Trump and Musk are running a disinformation campaign on Social Security

Donald Trump keeps saying he has no intention of slashing Social Security, but…he and his mini-me, Elon Musk, won’t stop making outlandish claims about the program and appear to be setting the table for cuts that they will try to call something other than “cuts.”

Just about every time they mention the program and entitlement spending, they lie. Musk recently denigrated Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” It isn’t, but if it were, shouldn’t you whack away at it? And during an interview with Fox Business, he claimed there’s $500 to $700 billion in annual waste and fraud within entitlement spending—when there is no evidence of that (as Forbes notes). Moreover, he and Trump have falsely insisted there are a gazillion dead people on the rolls, implying checks are going out to ghosts.

This duo of deceit is doing all they can to raise doubts about the most popular and arguably the most important government program. Meanwhile, Musk and his dodgy DOGErs have moved to shitcan or force out thousands of employees at the Social Security Administration, perhaps as many as 10,000. (Good luck reaching someone there on the phone.) The downsizing that has already occurred at the agency has led to “a significant loss of expertise,” according to one former employee. If things go to hell at the SSA, older voters might get truly get pissed.

Unlike ideologues of the right who have long salivated at the thought of shrinking entitlements and privatizing Social Security, Trump realizes such a move could be political suicide. So he has repeatedly vowed not to reduce the program. But should his promise be believed? (That’s a rhetorical question.) After Musk uttered an inartful statement this week about eliminating purported waste and fraud within entitlement programs—which some people interpreted as an expression of his desire to kill these programs—the White House rushed out a press release declaring, “The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).” But here’s the tell that the White House cannot be trusted on this front: The statement was full of lies about entitlement spending.

The press release claimed Musk was correct to opine that waste and fraud in entitlement programs totaled up to $700 billion each year. To back this up, the White House listed four “facts” and provided citations. Nerd that I am, I clicked on the links and discovered—wait for it—these citations did not support what the Trump White House was asserting. Let’s run through them:

FACT: The US Government Accountability Office estimates taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually to fraud—and most of that is within entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

That is not what the GAO said. Its report stated, “The federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” That is, could. Not that it does. And this estimate of possible fraud included Covid pandemic-fraud, which likely boosted the number. As for the claim that most of this comes from entitlement program, the citation supplied by the White House links to a GAO report that says there was an estimated $236 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. But it adds, “Such payments are essentially payment errors that can be the result of many things—including overpayments, inaccurate recordkeeping, or even fraud.” Medicare and Medicaid did have the most payment errors—$186 billion—but, again, that’s not necessarily due to fraud. 

FACT: Over the past two decades, the federal government has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in “improper payments”—the majority of which come in the form of “payments to deceased individuals or those who no longer [are] eligible for government programs.”

This is highly misleading. The GAO report cited says that most of the improper payments were overpayments. As an example of an overpayment, it pointed to “payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs.” It did not say that payments to dead people or ineligible recipients comprise the majority of these improper payments—only that they account for some of these errant payments. 

FACT: The Social Security Administration made an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022. 

This “fact” left out important context. The inspector general of the SSA, who came up with this statistic, noted that the $72 billion was “less than 1 percent of the total benefits paid during that period.” While $72 billion seems like a lot of money, a 1 percent error rate is rather admirable for an immense and complex program. Plus, the IG said that some of these payments were deemed improper because of errors made by beneficiaries in reporting changes in their circumstances. These might not be instances of fraud.

FACT: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated it made $140+ billion in improper payments in 2024 alone.

This was quite the whopper. Click on that link and you get a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services fact sheet on improper payments. Add up the figures, and the total is $86 billion, not $140-plus billion. More important, the CMS states, “It is important to keep in mind that not all improper payments represent fraud or abuse. Improper payments are payments that do not meet CMS program requirements. They can be overpayments, underpayments, or payments where insufficient information was provided to determine whether a payment was proper. Most improper payments involve a state, contractor, or provider missing an administrative step.” It added, “Of the 2024 Medicaid improper payments, 79.11% were the result of insufficient documentation.” In other words, these payments might have nothing to do with waste and fraud.

You can see what’s going on here. The White House is mugging the truth to foster the impression that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are ridden with fraud. No doubt, within enormous programs that disburse a combined total of about $2.8 trillion a year, there will be waste, abuse, and fraud. That needs to be addressed, and the feds routinely spend a lot of resources each year trying to do so (without having to be besieged by the minions of DOGE). In its fact sheet, CMS reported that the improper payment rate had dropped for several of its major programs.

By and large, the stats ain’t so bad. Yet Trump and Musk are running a disinformation campaign that targets Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, inaccurately depicting them as rotting with criminality. Why do that? What are they setting up? It’s not too hard to imagine.