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President Donald Trump dropped a stunning new excuse for why the United States should take over Greenland Friday.

Trump was meeting with American oil executives over the military incursion of Venezuela and his goals to shift the country's oil production to benefit the U.S. when a reporter asked about Venezuela and if the country would be considered an ally.

"Right now they seem to be an ally and I think it'll continue to be an ally," Trump said. "We don't want to have Russia there. We don't want to have China there. And by the way, we don't want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don't take Greenland, you're going to have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That's not going to happen."

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.”

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) suggested that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had failed the Republican Party by refusing to open the House of Representatives for legislative business during the government shutdown last year.

During an appearance on C-SPAN this week, host Dasha Burns noted that the year ended without passing an extension for health care subsidies, causing insurance costs to skyrocket for many Americans.

"Republicans having the majority should have planned further in advance instead of the last weeks of the year to see how am I going to deal with this," McCarthy replied. "So now they've kind of got a political football. Remember what happened in the House."

"The Democrats did shut the government down. Everybody would agree with that," he continued. "But the Senate kept working. The House kept everybody away. And when you only have a majority for two years to pass a bill, you have to have a hearing, then you have to have a markup, then you've got to pass the bill, then it's got to go the floor? You just lost two months."

"Was it a mistake for Johnson to send the House home?" Burns wondered.

"The House, you have the power as the Speaker and the majority," McCarthy pointed out. "If you give that power away, you may look at the end of the day, oh, I gave two months, maybe the Democrats won the shutdown."

"How many other bills could we have passed? How many things could we brought to the floor that was an 80-20 issue that actually put the Democrats in a bad place for shutting the government down?"