold town halls for them.
The mass firings that we talked about here on the show last night at the U.S. Department of Education, they went ahead today.
Last night and today, they fired 1,300 people who work at the U.S. Department of Education.
They've now removed almost half of the staff from that agency, and they say they intend to fully shut down the U.S. Department of Education.
This is a wildly unpopular thing to do. Two-thirds of Americans say they do not want the U.S.
Department of Education to be shut down. But Trump and Republicans are going ahead with it anyway, apparently.
Huh, I wonder why they don't want to do town halls. I wonder why they don't want to answer questions about what they're doing.
Also today, they are firing another 1,000 people who work at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. This is the agency that gives us hurricane warnings, tornado warnings, flood warnings, tsunami warnings.
They warn about avalanches. They provide navigation information to ships.
They provide crucial, crucial information to the commercial fishing industry. This is who monitors geomagnetic storms that can affect the electrical grid from space.
This is the agency from which we get the weather forecast. With this new round of a thousand more people being fired from NOAA, Trump will have fired basically one out of every four people who works at that whole agency.
Boy, that sounds like a popular thing, right? Sure, if there's one thing Americans have surely felt is wasteful, it's having a weather forecast or a tornado warning when one's coming. What a luxury.
That's so liberal. That's so liberal.
Please. Tornado warnings.
Snowflakes. This week, they have emptied out the whole National Security Division at the U.S.
Department of Justice. Today, we learned they have also emptied out and are maybe just ending the Public Integrity Unit at the Department of Justice, which is the unit that prosecutes public corruption.
They're just getting rid of the prosecution of public corruption. Is this a popular thing? This and, you know, also what they're doing to the economy? A new poll out today from CNN shows Donald Trump underwater by nine points overall in terms of his approval rating.
He's only 50 days into his first to this term. A big majority of the country, 56 percent, disapproves of Donald Trump's handling of the economy.
56% disapproval. That is the worst number he has ever had on that issue.
Do you approve of the way Donald Trump is handling the economy? No. 56% say no.
Do you approve of Donald Trump's handling of health care? No. 56% of Americans say no.
Do you approve of Donald Trump's handling of foreign affairs? No. 58% of Americans say no.
Do you approve of Donald Trump's handling of tariffs? Tariffs, his signature issue. How's he doing on that? The answer is no.
61% of Americans say they do not approve of Donald Trump on his handling of that signature issue, the thing he most wants to be known for. 61% say no.
Do you like J.D. Vance, the vice president of the United States? No.
11 points underwater. Do you like Elon Musk? No.
God, no. Elon Musk is 18 points underwater.
That's so far underwater, it's starting to get hot because you're getting close to the center of the earth. I mean, the one question they got a really big yes for when it

comes to Donald Trump is this one from the CNN poll. Quote, overall, would you describe the

views and policies of Donald Trump as too extreme? On that one, yes. Yes, a big yes.
59% of the country says yes, Donald Trump is too extreme. That is an 18-point gap over the number of people who say, oh no, Trump's mainstream.
He's fine. And that actually matches another new poll that's out today from Reuters, Ipsos.
A large majority of the public saying that Trump's handling of the economy is, quote, too erratic. 57% of Americans say his handling of the economy is erratic.
The proportion of people who say that Trump's economic policies will raise prices and make the cost of living more expensive is 70%. Now, that's not people who think generically that they think costs and prices are going to go up for some reason.
70% of Americans say Donald Trump personally is making costs and prices go up on purpose because of what he's doing with his economic policies or lack thereof.

So there's a lot going on. The American people are deeply annoyed about much of it, and they are pushing back in all sorts of ornery and increasingly creative ways.
I see you, Congressman Larson. We see you.
But for all the unpopular things that Trump is doing,

there is one thing you might not have heard about

that he is doing specifically in the Deep South.

And it is almost unfathomable.

It's just jaw-dropping.

And we here at MSNBC have sent one of our best there

to see it up close to bring you that story. And we've got that for you here next.
You're going to want to see this. Stay with us.
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This is it coming to fruition. Maine Justice.
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This is an elementary school. It's called the Fifth Ward Elementary School in Reserve, Louisiana.
Fifth Ward Elementary was a predominantly black elementary school in this part of Louisiana. I say was because last year the local school board voted to shut down that elementary school at the end of this school year.
They voted to shut it down because that elementary school, look what it's right next to. It sits about a quarter mile away from a big petrochemical plant, one that the federal government said was putting people in the surrounding community at an unacceptable risk of cancer.
There's an 80-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that has earned the terrible nickname Cancer Alley.

