Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a new video on Wednesday warning seniors that Donald Trump and Elon Musk “are taking a chainsaw to your Social Security.”
In the video, recorded as a Q&A-style explainer and posted on YouTube, Warren details the carnage that’s unfolding at the Social Security Administration (SSA) — thanks to Musk, the world’s richest man — and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has led efforts to fire thousands of workers at the SSA and shutter dozens of field offices, while attempting to implement highly disruptive changes at the agency.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are saying 78 percent of the people they want to fire are the folks working in those field offices to help people across this country when they have a problem,” Warren says in the video. “This is Donald Trump and Elon Musk working together as co-presidents to keep people from getting the Social Security benefits that they earned and they were promised by law.”
She says Musk and Trump are “trying a backdoor way” to slash Social Security, by making it “harder and harder for people to get the Social Security benefits that they earned, and that the law says that they have a right to.”
Musk — through his work with DOGE, his massive political spending for Trump, and his ownership of X, one of the world’s biggest social media megaphones — has ensured the American public knows how happy he is to be firing workers en masse, while threatening the stability of the nation’s already meager safety net. There was also Musk’s viral appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he waved around a chainsaw he pledged to use against “bureaucracy,” while stammering out weirder stuff like: “I am become meme.”
There’s now a growing peaceful protest movement targeting Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, which is separately facing a string of vandalism and even fiery attacks on its dealerships. After the car company reported a steep decline in quarterly earnings on Tuesday, Musk sought to blame it on “paid” and “very organized” protesters. (It’s an ironic accusation, given Musk has quite literally been paying voters to sign his petitions and giving out occasional $1 million checks to the luckiest of signers.)
The billionaire’s attacks on Social Security have become a particular source of simmering public anger. In addition to DOGE’s cuts and changes at the SSA, Musk has falsely characterized Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Now, when people lose access to their Social Security benefits, they are talking to reporters and blaming Musk.
Warren spotlights one such news story in her video Wednesday.
“Shoot, there’s a guy out in Seattle, Ned,” she says. “He finds out from checking about his Social Security: He receives a notice that he’s dead, and has to spend weeks going back and forth to the Social Security office just to say, ‘Not really. I’m still alive. Please don’t take back the money already in my account and please restart my Social Security payments.’”
Warren further contextualizes Ned’s story, explaining that “Social Security is a great agency,” but “mistakes do happen.” She continues: “When Elon Musk and Donald Trump come in with a chainsaw and they’re firing people and creating chaos, two things happen: The number of mistakes goes up and the people there to help you get them fixed goes down. And that’s bad for everyone who counts on Social Security.”
The explainer video from Warren follows her recent launch of a Social Security War Room, designed to both highlight and oppose Musk and DOGE’s cuts to the SSA and the threats they pose to seniors and disabled Americans who rely on the safety-net program. She also wrote an op-ed for Fox News calling out Trump and Musk’s attacks on the program.
The senator posted the new video on YouTube because seniors are more likely to use the video site than other major platforms.
According to Warren’s office, more than half of the views on her YouTube videos are coming from seniors — and that percentage has grown significantly since she and Senate Democrats launched their Social Security War Room.
At the end of the explainer video, Warren calls on viewers to share their own Social Security stories.
“One of the best things we can do is tell the stories,” she says. “Tell the stories about why Social Security matters. Tell the stories if you’re running into problems. Tell the stories about the people you know, maybe people who work at the Social Security Administration. This is about all of us getting into the fight to defend the Social Security that people have paid into all of their working lives.”
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