As Trump insists that dead people are collecting payments, Adam Kinzinger poses a key GOP question

The unraveling of American democracy is occurring before our very eyes, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk transform the United States into something unrecognizable.

Last time, it was a slow process. Trump took his time attacking our institutions and enacting insane policies. This time, however, it’s happening at record speed, as Trump works overtime to dismantle the democracy this nation was built on. The latest item on his to-ruin list is Social Security, but don’t worry — at least Adam Kinzinger is here to give him a hard time as Trump robs us of the program.

Social Security occupies a strange territory, for many young people. While we all look on it as a hopeful final reward for decades of labor and civil obedience, most everyone below the age of 45 is fully convinced we’ll never see a cent. We’ve been paying into the fund since we started high school jobs, we’ll keep paying into it until we retire, but there’s little chance the program will survive long enough for us to cash out. Even less so now that Trump’s set his sights on it.

47 is following a familiar playbook with his attacks on Social Security. Just like he did with when he laid off federal workers, cut foreign aid, and attacked transgender rights, Trump is easing America into his fresh targeting of Social Security by claiming that millions of dead people are collecting benefits.

Trump has no proof of this claim, no actual backing to lend it weight, just words. Like most everything else about the man, the fib is fabricated of nothing but hot air, but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t use it to make massive cuts to our Social Security, robbing Americans who’ve paid thousands into it of their eventual cash-out.

The Trump team would have much more success in man-ing up, and now he’s got a key new area for Congressional Republicans to explore.

Here’s a question for @HouseGOP @GOP @POTUS pic.twitter.com/dmKPeqtKjW

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) February 19, 2025

Instead of cutting into Social Security, Kinzinger wants to know why Congressional Republicans aren’t facing office cuts, themselves. Nearly every other federal worker is facing cuts to their department or even loss of employment, and yet our Congressional leaders are safe and cozy?

This is all the more egregious given Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent reveal of just how little work House engage in on an annual basis. She shared a graphic of the weeks when the House is in and out of session in 2025, and promptly faced demands that she — and her colleagues — start working like real Americans. The rest of us pull five-day, 40-hour work weeks, and yet our so-called “representatives” are pulling in double our salary for half the labor? That’s not a great look.

If we made cuts to Congress, as Kinzinger is urging, it could make a far larger dent in the national deficit than any cuts to the Department of Education or Social Security. Our leaders in Congress typically pull in several hundred thousand dollars a year, and that’s not even considering the hefty additional expenses attached to their positions, and no-doubt rampant waste. Cuts to Congressional offices — both right and left leaning — actually seem like an incredibly wise direction forward, but there’s no chance in this world or the next that our Congressional leaders will take it sitting down.