It's earned that name because of more than 200 petrochemical facilities along that stretch of river,

where the EPA has repeatedly found that residents are exposed to more than 10 times the level of health risk from hazardous air pollutants than people living elsewhere in the state. That's according to a report from Human Rights Watch.
When Joe Biden was president, the Justice Department and the EPA decided they were going to take some action there. The Biden-era Justice Department and the EPA brought a landmark lawsuit against that big petrochemical plant, that one that's just down the road from that elementary school.
It's called the Denka Performance Elastomer Plant. They make neoprene.
In its lawsuit, the Biden administration alleged that the Denka facility was releasing unsafe levels of a toxic carcinogenic chemical called chloroprene into the air. They said in the lawsuit, quote, the increased cancer risk that the communities near the facility are currently being exposed to because of Denka's chloroprene emissions presents an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health and welfare.
In the aggregate, the thousands of people breathing this air are incurring a significantly higher cancer risk than would be typically allowed. They are being exposed to a much greater cancer risk from Denka's air pollution than the majority of U.S.
residents face. That action was taken under the last president, Joe Biden.
Now, new president, radically different story. Donald Trump's Justice Department has just announced that they are dropping the lawsuit against that chemical plant, and they say they are dropping it because DEI.
Huh? Seriously, they said that dropping this case, quote, fulfills President Trump's day one executive order, ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing. Because it's mostly black people who live nearby? Is that what you're saying? My colleague Alex Wagner traveled to Southeast Louisiana this week to see the plant, to meet the people who live nearby.
I should say before I show you this next part that it is impossible for anyone to know what exactly caused any particular illness in this community, but what you're about to see reflects how things feel in the community of that plant. You'll also hear references to another chemical company, DuPont.
That's because this facility used to be owned by DuPont. How many of you feel like you know people either in your family or your circle of friends who are suffering adverse health effects because of the proximity of this plant? So everybody.
My dad and I have experienced several generations of illnesses. My mother died of breast cancer.
My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my grandmother died of breast cancer. And my fraternal grandmother died of pulmonary disease, and so on and so on, other family members, ovarian cancer.
So we are directly affected in this community. I've also had genetic testing for breast cancer, my mother, my sister, and myself, and all of them came back negative.
Wow, so it's not a DNA. It's not a DNA.
Correct. It's environmental.
Wow. I have several family members that have died and passed away of cancer.
Some of them are still living. One of my family members, she's on the list for heart transplant, two of them.
One family member on the West Bank of the River from Lucy in Edgard, he just had his lungs, he had a lung transplant about a year ago. My mother, she passed away.
A lot of people are going to dialysis centers. A lot of people have brain cancer.
It's been high. Prostate cancer is high throughout the parish, not just on the west bank of the river.
Chloroprene is in the whole parish. I grew up on East 30th Street.
I've lost everyone in my family because of it. And I'm the oldest living relative on my father's side at the age of 67 due to DuPont Denka.
Wow. You've lost everyone on your family.
Everybody. I remember growing up on East 30th Street.
And you remember the days we could sleep with our windows open? Well, a lot of mornings, we woke up with this awful smell in the house. We didn't know what it was.
Oh, it was just a release from DuPont. We didn't know what chemical we were breathing while we were sleeping.

It was in the bed.

It was in your closet, in the clothes in the closet.

My mom couldn't get it out the house if she aired the house out all day long.

We smelled that all day long.

We went to school with it on our uniforms.

Is it all cancers?

Cancers.

Everyone?

Yes.

MSNBC has reached out to Denka for comment. We've not heard back.
Denka did stay in a statement published by the Washington Post that the dismissal of this lawsuit represents a long overdue and appropriate end to a case lacking scientific and legal merit from the start. The company said it, quote, remains committed to reducing chloroprene emissions at the plant.
But for members of that community, that kind of promise, as you might imagine, just isn't nearly enough. The five parish area that's called Cancer Alley, it is now 92% black.
Wow. And it's got about 250 petrochemical plants in that one little 80-mile area of that river, the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
That's called Cancer Island. What do you think is going to happen under Trump with the Denka plant and all these other, you know, industrial plants in your neighborhood?

Well, I don't know. That's going to depend largely on the people here.
Yeah. If we let them have their way, they will kill us all.
We will die here. We are now trying to regroup so we can find out exactly how we have to deal with this situation.
What is obvious to us is the destruction. The government has now officially abandoned us, has officially thrown us to the wolves.
That's what they've done. Joining us now is Alex Wagner.
Alex, this is incredible reporting, and this is an amazing trip. Thanks for being here to talk about it.
Thank you for airing it, Rachel. I think so much of what Trump is doing right now, they're betting on the abstract, right? They're betting that shutting down the Environmental Justice Department of the EPA doesn't alarm people.
We don't think about the human cost of all that. And I've covered a lot of stories in the field, Rachel.
This was one of the hardest I've ever borne witness to. I mean, this is a community of people who have born undue.

