“They talk about closing offices today, but they intend to end Social Security,” Democratic Congressman George Latimer of New York’s 16th Congressional District told a rally in White Plains on March 22.
“The people who work and labor to do this work, the members of unions, the law judges, all of those people that lose their jobs … they’re not part of Mar-a-Lago families. They’re out on the streets,” Latimer said. “This is not a matter of just a few people. This is systematically citizens and elected officials alike that are outraged by what’s happened and won’t accept it, won’t take it anymore.”
The rally was held at the Social Security field office at 297 Knollwood Road. That office is not one of the dozens listed by Trump campaign donor and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk and his associates for closure. However, the White Plains Hearing Office at a separate location where people appear before administrative law judges to pursue claims for Social Security benefits is scheduled to be closed on May 31, and the field office in Poughkeepsie is scheduled to be closed July 31.
Among the local elected officials and labor union leaders who were joined by people from throughout the Hudson Valley, Connecticut and the Bronx, were American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley, New York Alliance for Retired Americans President Barry Kaufman, New York State United Teachers At-Large Director Florence McCue and New York State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins.
Latimer said that under Trump the Social Security Administration (SAA) would rather send New Rochelle residents to New Haven, Connecticut, to try to gain the benefits to which they’re entitled than keep the White Plains Hearing Office open, even after Westchester County offered SSA space it could use in White Plains.
“It’s another way of saying ‘we prefer you don’t come to the hearing so we can cut your Social Security benefits and you don’t say a thing about it,'” Latimer said.
He emphasized that Social Security benefits are earned benefits.
“I first started contributing to Social Security in my first full-time job, January 1975,” Latimer said. “My mother and father were alive at the time that Franklin Roosevelt created the system and that commitment was for them. When they retired and they received Social Security I was contributing to a system that had benefits for me in time but in the meantime benefitted the people that the commitment was made to back in the 1930s. That system has worked. We’ve seen people who have come to you and me and said, ‘My Social Security check is all I have.'”
Weingarten said, “If you think this is unprecedented you are not crazy; it is. We have never in the United States in the modern age faced the kind of assault on people that has happened in the last 60-plus days.”
She said that the Trump Administration is loading up the playing field with so many things happening in the hope that people will not know where to look first and will grow tired.
“They want us to throw up our arms and say, ‘it’s too much, we can’t do anything.’ And they want us to be scared, because at the end of the day they want the people to be broke and broken,” Weingarten said. “You know what’s going on. Once they close an office so that people can’t get to the farther office, fewer and fewer people get the benefits. When they close an office it is to try to stop people from getting the benefits. When they change a phone system it is to stop people from getting the benefits.”
Kelley urged people at the rally to tell Elon Musk, who at the behest of President Trump has been making huge cuts to the federal government including at the Social Security Administration, that it is time for him to go.
“We are going to fight and win,” Kelley told the crowd. “We’ll stand up as family and tell you (Musk) when it’s time to go and that time is right now.”
