President Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk are ratcheting up false rhetoric about Social Security, repeatedly claiming the program wastes hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent payouts that need to be eliminated.
Their position is confounding experts and worrying advocates, who fear the claims are a pretext for massive cuts to the program down the road.
Trump, Musk and the administration’s allies insist they are targeting waste, fraud and abuse and are not going after benefits.
In an interview Monday with Larry Kudlow, who served as Trump’s chief economic adviser in his first term, Musk suggested Social Security and other entitlement programs are rife with fraud and a prime target for cuts.
“Most of the federal spending is entitlements. So that’s the big one to eliminate,” Musk said on Kudlow’s Fox Business show, adding there’s possibly $500 billion to $700 billion in potential cuts there.
Musk also said they’re trying to put a stop to “stolen” and “fake” Social Security numbers.
The tech mogul showed his hostility to Social Security earlier this month, when he referred to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
Musk’s comments echo what Trump said during his joint address to Congress last week.
“We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Democrats have been sounding the alarm on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for weeks and said Monday’s interview confirmed their worst fears. They said Musk’s comments directly contradict Trump and GOP leaders’ vows not to touch Social Security benefits.
“The richest man on Earth repeated again a bevy of lies that entitlement programs tens of millions of people rely on are riddled with fraud and abuse. That’s a pretext to slashing them, but it’s false,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday.
“Elon Musk is shamelessly lying about Social Security, claiming it’s riddled with fraud, in order to justify taking benefits away from seniors and retirees,” Schumer said.
The White House pushed back on those accusations Tuesday, asserting Trump will not cut entitlement benefits.
“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).”
Economists say the levels of fraud talked about by Trump and Musk just don’t exist.
A report by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general last year found the agency made nearly $72 billion in improper payments from fiscal 2015 through fiscal 2022 — less than 1 percent of benefits paid out during that period.
“I’m a firm believer in the perpetual inefficiency of government. But if I had to pick one place in the federal government that is more efficient than most, Social Security would be one of them,” said Chuck Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a former top economic adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
Representatives from DOGE have reportedly gained access to sensitive taxpayer data collected by the Social Security Administration (SSA).
According to a declaration in a federal lawsuit from Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff, the DOGE staffers seemed to want the data to search for evidence of alleged benefits fraud.
Flick wrote that she thought the DOGE team’s concerns were “invalid and based on an inaccurate understanding of SSA’s data and programs.”
DOGE officials appeared to be focused “on the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts,” she wrote.
Democrats agree fraudulent spending should be rooted out of government agencies, but they argue Trump and Musk are using fraud as a guise to cut programs they don’t like.
“You could argue whether a particular appropriation for a particular program is good or bad policy, but if it’s legal, then the right remedy is legislation,” Blahous said.
Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said the amount of fraud in the program is “vanishingly small,” and the consequences of Musk and Trump’s actions will undermine confidence in government.
“There’s no line item [of] waste, fraud and abuse that you can just scratch off,” Altman said. “This is a way to undermine people’s confidence in … Social Security, and to pretend that you’re cutting something that everybody agrees should be cut, when actually you’re really cutting into the essence. You’re cutting into the bone.”
