Trump and Musk Threaten a Ten Alarm Retirement Inferno, But the UFT Opposition Is Busy Pulling False Alarms

There is a method to the madness that the second Trump administration has brought to the federal government and the vital services it provides to Americans, and it should be a cause of grave concern for UFTers. In the midst of the chaos and devastation caused by efforts to recklessly slash one-third of the federal government, one can find a number of coordinated attacks on the two programs – Social Security and Medicare – that are vital to those of us who are now retired and to those looking forward to retirement in the future.

It became clear that Social Security and Medicare were targets when billionaire Elon Musk, head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), declared that Social Security was “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and made completely unsupported claims of massive fraud in both programs. Since Trump took office and DOGE began its operations, thousands of positions in the Social Security Administration (SSA) have been eliminated and dozens of field offices have been closed. (In addition to managing Social Security, SSA signs up new users of Medicare.) An announcement was made that the SSA would no longer accept benefit applications by telephone, requiring recipients unable to apply on-line to apply in person. At the same time, the SSA web site keeps crashing amidst cuts to its IT staff, making it much harder for prospective recipients to apply on-line. An internal memo from the Acting SSA Commissioner indicated that these cuts are only the first wave of planned reductions in staffing, with plans to cut 12% of the staff. Administration accounts for a small fraction of the cost of Social Security – less than 1% – so the savings would be minimal, but taken together, these measures will make it much harder for eligible Americans to access their Social Security and Medicare benefits, delaying and effectively denying those benefits to many of the millions of Americans – including UFTers – who rely on them. As one frustrated applicant described the impact of the first round of cutbacks to the New York Times, it’s “just a mess.”

If this were not bad enough, recall that the Republican Study Committee, representing the entire Republican House leadership and 80% of the Republican House caucus, has proposed raising the retirement age for receiving full Social Security benefits by two years, to age 69, and for lowering the level of benefits new retirees would receive – changes that would result in a 13% cut to benefits, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Project 2025, which has provided the blue print for the first one hundred days of the second Trump administration, has plans for moving all new Medicare recipients into a default option of Medicare Advantage, slashing federal government aid to states that reimbursed Medicaid expenditures, and remaking federal government financial support for Medicaid into unregulated and diminished block grants. There will be pivotal battles in Congress during the coming weeks and months.

Social Security and Medicare have long been known as the “third rail” of American politics, not to be touched. While he was campaigning, Trump explicitly committed to maintaining Social Security and Medicare, without any cuts. What accounts for the reversal? An old quip of Willie Sutton comes to mind: when asked why he robbed banks, Sutton retorted “that is where the money is.” When you set out to eliminate one-third of the federal government budget to provide massive tax cuts for the wealthy, as Trump and Musk have done, you have to go where the money is, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid together account for 60% of federal government expenditures. The problem for us is that the bank that Trump and Musk plan to rob are programs which are essential to the retirement security and health care of UFTers and all Americans.

Taking Up the Fight… Or Not, If You Are in the UFT Opposition

The Unity Caucus leadership of the UFT and AFT recognizes the serious threat to Social Security and Medicare posed by Trump and Musk, and has led our union in taking up the fight to defend them. We were at the April 5^th “Hands Off” demonstrations, which had the defense of the two programs as one of its main planks. Together with other unions, we have been rallying outside closed Social Security offices. We have organized petitions to protect Social Security. We have been lobbying in Congress. We are working in close concert with organizations that share our commitment to Social Security and Medicare.

One might expect that the meetings of the UFT Retiree Chapter would be dedicated to an all-out mobilization of the chapter’s 70,000 members, spread across the U.S., for this vital fight. But those who held that entirely reasonable expectation, such as me, have been disappointed until this week. In its December meeting, after the election, these matters were not on the agenda; the meeting spent its time discussing legislation favored by some of its Steering Committee, the New York Health Act, that would remove UFT retirees from traditional Medicare. In March, the first time the Retiree Chapter met in 2025, these matters were not discussed: the chapter’s agenda was consumed with addressing a manufactured pseudo-crisis being promoted by one of the opposition slates in the UFT election, ABC. Only this week at the April meeting, months after these attacks began, did our Chapter Leader mention them in his report, and did the chapter pass a resolution committing itself to this fight, already well underway; hopefully, the chapter will now finally have a discussion of how to mobilize the chapter in this critical fight.

