Malevolence -- Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein and Meryl Kornfield at WP:
Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.
But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.
...
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said.
Incompetence -- Naftali Bendavid at WP:
President Donald Trump regained the White House in large part by trumpeting his ability to get things done, accusing his opponents of ineptitude and senility and promising that on Day 1 he would restore basic competence to government.
And, he said, it wouldn’t even be hard.
But 2½ months in, agencies such as the Social Security Administration have struggled to provide basic services. Trump’s team issues edicts, then reverses them. A leaked Signal chat suggests top security officials were unfamiliar with the basics of protecting military secrets.
Crucial government workers have been fired, then rehired. A much-ballyhooed immigration detention center at Guantánamo Bay has faced logistical problems. Trump’s team told laid-off workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to contact a particular individual if they felt they were being discriminated against; she turned out to be dead.
These and other missteps are now being compounded in dramatic fashion by a roiling stock market and bond sell-off prompted by Trump’s tariff policies, raising fears of a collapsing economy. Trump’s formula for calculating the tariffs has been widely panned by economists. And on Wednesday, he paused many of the levies just hours after they took effect, even while leaving a 10 percent blanket tariff in place and further hiking duties on imports from China.
On Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a glitch in the system that is used to exempt some freight from tariffs, CNBC reported, adding to the confusion over the chain of abrupt policy shifts.
Americans have long harshly judged leaders who seem, fairly or unfairly, to lack competence, whether it was President Joe Biden’s troubled withdrawal from Afghanistan, President George W. Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina or President Barack Obama’s introduction of a vaunted health-care website that immediately crashed.