They have born. stories in the field, Rachel.
This was one of the hardest I've ever borne witness to. I mean, this is a community of people who have borne undue, they have borne tragedy like I think almost no one else.
A lot of these people, you know, one of the men I talked to, he grew up on a former plantation. These are the children of sharecroppers and those sharecroppers were the children of slaves.
A lot of these plants, Rachel, most of them, in fact, in the area are on the grounds of former plantations. There's nowhere else in Louisiana that has that stretch of land.
And it's been cleared to make way for plants that the Biden administration believed was poisoning the community. And I just for a moment thought deeply about not the irony, but the symmetry of what were, you know,

former institutions that visited trauma upon communities of color and these plants that are

now reportedly, and again, according to the EPA under Joe Biden, visiting a different kind of

trauma to the current population of reserve Louisiana. I want to play a little bit of sound

where we talked about that, if I could, that legacy of slavery to petrochemical industries. I'm so struck by the fact that the Denka DuPont plant is on the grounds of a former plantation.
What does that tell you as people of color in this country? We meant nothing then and we mean nothing now. I think Trump is doing exactly what Trump said he was going to do.
And I don't think we have enough money here for him to care about what's going on with us. He cares about the wealthy people, the people that paid—I mean, the people that were elected to these positions that he put in place.
And if there was some way that we could make money off environmental justice for him, he would prioritize it. They do not care.
It's about what they can make money off of. And they can't make money off of this.
And DEI has nothing to do with the facts and the fact that this company, Dinka, was actually breaking the law. They are guilty of breaking the Clean Air Act.
They put us in jeopardy. We are burying family members every week.
People are suffering 20 and 30 years before they pass. That's real.
That's real. We live a life every day wondering what's going to happen at our next doctor's visit.
Alex, can I just ask you, Alex, that when you're talking to these folks, did they see this coming from Trump? Obviously, this lawsuit was filed. The plant was on a very different trajectory under Joe Biden with that previous DOJ and EPA case.
Did they see this coming? Did they have time to prepare for it? It seems like they're starting to talk to you about what they're going to try to do to organize in response. Yeah, I will say, I mean, they have been grappling with this for decades.
And they have been going to local and state officials and federal officials, even under Obama and early Biden. They felt like their cries weren't being heard, that there was not a level of concern that matched the threat they were facing.
And so when Michael Regan, who is the EPA head under Biden, who is also black, came down and met with Robert Taylor, the older gentleman that you saw in that earlier clip, and said, we're going to do something about this, I think they reluctantly believed him, right? They finally felt like, OK, we've reached a threshold at which they can't ignore this anymore. At the same time, you know, I think you can talk to many people of color in this country who don't take any advancement for granted.
And so I don't think there was, and from the conversations I had, a ton of surprise that Trump was going to reverse it. But at the same time, Rachel, there is a tenacity and a resilience in this community.
I mean, Robert Taylor, the man that we just talked about, is 84 years old. He picked me up in his red pickup truck and he drove me all around the town.
The police came

after us at one point. They are unafraid of the consequences here because they got nothing to

lose. They admit it on this panel.
They're like, most of us won't live to see this,

the conclusion of all of this. But they're fighting for the next generation and they're

not giving up. Wow.
Incredibly important reporting, amazing, and absolutely horrifying story. Alex Wagner, God bless you, my friend.
I really appreciate you doing this. God bless you for doing this, Rachel.
And bringing it here. Yeah.
Thank you. All right.
Thanks, Alex. We'll be right back.
It's President Trump's first 100 days, and MSNBC's Alex Wagner will be covering it all from the front lines. What issue matters to you the most? Join her as she travels the country to talk to the people at the center of the president's policies and promises.
Do you think now that he's pardoned everybody, he can count on this group of people again? Search for Trumpland with Alex Wagner wherever you're listening and follow. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts to listen ad-free.
Sir David Frost gave us a front row seat to history. What I'm interested in is conversation, not an interrogation.
He was the person to be interviewed by. There's a great wave of revolution.
And David Frost was right at the front of all of that. MSNBC Films presents a six-part documentary series, David Frost vs.
on the next episode. Muhammad Ali! You think I'm gonna get on this TV show and deny what I believe? Sunday at 9 p.m.
Eastern on MSNBC. All right, tonight we are awaiting a ruling from a federal judge that could result in thousands of federal workers who have just been fired getting their jobs back, at least temporarily.
NBC News reports that after a hearing today in Maryland, the judge appears likely to reinstate those workers who were fired by the Trump administration, and he says that he would issue a ruling promptly. Well, if the judge rules in that direction, this would be just the latest in a nearly unbroken losing streak in court when it comes to the many attempts by Donald Trump and his top campaign donor, Elon Musk, to fire huge swaths of federal workers indiscriminately.
These efforts to gut the federal government have been centered at a small government agency called the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. It's supposedly like the HR office for the federal government.
At 12.01 p.m., one minute afternoon on Inauguration Day, literally within seconds of Donald Trump officially becoming president again, Elon Musk's Doge team were at OPM getting themselves into that agency's computer systems, which contains the personal data of millions of federal employees. They locked everybody else out of that computer system.
They installed sofa beds so they could be there all the time. And it sounds like they

were just peachy to have around. Three OPM officials told the Washington Post that, quote, morale plummeted as Doge agents clashed with senior career personnel.
One official recalled a recent meeting in which a young Doge team member began screaming at senior developers and calling them, quote, idiots.

