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If those people weren't granted unprecedented access to our data, there would be no whistle to blow. You can wait for the "investigation" to play out, the rest can see that obvious risks were ignored to benefit someone.
Again, there doesn't need to be evidence. The point is that a claim like this is clearly plausible and worth investigating because of political decisions this administration made. They took a non-political issue (access to social security data) and explicitly made it political. You don't get to later use those same politics as a protective shield for criticism.
> it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for.
People were primed because of the repeated warning that experts were giving about the security of this data and carelessness in allowing access. You are helping to prove my point that the administration encouraged this by their own actions.
But, yeah: if you find that the steelman version of the opposing argument won't be borne out in reality that's a promising line of attack. You'll argument will be more likely to be effective, however, than if you attack the strongest rather than the weakest ("strawman") version of the case.
Which is usually a strawman tactic, and I agree both disrespectful and useless.
But... We will always respond to our own understanding of someone else's argument! That's inevitable, short of mind-reading. A habit of steel-manning the opposite case is a useful discipline for demonstrating respect - and, ideally, minimizing the necessity for clarification.
In practice, this means to make (to the best of your ability and understanding) an honest and accurate restatement of their case, and (if you see an opportunity - you won't always) a genuine suggestion that it would be stronger if it considered [x, y, z], before you attempt to refute it. You may not get it quite right, but you will have given your interlocuter a straightforward opportunity (as you say, conversationally) to clarify.
I think this is, given as I say that we're not able to inhabit anyone else's mind directly, the closest that we can rhetorically come to taking another's claim "at face value".
I think given the performance of DOGE, the wars, the executive orders, the epstein files, we can make a SMALL logical stretch here and assume, FOR THE MOMENT, that this happened.
That is to say, there is no reason to extend this administration or anything DOGE-related the benefit of the doubt.
Now, your turn to answer the question.