By Sophie Morgan | Phoenix
In the horrible aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick lost 70% of his company’s employees in the north tower. Among other actions, he pledged 25% of the firm’s profitability for the next five years to the families of the 658 employees who had perished, and paid for their health insurance for 10 years.
That was an amazingly generous and empathetic act, which is why I was so unpleasantly surprised last week when someone pointed a camera at now-Commerce Secretary Lutnick and he addressed the possibility of late or missing checks as Social Security Administration staff and services are reduced.
“Let's say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain,” Lutnick said during an appearance on the “All-In” podcast.
“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” he continued. “Whoever screams is the one stealing … Come on, your mother, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds, they trust the government.”
Not with that attitude, we don’t. Lutnick’s casual dismissal of what a 90-year-old who doesn’t have a billionaire son requires has given me no reason to trust him or the Social Security Administration. I have no confidence they’ll be better equipped to accurately process or find my check with 12% less staff and 47 fewer locations.
I know a little bit about sending people money reliably and transparently. For four decades, I have exhausted myself making sure my fellow employees received their checks on time.
Some would have been able to wait until the next payday had the promised check not arrived, but many more would have missed those time-sensitive “luxuries” like mortgage payments, child support deductions and groceries for the week if we got it wrong.
It wasn’t my place to decide whether anyone could afford to miss a check, or that they should have saved for the rainy day if my team didn’t get the check cut.
Whether they could afford to miss the check was unimportant to me. My promise to them of reliability, of trust, of dependability was paramount.
Even if they had a side hustle paying $300,000 per month, I was committed to getting them their check because they earned it. My promise to them was more important than whether they were going to buy bougie food for their cat or for the cat they pretended to have at the checkout to salvage some shred of their dignity.
If they had a question about their check, I made sure that it was easy to find a human being who would explain it to them or fix it for them, so they could make that cat food purchase with confidence.
Can Secretary Lutnick make this less about flippant wisecracks about people who are understandably nervous about whether they will be able to cover the nut next month as they are living distribution-to-distribution and/or whether they will have the stamina and ability to hack their way through an understaffed administrative nightmare to find the money that they paid for with their own devotion to their own jobs?
Can he make this more about taking some personal pride and responsibility in this administration’s work and ensuring that reasonable, predictable outcomes are the norm and not something that constituents have to anticipate patiently and quietly so no one thinks that they’re a “fraudster?”
Finally, can he remember that it’s the person who promises the check and then doesn’t deliver who is the real fraudster?
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