Elon Musk and his friendly band took over OPM first, apparently because they wanted to use it for their campaign to fire as much of the federal workforce as they possibly could. OPM was the entity that sent mass emails to federal workers urging them all to quit, essentially threatening them all that they needed to quit.
That was some of the email that said they should find higher productivity jobs rather than their low productivity jobs in the public sector. OPM ordered agencies to start firing people, but some workers were told they received termination notices in error.
So, okay, no, no, no, come back. The same employees in some cases were all later told, no, sorry, we did mean it.
You actually are fired. Those firings were quickly found to be likely against the law.
This was the actual quote from the federal judge looking at that case, quote, OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to fire employees at other government agencies. After that brushback from a federal judge, OPM then tried to say, actually, it had never ordered any of these firings.
They were just, you know, offering their suggestions. Famously, OPM also sent out Elon Musk's demand that every single federal employee

had to send him an email listing five things they had done the past week or they would be fired.

After a couple days of confusion and panic, OPM then said,

oh, of course, we meant for that email to be voluntary.

And then they said, actually,

no, it's not voluntary. Justifying your job to Elon Musk is mandatory.
Yeah. So luckily,

there's real steady leadership and communication at the Office of Personnel Management, right?

No questions at all about who's running the ship there and how good they are,

making sure the American government workforce is only purely high productivity folks.

But we have some questions about that.

We have some questions about that specifically at that office.

And we've got those questions for you here next.

Hold that thought.

That was the president's mandate. This directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished.
But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat. And that's not to say that a lot of the folks, you know, it's a humanitarian thing to a lot of the folks that are there.
You know, they're out of a job. But we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people, the good people.
Kept all of the right people. We kept all the good people.
So the people who got the gun, they weren't right. They weren't good.
Last night, after firing almost half the people who

work at the education department, education secretary Linda McMahon went on Fox News to assure, don't worry, we kept all the good people, all the right people. Today, Donald Trump said the thousands of workers being fired did no work at all.
They never showed up to work. Quote, we are keeping the best people.
Are you? Is it only the best people that you're keeping? I mean, they're firing thousands, tens of thousands. Looks like they want it to end up being hundreds of thousands of people from the federal government.
But they say it's no harm done because it's only the bad people who they're firing. All the people they're firing are

bad or poor performers or they're lazy or they don't really exist or they don't show up or they have second jobs or they're all bad. All of them.
They only want the good people like them, the ones that came in with them. Those are the only people they want left in the government.
How's that going? Headline, Trump official tasked with defending

doge cuts posted fashion influencer videos from her office. This is real.
This is an amazing story reported out today by our friends at CNN. Quote, as the Office of Personal Management oversaw the layoffs of thousands of federal workers and pressed others to justify their positions, the agency's chief spokesperson repeatedly used her office for a side hustle, aspiring Instagram fashion influencer.
In at least a dozen videos filmed in her Office of Personnel Management office in the federal government, she modeled her outfit choices for the day while directing followers from her Instagram

account to a website that could earn her commissions on clothing sales. On the same day, for example, that OPM sent a government-wide memo pressing federal officials to swiftly terminate poor-performing employees, she posted a video blowing a kiss to the camera with the caption, Work Look, and the hashtag DC Influencer.
Her Instagram account linked to a site where viewers could buy the $475 purple skirt she wore in that video. On the day 20 people on her communications team lost their jobs with the federal government, she posted this video, captioned, a moment for mixed patterns.
When the Elon Musk justify your job with five things email went out, she described it as, quote, a commitment to an efficient and accountable federal workforce. The same week, she posted on Instagram, quote, the businesswoman special.
One former OPM communications staffer told CNN, quote, I saw it and I was like, are you kidding me? That's my office. The new Trump administration spokeswoman deleted her Instagram account minutes after CNN asked about it.
She tells the New York Times today that she never made any money from the account.

But that's how it's going now at the Office of Personnel Management under Donald Trump.

Honestly, kudos to CNN for this story.

It's amazing.

And again, tonight we are waiting on a court ruling that may find that all of these thousands of firings orchestrated largely by OPM were illegal or hashtag illegal. Watch this space.

All right, that's going to do it for me for now. See you again tomorrow and every night this week

at 9 p.m. Eastern.