The tale of how the manufactured pension crisis came to find its way into a UFT opposition slate’s campaign, where it took precedence over the actual fight to defend Social Security and Medicare during our March meeting, is an interesting one. It is a long tale, but worth recounting in full. It begins with a man named E. J. McMahon, a founding fellow and past research director of a right wing think tank in Albany, the Empire Center for Public Policy, and a fellow of New York City’s Manhattan Institute, another right wing think tank which has been taken over by forces supportive of Donald Trump. Most UFTers would not recognize McMahon’s name, but he is well-known in Albany political circles and among New York’s labor leaders, who have frequently ended up in tussles with him. For decades, McMahon has lobbied the state to contract and restrict the salaries and pensions of New York’s public employees, including educators in the NYC Department of Education, and to cut back on state government funding for public education and health care. If you want to get a taste of the man and his agenda, read this McMahon op-ed in the New York Post, where he argues vociferously against the efforts of the UFT and other unions to bring equity to pension tiers five and six, and this New York Daily News op-ed, in which he argues that New York’s rather modest state taxes on the wealthy are much too high and should be cut.

A grizzled veteran of many anti-government and anti-union campaigns, McMahon is now retired from the Empire Center, but writes a Substack. Always looking for opportunities to throw a monkey wrench into New York State’s budgetary process and to argue for diminishing the salaries and benefits of public employees, earlier this year McMahon took aim at a bill introduced into the state legislature to re-amortize one stream of New York City’s payments into the pensions of its public employees, extending those payments for an additional 13 years beyond their currently scheduled expiration in 2032. McMahon assumed that the bill had the support of the city’s public employee unions, and for him, that meant he would oppose it.

The actual re-amortization proposal was technically complex, but UFT Treasurer Victoria Lee has done a fine job of explaining it in this video. (It is the same presentation she gave to the Retiree Chapter meeting.) The bottom line? As the TRS actuary explains in the video, there were positive features in both options before the TRS trustees – benefits if the city continued the current schedule of payments (this stream would be funded faster, but then face a fiscal cliff in 2032) and benefits if it adopted the lengthier schedule in the proposed re-amortization legislation (the rate of funding would be slower, but provide longer term funding stability). While the UFT was initially prepared to support a re-amortization proposal, the City’s decision to go ahead unilaterally with legislation, without having unions participate in shaping it, led our union to conclude that the Eric Adams administration was not a trustworthy partner on this question, and it withdrew its support soon after the legislation was submitted in Albany.

In his usual polemical style, McMahon’s Substack post was designed to mislead: it suggested – falsely – that in this re-amortization proposal, funds were being taken out of the pension system, only to have to be repaid later, with interest. At the center of the argument was this bar graph:

Note that this graph proved to be so misleading that McMahon would subsequently find himself compelled to withdraw it, make a public correction, and substitute new graphs. His Substack post now contains a note to that effect. (Lee’s video explains exactly how the graph is misleading.) But in the moment, this graph provided McMahon with a pretext to speculate, without a single shred of evidence, that

If the Legislature approves Hochul’s proposal, the money saved by the city is most likely to be spent on salary increases. The DC 37 contract expires in November 2026, and the UFT contract a year after that…

If you are prepared to follow McMahon down his rabbit hole of unsupported speculation, the defeat of the proposal would mean that there was less money for contractual raises for city workers – and that, McMahon believes, is always a positive outcome.

McMahon’s Substack post was picked up by the entrepreneur Marianne Pizzitola, who has built a thriving business around NYC public employee retiree issues, the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, Incorporated. (Yes, that’s its full name.) Wielding McMahon’s misleading bar graph, Pizzitola accused the UFT of using “retirees as cash cows to fund active workers,” and launched into a series of increasingly hyperbolic and unhinged attacks on the union. In a nod to the rhetoric of Elon Musk’s attacks on Social Security, Pizzitola described the re-amortization proposal as a “Ponzi scheme” that “jeopardized the very lives of the people they (the union) claim to care for.” It was, she said, “criminal.”

