“But less than 1 percent of Social Security’s payments in recent years were determined to be improper – often the result of an accidental oversight or change in benefit status, according to a report last year by the agency’s inspector general. That works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.”
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“The degree of scrutiny by Social Security’s IG can be intense. One report issued by the office earlier this month found that a partner agency in Mississippi had incorrectly made a $14 payment because of a data-entry error.
Social Security’s inspector general was fired in the first days of the Trump administration, along with top internal investigators at 16 other government agencies. Although the office has continued to operate, it is expected to lose up to 20 percent of its staff because of budget cuts, Rose said.”
Trump and Musk are exaggerating the level of fraud in Social Security and are cutting it in a way that will hurt seniors.
Musk has unlimited money to spend on political campaigns, giving him great influence over congress members who fear Musk will spend money for their primary opponents.
Social Security keeps 2/3s of our elderly out of poverty.
Illegal immigrants are a net positive to Social Security because they sometimes pay into it and rarely get anything out of it.
Taxation to fund welfare for our society is not punishment.
Too many people don’t make enough to save enough for retirement without Social Security. We can’t realistically expect people to save enough to retire without Social Security.
“”Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type,” reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. “This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.” (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to “properly annotate death information in its database” per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven’t been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating “not marked as dead in a database” with “received benefits”—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.””
“contrary to what Musk claimed, tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse” cannot possibly generate enough savings to eliminate the annual budget deficit, which was nearly $2 trillion in fiscal year 2024, let alone reduce the ever-climbing national debt, which currently exceeds $36 trillion, including $29 trillion in debt held by the public.”
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“Even if Musk succeeds in curtailing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” there is only so much he can accomplish by focusing on “driving change through executive action based on existing legislation,” which is how he described his agenda last November. Any serious attempt to reduce federal borrowing will require new legislation that addresses the main drivers of federal spending, including Social Security, Medicare, and the military budget. But the platform on which Trump ran takes all those things off the table while promising pricey policies that will only exacerbate the problem that Musk decries.”
“First, it’s not as if there is some secret knowledge to be uncovered by the DOGE when it comes to fixing the rampant inefficiencies of the federal government. Those Medicare and Medicaid overpayments are documented annually, for example. The Government Accountability Office and various inspectors general file regular reports. The Congressional Budget Office maintains a list of things that could be cut to reduce the deficit. Various members of Congress—most prominently, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.)—periodically publish lists of silly, wasteful, or dubious government spending.
What’s lacking, in short, is not ideas but the political will to act on them.
The amount of political will is going to matter, because that is very relevant to the second point: Unless Trump is willing to set aside his promise not to touch America’s entitlement programs, the DOGE will be unable to follow through on its mandate.
Again, look at those improper payments made by Medicare and Medicaid. The $101.4 billion of improper payments the two entitlements made in 2023 accounted for 40 percent of all improper payments across the entire government that year, according to the GAO. That same GAO report suggested a simple change in how Medicaid bills some of its services that, if implemented, could save $141 billion over 10 years.”
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“The same problem pops up when you start looking at other big swings that the DOGE could take. Seven of the top nine suggestions made by the Congressional Budget Office’s annual report on “options for reducing the deficit” involve changing elements of America’s three federal entitlement programs. Capping Medicaid spending, increasing premiums for Medicare Part B, or reconfiguring how Social Security benefits are paid to wealthier Americans each could save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. None will be possible as long as entitlement reform is off the table.
All of this is a function of the federal government’s fiscal reality: Entitlements are the biggest and fastest-growing segment of the budget. This year, so-called “mandatory spending”—primarily Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other government-funded health care programs—will cost nearly $4 trillion, while all discretionary spending will total less than $1.8 trillion.
Musk has promised $2 trillion in spending cuts, but he could propose eliminating all discretionary spending—good luck zeroing out the Pentagon—and would still fall short of that goal. It is impossible to be serious about fiscal reform while promising not to touch the entitlement programs.”
“””Trump also recently proposed cutting taxes on Social Security payments. That might sound good because people will net more money when they receive their benefits. But the reality is more complicated. The poorest households wouldn’t see any change under that plan because Social Security benefits for those making below $32,000 are already untaxed, while the richest recipients would be more likely to see a tax cut.”
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“There’s no way around it: Lawmakers have to raise taxes on many families, including those who aren’t millionaires. Right now, any income that someone makes above $168,000 is not taxed for Social Security. That means that higher earners pay a smaller share of their income toward funding Social Security than lower- and middle-income earners.”
“To get the debt under control, AAF points out that lawmakers cannot simply focus on the discretionary part of the federal budget—which accounts for less than 30 percent of all federal spending. Meanwhile, so-called “mandatory spending” accounts for more than 60 percent (the rest is interest payments on the debt).
Most of the mandatory spending category is made up of Social Security and Medicare, but several other programs also run on autopilot, including food stamps, federal worker retirement benefits, Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies, and veterans’ benefits.
“Mandatory spending is the biggest driver of the national debt because there is no restriction on the unchecked growth of these programs,” argues AAF’s debt report.
Among the proposals to bring mandatory spending under control, the group argues for means-testing future Social Security cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for individuals making more than $1 million annually, stopping President Joe Biden’s student loan cancellation plans, ending Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for wealthy Americans, and the formation of a congressional commission to propose spending cuts.
The group also calls for ending so-called “tax expenditures,” which are forms of spending hidden in the tax code—for example, corporate green energy subsidies delivered in the form of renewable tax credits.
The new document picks up where Pence left off in his failed Republican primary campaign last year. On the campaign trail, Pence talked up the importance of sane fiscal policy and condemned his former boss—Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—for ignoring the threat posed by runaway borrowing and unsustainable entitlement programs.
Of course, Pence’s campaign never got off the ground in any meaningful sense. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had a little more success, but there’s clearly not much of a constituency for serious talk about the debt.”