DOGE attacks on Social Security have left millions in the lurch
This article was originally published by Truthout on April 06, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
When Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was running roughshod over the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year, experts warned it could spell disaster for disabled, ill, and aging Americans who depend on its programs. A March 2026 report by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) offers insights into just how dire the situation has become.
“It seems that applications are taking longer and being denied more often and running into more errors in the process,” Matthew Borus, a professor at Binghamton University and one of the report’s authors, told Truthout.
The new report is based on interviews with more than 50 benefits specialists working at dozens of organizations nationwide that, together, assist about 8,000 claimants each year in obtaining and maintaining Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Those programs provide financial assistance to about 13.5 million older Americans and those with disabilities.
The programs have long been criticized for their inadequacy and steep barriers to access. Now, things are getting worse. “It just feels like you’re banging your head against the wall,” Brenna, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation against her organization or clients, told Truthout.
Brenna works as an attorney at a medical-legal partnership in Washington, D.C., an organization comparable to those interviewed for the DREDF and AAPD report. She helps vulnerable patients apply for SSI/SSDI.
“It seems that applications are taking longer and being denied more often and running into more errors in the process.”
“It becomes difficult to trust even what advice you can give
Israel, not Iran, is the imminent threat, says ex-counterterrorism official Joe Kent
This story originally appeared in Professor Glenn Diesen’s Substack on April 2, 2026. This shortened, edited version is shared here with permission.
Joe Kent is the former US Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned in March 2026 due to the war against Iran.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” Kent wrote in his letter of resignation to President Donald Trump. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
I recently spoke with Kent about the mistake of attacking Iran and the intrusive influence of Israel over US foreign policy.
[Editor’s Note: The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and readability from the original full conversation, available here]
Joe Kent: As I said in my resignation letter, I believe that Iran posed no imminent threat to us; Iran was not on the cusp of attacking us. Since President Trump came back into office—and people with basic access to the internet can verify this—we watched the Iranians observe a very calculated escalation ladder.
They stopped their proxies from attacking us as they were attacking us under the Biden administration. When Trump came back into office, they sat at the negotiating table with us up until the 12-Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer. Now, mind you, during the 12-Day War, they didn’t attack us at all. Once we attacked them and hit their nuclear sites, they responded by firing an equal amount of missiles as we dropped bombs at a very empty quadrant on a base in Qatar. And then they
‘A moral obscenity’: Trump budget pairs record military boost with billions in cuts to social programs
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on April 03, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
President Donald Trump’s White House released a budget proposal on Friday that pairs an unprecedented, debt-exploding $1.5 trillion in military spending with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, healthcare, climate, and housing programs.
Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress, includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.
Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing “woke programs” and “ending the Green New Scam”—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, renewable energy initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.
The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the already-depleted Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures.
One budget expert noted that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to “its lowest level in the modern era.”
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in response to Trump’s request that “to pay for his endless wars, he wants the biggest increase to military spending in 70 years.”
“How does he pay for it? Cuts to ‘education, health, housing, and more,’” Casar added. “Hell no.”
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement that “the Trump-Vought budget proposal is a moral obscenity,” referring to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed Pentagon spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare,
‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on April 02, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.
It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.
Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.
What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on
The US and Israel are making Gaza-style war the new normal
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide — besides its near-unprecedented slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era — is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we’re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they’re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.
Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than 10 percent of its population killed or injured, the New Yorker ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel’s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as “a dress rehearsal” for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.
What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when “our side” does it.
The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of US and Israeli officials incessantly invoking the Allies’ carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror — including by Curtis LeMay himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union —