There they go again.

First, the Bush administration hired actors to masquerade as television reporters delivering fake news about the Medicare prescription drug law. Small TV stations hard-pressed for content to fill their programming aired these propaganda pieces as though they were legitimate reports from Washington, D.C.

Then it was a “journalist” shilling for the No Child Left Behind law. Using his position as a talk-radio host and syndicated columnist, Armstrong Williams admitted he was paid $240,000 by the U.S. Department of Education to promote NCLB.

Now, Social Security employees, represented by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), are being conscripted to advance the doom-and-gloom forecasts of the Bush administration. And they don’t like it one bit.

“Trust fund dollars should not be used to promote a political agenda,” says Dana C. Duggins, a vice president of AFGE’s Social Security Council.

Using Bush administration scare tactics, managers in the Social Security Administration (SSA) are implementing a “strategic communications plan” that directs the agency and its employees to spread the gospel (through speeches, seminars, public events, radio, television and newspapers) about the long-term financing problems the system allegedly faces.

In fact, the latest revision in the annual “Your Social Security Statement,” which is sent to participants each year, contains new language parroting the party line and painting a bleak picture of too few workers, too many retirees and too little money to pay benefits.

Resorting to the kind of hyperbole this issue has spawned, a policy brief prepared by the agency says the benefit cuts foreseen if Bush does not get his way with private accounts would “double the poverty rate of Social Security beneficiaries aged 64 to 78.”

As reported by Robert Pear in the New York Times, Robert M. Ball, who worked at the SSA for three decades and was commissioner from 1962 to 1973, said, “It’s fine for the agency to answer factual questions, but it’s unusual to use the Civil Service organization to push a political agenda, especially because what they are saying is not true. The program is not going bankrupt.”

—D.K.