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WASHINGTON — Greenland’s the talk of the town, which even has many Republicans nervous.
“The rhetoric going on now is irresponsible,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Raw Story.
The rhetoric — including the White House declaring “all options” are on the table when it comes to obtaining the Danish-governed territory — has only been ratcheting up since last weekend, when President Donald Trump deployed the U.S. military to invade Venezuela and capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
“You have to take it more seriously than we did six months ago,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Raw Story.
“Did you see this coming with Maduro?” Raw Story pressed.
“I'm still so naive that I took them at their word during their classified briefing in December when they told us they weren't interested in regime change,” Murphy said. “Yeah, it's hard to take any of this seriously, given that they have had very little compunction misleading us in the past.”
Murphy was speaking as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to Capitol Hill to give confidential briefings about the Venezuela operation.
With Rubio now slated to meet with Danish officials to discuss Greenland, an autonomous territory of the European nation, many on Capitol Hill are reassessing previous political complacency.
“I said all last year, ‘Ah, you know, nothing will come of it,’” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Raw Story. “Obviously, it's at the head of my priority list now.”
Even many of President Trump’s GOP allies fear Congress will once again be left in the dark.
“It's hard to say what he's inching towards,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) told Raw Story. “They've kind of been a little bit all over the board.”
“In the New Year, where’s Greenland on your priority list?” Raw Story asked Sen. James Lankford (R-OK).
“Greenland was not on my bingo card two years ago,” Lankford said. “I don't even know how to answer that question.”
“Are you worried that this could be a distraction?” Raw Story pressed. “Or do you think it is key strategically?”
“No. There's some key strategic aspects there dealing with their own coast and dealing with the Arctic, there's no question about that, so that's a key relationship,” Lankford said. “It’s why we have a base there and have had a base there for years.”
To many Republicans, that relationship’s worked — so they don’t see any need to alter it.
“I wouldn't say it's a top priority for me, no,” Sen. Capito said.
While most Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t want to even entertain the thought of using the U.S. military to capture Greenland, they’re open to reassessing the relationship.
“It’s in our strategic interest to enhance our presence there,” Capito said. “I don't think that it's something that is a top priority for us, and I don't think it's something that needs to be grasped.
“Some kind of mutually agreed enhancement of our presence there would probably be a good start.”
Even so-called foreign policy doves — or isolationists — in the GOP are now openly courting the island country.
“It’d be nice if Greenland would decide they'd like to join the U.S.,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Raw Story.
“But I wouldn't want to do it by force. The only way that you'd convince Greenland to be part of the United States is by offering them things that would be to their benefit, not telling them we're going to invade them.”
With Russia’s war against Ukraine already straining NATO, bellicose chatter from the White House has U.S. allies nervous.
“Any type of move on Greenland, it'll threaten the existence of NATO, which will be inviting the end of the post-World War II international system,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) — the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee — told Raw Story.
“They'll be conceding, I think, to the Russians influence in Europe that they don't have now — and China.”
But few doubt that President Trump seriously wants the U.S. to take over Greenland — a reality which means many lawmakers are now fielding calls from their NATO counterparts.
“I'm worried that even these threats, even this rhetoric has stirred our NATO allies up so much,” Murkowski said.
“I've talked to the Danish ambassador, talking to my friends, the parliamentarians in other Arctic countries — the Nordic countries — and, yeah, there's a lot of anxiety.”
Still, even with Greenland the talk of this town, many Republicans still just shrug when talk turns that way.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) is chair of the nominally powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee but when Raw Story asked him about Greenland, he simply responded: “I don’t know.”
“Talk to the President,” Risch said.
An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”
The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.
This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”
The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.
However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”
One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”
Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.
Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.
An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.
Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”
Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.
The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.
“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”
Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
