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Trump and Musk Continue to Threaten Social Security

During the 2024 campaign, the Felon lied and claimed he know nothing about Project 2025 - the white Christian nationalist agenda that his regime is in the process of implementing, hence the attacks on the rights of women, racial minorities and LGBT citizens. At the same time, the Felon claimed to have no plans to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. The activities of Elon Musk's DOGE and it group of hackers with no knowledge of the federal agencies they are destroying tell a different tale and ought to terrify older Americans who rely on the programs to survive either to access care or for an income on which to survive.  Despite no actual evidence that the programs are wracked with fraud, the Felon and Musk continue to lie and claim that fraud is rampant. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of these attacks is that the Felon's MAGA base would be severely harmed by cuts to the programs.   Working class whites are the largest group receiving Medicaid benefits and per capita, red states rely the most on Medicaid.  Meanwhile, older voters, another key aspect of the Felon's support, would be devastated by cuts to Medicare and Social Security.  One would think congressional Republicans - many of whom are receive an earful at town hall events - would be freaking out, yet as a whole they continue to sit quietly with their thumbs up their posteriors. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the ongoing threat_

The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. . . . Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud 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.” . . . the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security . . . DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.”

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts . . . .

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. . . . But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

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