Adapted from The World’s Worst Bet: How The Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (and What Would Make It Right) by David J. Lynch. Published September 9, 2025.

Department of Government Efficiency employees at the Social Security Administration put the records of more than 300 million Americans at risk by creating a copy of the data in a vulnerable cloud ...

Aliss Higham is a Newsweek reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus is reporting on Social Security, other government benefits and personal finance. She has previously extensively covered U.S.