When Pizzitola seized on McMahon’s argument, the re-amortization bill was thrust into internal UFT politics. A split had developed in the Retiree Chapter Steering Committee, controlled by the UFT opposition, along the lines of what would become the two opposition slates – ABC and ARISE – competing in the UFT elections. Those from the slate that became ABC were especially eager for Pizzitola’s support in the upcoming election, and were currying favor with her. ABC officer candidates immediately took up the extreme, overheated misrepresentations of Pizzitola. Quoting at length from McMahon, Arthur Goldstein, ABC candidate for UFT Assistant Secretary, accused UFT President Mulgrew of “playing fast and loose with our pensions.” Goldstein repeated as gospel McMahon’s unsupported speculation that the re-amortization proposal was designed to pay for salary increases; in so doing, he said, it put retiree pensions “at risk.” For good measure, he took shots at his former compatriots on the Retiree Chapter Executive Board over the issue, as they had begun to distance themselves from Pizzitola’s extreme rhetoric and claims.

With McMahon’s bar graph as exhibit # 1, the ABC candidate for UFT Treasurer, Katie Anskat, denounced the re-amortization proposal as “a reckless gamble that puts UFT members’ retirement security at risk.” She said it would “underfund” the pension system, “essentially borrowing against our futures, potentially forcing increased employee contributions, reduced benefits, or higher costs down the line.” Anskat linked to an anonymous web site, “Protect Our Pensions,” which also highlighted McMahon’s bar graph. An anonymous leaflet directing people to that same web site, different versions of which were circulated on Facebook and distributed at the Delegate Assembly and elsewhere, declared that “MICHAEL MULGREW IS ‘BORROWING’ $11 BILLION FROM THE TRS, NYCERS, AND THE BERS PENSION SYSTEM,” with borrowing in scare quotes. It concluded “COULD THIS BANKRUPT YOUR PENSION? YES, INDEED.”

I tend toward First Amendment absolutism, inclined to give the widest latitude to political speech, especially in our union. In election campaigns, people are prone to exaggeration, often shading into actual misrepresentation and scapegoating, yet I can excuse a lot of what is said and written in the heat of battle. But it must be said that what Pizzitola, ABC, and their friends have done on this issue went well beyond the bounds of decency: they engaged in a concerted campaign to scare and panic retirees that their pensions were in serious peril, knowing full well that retirees depend upon those pensions for life’s basics of food, clothing, and shelter and that there was no real threat to them. Campaigns of fear and loathing are the stock in trade of the extreme right; we have seen all too much of them in American politics these last years. It is not surprising that a McMahon would indulge them. But we have a right to expect better from our union siblings.

What made this campaign even more inexcusable is that ABC clearly knew better. With a former UFT Boro Representative and a former UFT Political Director as their candidates for the top two officer positions in the UFT, they knew the anti-union, anti-public employee, and anti-retiree politics and history of the original author of this pension scare, E. J. McMahon. As veterans of many a campaign to defend the clause in the New York State Constitution that protects our pensions from being “diminished or impaired,” they knew that nothing they were telling retirees they had to fear could happen without a constitutional amendment, which would have to be approved by the New York voters in a general election, and that the UFT has always fought vigorously and successfully against such an amendment. They knew that it would be a violation of law to take funds out of the pension system. They knew that the city has a legal obligation to maintain the funding stream in question until a 100% target is met, that this obligation cannot be passed off to retirees or active members, and that the re-amortization proposal would meet that target. They knew that our pensions were anything but underfunded. But still they engaged in this campaign of fear, peppered with false claims.

As the TRS pension fund trustees pushed back against the misrepresentations that were part of this campaign, Pizzitola and ABC began to back pedal faster than Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the frigid Russian winter. Pizzitola’s protests that she was completely innocent of any suggestion that the UFT was “borrowing” money from the pension funds are a sight to behold, given that her own written words accuse the union of engaging in a criminal Ponzi scheme that put the lives of our retirees in jeopardy. Somehow, in the course of this grand retreat, not one person who took up McMahon’s narrative – not Pizzitola, and no one in ABC – ever got around to telling their readers that the graph at the center of this narrative, which they had so prominently displayed and relied on, was so misleading that McMahon himself had felt compelled to replace it. After the publication of Victoria Lee’s comprehensive explanation of the issue, which neither Pizzitola nor ABC even attempted to refute, they moved on to other issues – although not the real threats to Social Security and Medicare coming from Washington DC.

There is another, crucial dimension to this sordid campaign – political alliances with reactionary, authoritarian elected officials and the impoverished conception of unionism that underlie them – which I will take up tomorrow in a second post on the subject.