Trump And Musk’s Next Target: Social Security, The Largest Social Program In The U.S.

Workers are overwhelmingly against any cuts to social security. Could Musk be seeking to drum up opposition to the program based on false claims of widespread fraud?

By Natalia Marques, Peoples Dispatch

The world’s richest man has shown his determination to use his unelected position within the Trump presidency to wage war on the working class in the United States. Elon Musk’s latest accusation of widespread fraud within the Social Security system in the US could represent yet another major offensive against workers, who nearly universally rely on the country’s largest social service for current and future retirement plans.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an invention of the Trump administration that has pursued broad cuts to federal departments and regulations, has pursued access to sensitive information of millions of people in the US, held by the Social Security Administration. Both Trump and Musk have said they suspect that the SSA is making fraudulent social security payments to tens of millions of dead people, claiming that people as old as 100, 200, or even 300 years old are receiving social security benefits. These claims have been refuted by the SSA, which has a rule in place that automatically stops payments for people over the age of 115.

Musk’s claims began at his press conference in the Oval Office last week, when he said he found “crazy things” within the Social Security system, including people who were “150 years old.” Musk repeated the claims on his platform X, writing in one post that “maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

On Tuesday of this week, Trump himself repeated many of these claims. “Now, the big thing is, how many of these people got paid? Where are they getting paid? Where are they getting paid? How many of them were getting paid Social Security, because that’s—if that’s the case, it’s a massive fraud,” the president told reporters.

Social security data shows that these claims of fraud are false. According to agency statistics, only 0.1% of those received social security benefits are over the age of 100. While the Social Security administration does indeed make erroneous payments, according to a July 2024 SSA inspector’s general report, these constitute only 1% of payments and are mostly composed of overpayments made to existing beneficiaries.

Trump and Musk’s plan

Given the false nature of Trump and Musk’s claims, what are the true motivations behind accusations of fraud?

Musk has attempted to get rid of millions of federal workers, part of a shrinking sector of the working class that enjoys somewhat safeguarded and stable employment opportunities. Musk has also attempted to gain access to the payment systems for those millions of government workers, with both of his attempts being thwarted by the workers themselves through legal counteroffensives by organized labor.

Trump’s administration claims that there will be “there will be NO cuts to Medicare or Social Security, and there will be no tax on Social Security.” Trump has chosen Frank Bisignano, a multi-millionaire who made USD 28 million last year alone as the CEO of financial services company Fiserv, to be the Social Security Administration commissioner, leaving some worried about how a Wall Street banker would run the program that provides retirement benefits to tens of millions of working class people. Trump and Musk’s plan to fire millions of federal workers would also have gotten rid of the very people tasked with administering these benefits. The SSA is already experiencing staffing shortages.

Widespread unpopularity of Social Security cuts

Any potential cuts to the largest social welfare program in the US should anticipate a massive popular backlash. Almost 69 million people receive Social Security benefits per month. There are few things that 80% of people in the country agree on, but 79% oppose reducing the size of Social Security benefits, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from 2023.

In fact, the AP-NORC poll found that a majority of people (58%) supported a Biden proposal to tax households making over USD 400,000 per month to pay for Medicare, the government-run healthcare program for those 65 or older.

Polling from Data for Progress from June of 2023 showed the enormous unpopularity of a proposal by then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to “make some people uncomfortable” by creating a commission that would “look at the entire budget,” which could have opened up the possibility of cuts to both Social Security and Medicare. 72% of likely voters, including 65% of voters within McCarthy’s own Republican Party, opposed such a proposal. The same poll also indicated that only 3% of voters, (and 2% of Republican Party voters) support cutting Social Security in order to reduce the national debt.