The White House on Tuesday asserted President Trump would not cut Social Security or Medicare after comments from tech billionaire Elon Musk about the need to examine entitlement spending gained traction.
Musk, a top Trump adviser leading the effort to overhaul the federal workforce, appeared on Fox Business Network on Monday for a rare television interview, where he noted that most government spending is on entitlements.
“So, the waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is all of the — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements. So, that’s like the big one to eliminate,” Musk told former Trump official Larry Kudlow, suggesting it could amount to more than $500 billion in annual savings.
Multiple media outlets reported on Musk’s comments and indicated the Tesla CEO was talking about cutting entitlement programs to reduce government spending. Such a move would trigger significant political backlash and create fodder for Democrats to go on the attack.
But the White House pushed back on those reports, arguing Musk was talking only about cutting fraud.
“The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits,” the White House said in a press release. “President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again),” the White House said in a press release.”
The administration also linked to government findings of waste and fraud in entitlement programs, including an August 2024 report from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General that found nearly $72 billion had been improperly paid.
Trump has repeatedly said he does not want to cut Medicare or Social Security. But he has said he would seek to get rid of fraud in those programs, and critics have argued the president and his allies could use that as a pretext to cut benefits.
In addition, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said in a report last week that Republicans can’t achieve their goal of slashing $2 trillion in federal spending over the next decade without cutting Medicaid.
