Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
For many decades, true-blue anti-government conservatives and libertarians have secretly or semi-secretly longed to take a chain saw to Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal and of America’s sorta-kinda welfare state. But with a few exceptions (e.g., Barry Goldwater in his disastrous 1964 presidential campaign and George W. Bush in a 2005 partial-privatization initiative that went nowhere), Republican politicians have understood that Social Security is indeed the third rail of American politics: Touch it and you’ll die. And Donald Trump has been especially keen to disclaim any interest in messing with the retirement benefits that so many of his voters rely upon and that most feel they’ve richly earned.
Unfortunately, that sense of basic political reality is not shared by the extremist businessman whom Trump has given unprecedented power to identify and eliminate federal programs and personnel he deems wasteful. Elon Musk has repeatedly called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a point of view that will especially infuriate current beneficiaries whom he is implicitly accusing of profiteering. The Social Security Administration was one of DOGE’s earliest targets; it’s where DOGE has demanded and obtained big reductions in customer-service offices that might affect the smooth payment of — and adjustments in — benefits. At DOGE’s insistence, Social Security has also announced plans to lay off at least 12 percent of its employees.
As Musk himself made clear in a March 10 interview with Fox Business personality and MAGA insider Larry Kudlow, he wants to go after benefits in the worst way. After assuring Kudlow that he wasn’t going anywhere despite highly dubious media claims that Trump has “reined in” the DOGE edgelord, he put a bull’s-eye on entitlement programs like Social Security. Musk said:
We’re just getting things done, as opposed to writing a report. Like I say, reports don’t mean anything. You’ve got to actually take action.
So, I mean, the waste report in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements. So that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half-trillion, maybe 600, 700 billion a year.
These numbers are either being pulled out of the air or perhaps reflect a wild distortion of estimates of invalid claims in Social Security and other retirement programs, as the Associated Press suggests:
Musk’s estimate for the level of fraud in entitlements far outpaces figures from watchdogs like Social Security’s inspector general, who previously said there was $71.8 billion in improper payments from fiscal years 2015 through 2022. That’s less than 1% of benefits paid out during that time period.
Numbers aside, Musk made it clear to Kudlow that he believes almost any myth ever heard about Social Security fraud. Both he and his boss in the White House have been ventilating about dead people being in the Social Security database:
There have been many good audits, like I said, done by inspector generals and by Government Accountability Office. And they just haven’t been implemented. Nothing’s been done. I think the GAO identified that there were 17 million dead people in the Social Security database several years ago. It’s now 20 million.
Unfortunately for this lurid claim, having a Social Security number is not the same as receiving Social Security benefits, and there’s no evidence that significant numbers of ineligible people are actually receiving checks. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently explained, Social Security just isn’t a program with a serious fraud problem:
Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Only 0.3 percent of Social Security benefits are improper payments, which are typically caused by mistakes or delays.
But Musk, who before his DOGE self-assignment probably knew as much about Social Security as a hog knows about the Spanish Inquisition, revealed to Kudlow that he has bought into the deeply racist Great Replacement Theory for why the welfare state was invented and persists:
[Entitlement spending] is also a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters. So this is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation, because they’re losing, you know — if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave.
This claim represents a tight bundle of multiple lies. Other than court-ordered educational benefits and emergency health care, undocumented immigrants do not qualify for any federal benefits, and there’s no evidence of widespread fraudulent access to such benefits. There’s even less evidence of the noncitizen voting that Trump and other Republicans have recently used to challenge any elections they happen to lose.
One of the problems with giving a completely unaccountable figure like Musk the kind of unlimited access he now has to the innards of the federal government is that nobody voted for him, and nobody can rebuke him for holding ignorant and conspiracy-laden views of a public sector he clearly despises and would like to dismantle. Indeed, he offers cover to Trump and Republican politicians who can depict him as a disinterested technician instead of a knuckle-dragging ideologue who couldn’t be elected dogcatcher.
