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Latest News
Trump-Inspired Commemorative Social Security Cards Denounced as Latest 'Political Propaganda' Effort
Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, noted that in the 90 years since the first Social Security card was issued in 1936, "the design has never been politicized."
"Now, the Trump administration is putting the logo of a semi-private, partisan entity, which is widely reported to be corrupt, on the Social Security cards of newborn babies. They claim ‘no additional cost to families or taxpayers’, but the cost has to come from somewhere."
A commemorative Social Security card with a Freedom 250 logo. (Photo by Social Security Administration)
Altman referred to a report released Thursday by the US House Natural Resources Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, titled "From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday."
The 55-page report found that Freedom 250, which is funded through taxpayer dollars as well as donations from a number of companies with regulatory business before the government, including Palantir, ExxonMobil, and Oracle, secretly diverted funds intended for the congressionally chartered, bipartisan initiative America 250, and misled donors by providing them with Freedom 250's banking information instead.
"This is abuse of Social Security, a nonpartisan institution which Trump claimed he would not hurt."
The report also detailed how Freedom 250, with former employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has collected Americans' personal data and has "sold access to the president and courted foreign money in America's name."
"Freedom 250’s website quietly collects an extraordinary amount of information about the people who visit it," reads the report. "Its own privacy disclosure states that Freedom 250 collects everything a user shares with it and, when a user or devices permits, tracks precise geolocation data down to 'latitude, longitude, velocity, [and] bearing.' It logs each click across the site and captures the information users type into forms, including home addresses and contact information, and sends it back to the server of the organization that designed and created the website—in this case the National Design Studio, staffed by ex-DOGE employees."
The subcommittee explained how Freedom 250 "circulated sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10 million, backed by a 'historic photo opportunity' with President Trump. Its CEO solicited foreign governments, corporations, and individuals at the World Economic Forum in Davos to fund the president’s priorities. If foreign funds reach the president's vanity projects, the report finds the conduct would clearly violate the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause."
Altman emphasized, in light of the committee's findings, that "DOGE has been found in court to have mishandled our private Social Security data, and these cards may provide another opportunity for that abuse of Americans’ most personal, sensitive information."
The use of the Freedom 250 logo on Social Security cards is "corrupt and inappropriate," said Social Security Works.
The group called on SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano to disclose whether the administration is paying a licensing fee to Freedom 250, release "any and all contracts between the Social Security Administration and Freedom 250," and reveal whether Freedom 250 will have "access to data associated with beneficiaries of Social Security cards bearing their logo."
"This is abuse of Social Security, a nonpartisan institution which Trump claimed he would not hurt," said Altman. "Like issuing passports with Trump’s visage and signature, putting his name on the Kennedy Center, and destroying the East Wing of the White House, turning Social Security cards into political propaganda reveals yet again Trump’s contempt for the American people he is supposed to be serving.“
1,022 Babies Among 21,500+ Children Killed by Israel in 1,000 Days of Gaza Genocide
The GMO said Thursday that at least 173,514 others—including more than 44,500 children—have been wounded, and 9,500 Palestinians are still missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings in the coastal strip, more than 90% of which has been destroyed and 80% of which is under Israeli control, according to officials.
(Source: Gaza Government Media Office)
More than 11,000 Gazan children have suffered what the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) called "life-changing injuries," including as many as 4,000 amputations, many of them performed without anesthesia.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza by not intervening to stop the killing and maiming of children," Ahmad Ahendawi, regional director at the charity Save the Children, said Thursday. "As their young, fragile bodies were blown to bits and pieces by bombs and missiles, the world sold those same weapons to the government of Israel [and]... continued trade agreements with the government of Israel."
Early in the war, UNICEF called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
Classified Israel Defense Forces (IDF) data leaked last August suggested that 5 in 6 Palestinians, or 83%, killed during the war's first 19 months were civilians. Experts attribute the high civilian death toll to Israel's use of artificial intelligence in target selection, its dropping of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many of them supplied by the US—in densely populated urban zones, and relaxed rules of engagement allowing for an unlimited number of noncombatant casualties in airstrikes targeting a single Hamas operative, no matter how low-ranking.
Last month, a United Nations commission of inquiry found that 30% of those killed by Israel in Gaza have been minors, and that “the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza."
The commission, which separately concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, used language consistent with Article II of the Genocide Convention, the international treaty against which Israel's actions are being weighed by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In December 2023, South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ that is now formally backed by around 20 nations.
IDF troops have admitted to witnessing alleged war crimes, including indiscriminate murder of women and children. Doctors and other international volunteers who worked in Gaza's besieged hospitals during the genocide have reported the apparently deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians, including children shot in the head and chest by Israeli snipers.
Palestinian survivors and witnesses have also accused IDF troops of summarily executing women and children.
“Every day for the past 1,000 days, the world has failed 1 million children in Gaza."
The new GMO figures note 460 deaths from malnutrition—164 of them children—and 28 Palestinians, mostly children, who perished from hypothermia in camps housing many of the approximately 2 million people forcibly displaced by the war.
According to figures published last month by UNICEF, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including at least 265 children, have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since the October 2025 ceasefire took effect. UNICEF called the purported truce a "cruel and deadly illusion."
All this in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack in which approximately 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed—some by so-called “friendly fire” and under the fratricidal Hannibal Directive—and 251 others abducted.
In the aftermath of the deadliest attack on Israel in its 75-year history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation—exhorted Israelis to "remember what Amalek has done to you."
According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose total extermination—"man and woman, infant and suckling"—was commanded by the Abrahamic deity figure God.
Numerous Israeli leaders made similarly genocidal statements, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who asserted that there are no innocent people in Gaza, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—who is also wanted by the ICC for ordering the "complete siege" of Gaza blamed for fueling deadly famine and disease—and the influential far-right politician Moshe Feiglin.
"Every child in Gaza is the enemy," Feiglin said last year. "We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there."
According to the new GMO figures, 39,022 families in Gaza have suffered Israeli massacres, with more than 2,700 families entirely wiped out and another 6,020 left with only a single surviving member. More than 58,800 children have been orphaned, including 2,700 who lost both parents, while 26,370 women are now widows.
In 2024, Save the Children published a report detailing how Israel's onslaught has caused the "complete psychological destruction" of Gazan children. A subsequent study found that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believed that their deaths were imminent—and nearly half of them said they wanted to die.
“We could die at any moment. I hope the war stops for us,” a 14-year-old girl identified as Amani told Save the Children in a report published Thursday.
“I hope the war stops so that I can continue my education in Gaza and live my rights as a human like any girl in other countries," she added. "I would like to live with love, peace, and an easy life."
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