Elon Musk’s Risky Attack On Social Security

WASHINGTON — Social Security is the electrified third rail of American politics, and now Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his band of 20-something acolytes are reaching for it.

The Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s cost-cutting team, arrived at the Social Security Administration over the weekend. Under pressure, the agency’s acting head resigned, while Musk falsely claimed it fraudulently issues benefits to millions of people who are more than 100 years old.

“This might be the biggest fraud in history,” Musk wrote in a follow-up post on Monday.

Musk’s observation appears to have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the agency’s records — which do include Social Security numbers for millions of people who are too old to be alive, but don’t show them getting benefits. And Musk ignored that government watchdog agencies have repeatedly probed the Social Security program and have found no such massive fraud.

President Donald Trump picked up the baseless allegation on Tuesday, saying he wondered who was getting the money supposedly dished out to Americans more than 150 years old.

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of the sudden we have a very powerful Social Security, with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200,” he said.

The Social Security Administration’s acting director resigned Sunday in the face of apparent demands for access to sensitive SSA information from Musk’s minions, according to the Washington Post. A similar ouster occurred last week at the Treasury Department over access to IRS files, prompting a lawsuit from taxpayer advocates.

Social Security may be a riskier target than the IRS, the Department of Education or the U.S. Agency for International Development, the last of which Musk bragged about feeding into a wood chipper. Threatening changes to Social Security’s popular retirement program, which pays the bills for more than 50 million older Americans each month, famously began former President George W. Bush’s long slide into unpopularity following the 2004 elections.

Trump said on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t touch Social Security benefits. That position marked a break with past GOP orthodoxy, and was a key reason working-class voters saw him as comparatively moderate.

Martin O’Malley, who ran the Social Security Administration under former president Joe Biden, warned that Musk’s foray into the Social Security Administration’s systems could actually cause people to miss payments.

“At this rate, they will break it. And they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley told the Washington Post.

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a liberal group that advocates against cuts to benefits, said Musk seemed to be setting the stage for programmatic cuts.

“He wants to undermine confidence and convince people that there’s fraud so when benefits are cut, they’re not cutting benefits, they’re cutting fraud and waste,” Altman told HuffPost.

Democrats pilloried Musk and Trump on Tuesday over the resignation of the SSA’s acting director.

“It should alarm all Americans that Donald Trump is willing to push out anyone who does not show strict obedience to an unelected, unaccountable billionaire,” Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) said. “This has nothing to do with ‘government efficiency’ and everything to do with ensuring the billionaire class controls the levers of power with no guardrails or accountability.”

HuffPost readers: Are you a federal employee with insight into what’s happening at SSA? Email [email protected].

The SSA’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday the White House suspected fraud at the agency and that benefits wouldn’t be affected for people who paid into the system “honestly.”

As for the fraud Musk claimed to have identified, the SSA’s inspector general’s office, an independent investigative agency, has issued at least two reports about “numberholders age 100 or older.” The inspector general found in its July 2023 report that the SSA lacks death records for 18 million such people because the individuals died before the government adopted its electronic system for reporting deaths.

The inspector general urged SSA to fix the data anyway using available information, since the old Social Security numbers could potentially be used by fraudsters. The agency refused, saying it would be a waste of money since no improper payments were going out.

“Correcting records for nonbeneficiaries would divert resources from work necessary to administer and manage our programs, which we cannot afford,” Social Security said in its response to the IG report.

In other words, the agency said the fix wouldn’t improve government efficiency.

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