DOGE private equity goons (Musk & Bisignano's friends) improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud claims

[CousinIT]

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5352470/doge-musk-social-security-voting

One of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest DOGE isn't supposed to have.

The staffer, Antonio Gracias, made the claims as part of larger misleading statements about the SSA's enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE program, which streamlines the process for granting Social Security cards to certain categories of eligible immigrants.

Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on Fox and Friends that "5-plus million" noncitizens who "came to the country as illegals" received Social Security numbers "through an automatic system" and proceeded to "get into our benefit systems."

"And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted," Gracias said.

State-level audits of voter data have found few examples of noncitizens voting, which is a federal crime punishable with prison and deportation.

Later that week, Gracias furthered his claims on a podcast. "I think this was a move to import voters," he said, echoing a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and Musk elevated during the 2024 campaign season and Republican lawmakers are invoking to push for stricter voting policies.

While Musk and some Republican lawmakers are now amplifying Gracias' claims online, >>>>> experts familiar with Social Security say Gracias is mischaracterizing the program, and voter registration experts say they doubt the accuracy of his claims about noncitizens voting.

. . .

Gracias, the billionaire chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Valor Equity Partners, is one of 10 DOGE staffers embedded in the Social Security Administration.

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MY NOTE: Gracias is one of several "private equity" goons who are fishing around in the Social Security Administration, looking for ways to destroy and privatize it.

He is a buddy of Elon Musk and Frank Bisignano. Bisignano is also a private equity billionaire who runs an outfit called "FinServ." FinServ is a financial services company whose current and former employees give it horrible ratings on Glassdoor, a site where job seekers look to find out if companies they might want to work for are good employers. FinServ is NOT. According to its own current and/or former employees, it's a hellhole.

Bisignano (and other private equity billionaires) make their money by GUTTING companies, reducing employees to just skeleton staff, and closing offices all over the country/world. They are ruthless, machete-wielding sociopaths.

Their job in SSA is to reduce it to rubble, claim it "doesn't work" (it has worked very well for 90 years), and then privatize it.

[CousinIT]

1. Related...As DOGE Mauls Social Security, Profit-Hungry Private Equity Is Swooping In

https://truthout.org/articles/as-doge-mauls-social-security-profit-hungry-private-equity-is-swooping-in/

The Social Security Administration (SSA), an irreplaceable lifeline for 73 million people, is only the latest venerable U.S. institution to be hit with a campaign of media falsehoods and startling internal sabotage efforts, all on the orders of Trump and the reactionary right. This has taken its most visibly outrageous form in the bureaucratic pillaging committed by Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), the widely loathed advisory body with a meme-derived name as juvenile as its staffers.

But this week, a still-more ominous threat appears to be circling. Bloomberg reports that three individuals representing private equity concerns — firms in an insidious financial industry intent on harvesting anything that can rake in a profit for the ultrarich — have now shown up, alongside DOGE, to meddle in the life-sustaining work of the SSA.

This should be of grave concern to all, but the public at large is not widely aware of these threats. Private equity is just that: private, and opaque by design. These firms’ grotesque amassment of wealth has enabled them to cannibalize huge reaches of the economy; estimates vary, but the industry’s combined assets run, at minimum, into the several trillions.

Predatory firms have made startling headway at acquiring, exploiting and flipping companies “across every imaginable sector, from housing and hospitals, to fossil fuels and retail, to pet shops and music catalogs,” as Derek Seidman writes for Truthout. “Private equity has a reputation for being perhaps the most ruthless arm of Wall Street.”

Most infamous are its firms’ parasitic takeovers: buying out a corporation, saddling it with debt to enrich themselves, then brutally cutting costs, often starting by firing many workers and squeezing the rest for every cent and second. Eventually, they strip the whole thing to a husk and sell off whatever assets remain. Despite the astonishing extent of private equity’s incursions into civil society, our sense of the scale, and the damage involved, has lagged behind this industry’s aggressive pace.