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Difficulty making payments is a form of sabotage

I didn't see anything related to making payments, only customer support. So signing up for benefits, changing deposit accounts, etc. Those things can largely be resolved through the SSA's self-service portal, so there's a good chance states and charities will step up to fill in the gap.

But it's still not clear what exactly the changes are. They claim to be targeting "fraud and waste," but I haven't seen a breakdown of the tangible changes other than "some offices were closed." I generally don't take Musk at his word, and haven't for years (or even ever), so I'm looking for some credible journalism to go over it in detail. If it was a serious issue, we'd see a ton of highly credible news agencies making a big deal out of it. Given that we don't, either the investigation is on-going (this was pretty recent) or it's not an issue.

So I guess we'll have to wait and see what the impact is. So far, it doesn't seem like there have been any major impacts yet, other than some more wait times for getting an in-person appointment (which isn't necessary at all to sign up for benefits).

“Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk told the Fox Business Network. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”

Right, and that requires legislative action which Trump has repeatedly said he's not going to consider, because that's political suicide.

"Musk said Monday that federal entitlements are “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.”

That's not how any of this works, and Musk knows it. To get SS, you need to have a Social Security number, which you can't get on many legal visas, not to mention entering illegally. You also need proof of 40 quarters of paying into Social Security, meaning you need to have legally paid taxes for 10 years (non-consecutively). Voting is also constitutionally limited to citizens, not even permanent residents, so there's absolutely no basis for that either.

In short, 100% of that statement is wrong. The best explanation for him making it is to justify additional ID checks on the Social Security system, which is honestly probably a good thing due to how much Social Security numbers get abused. So it might end up being a net positive long term, though it'll cause some issues in the short term as people navigate any changes that get made (esp. poor and tech illiterate people who may not have the resources to navigate it).

I want to make it extremely clear that I'm not a fan of Trump, Musk, or DOGE, I just happen to like some of the side-effects of broken clocks being right twice/day (these changes should mostly go through Congressional approval, not EO).