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The concept hundreds of thousands of useless Individuals are receiving Social Safety checks is surprising, and bolsters the argument that the federal paperwork wants radical change to fight waste and fraud. There’s one massive downside: No proof exists that it’s true.
Regardless of being informed by company employees final month that this declare has no foundation the truth is, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to make use of the speaking level as a pretext to assault America’s highest-spending authorities program. Musk appears to have gotten this concept from a listing of Social Safety recipients who didn’t have a demise date connected to their document. Company workers reportedly defined to Musk’s DOGE group in February that the listing of impossibly historic people they discovered weren’t essentially receiving advantages (the dearth of demise dates was associated to an outdated system).
And but, in his speech to Congress final week, Trump said: “Consider it or not, authorities databases listing 4.7 million Social Safety members from folks aged 100 to 109 years outdated.” He mentioned the listing contains “3.5 million folks from ages 140 to 149,” amongst different 100-plus age ranges, and that “cash is being paid to lots of them, and we’re looking proper now.” In an interview with Fox Enterprise on Monday, Musk mentioned the existence of “20 million people who find themselves positively useless, marked as alive” within the Social Safety database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 workers to attempt to discover proof of the claims that useless Individuals are receiving checks, in line with paperwork filed in courtroom on Wednesday.
Musk and Trump have lengthy maintained that they don’t plan to assault Social Safety, Medicare, and Medicaid, the main entitlement packages. However their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists inside these entitlement techniques undermine these assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk mentioned, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is a lot of the federal spending, is entitlements—in order that’s like the large one to get rid of. That’s the kind of half trillion, possibly $600, $700 billion a yr.” Some observers interpreted this complicated sentence to imply that Musk desires to chop the entitlement packages themselves. However the Trump administration shortly downplayed Musk’s feedback, insisting that the federal authorities will proceed to guard such packages and suggesting that Musk had been speaking about the necessity to get rid of fraud within the packages, not about axing them. “What sort of an individual doesn’t help eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in authorities spending?” the White Home requested in a press launch.
The White Home’s query could be quite a bit simpler to reply if Musk, who has referred to as Social Safety a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the quantity of fraud in entitlement packages. Musk is claiming waste in these packages on the order of a whole lot of billions of {dollars} a yr, however a 2024 Social Safety Administration report discovered that the company misplaced nearer to $70 billion whole in improper funds from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 % of Social Safety funds. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to quickly lead Social Safety after being placed on administrative go away for sharing data with DOGE, pushed again final week on the concept the company is overrun with fraud and that useless folks older than 100 are getting funds, ProPublica reported after acquiring a recording of a closed-door assembly. DOGE’s false declare about useless folks receiving advantages “received in entrance of us,” one among Dudek’s deputies reportedly mentioned, however “it’s a victory that you just’re not seeing extra [misinformation], as a result of they’re being educated.” (Dudek didn’t reply to ProPublica’s request for remark.)
Some 7 million Individuals depend on Social Safety advantages for greater than 90 % of their revenue, and 54 million people and their dependents obtain retirement funds from the company. Even when Musk doesn’t get rid of the company, his tinkering may nonetheless have an effect on all of these Individuals’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed again its plans to chop off a lot of Social Safety’s cellphone providers (a generally used various to its on-line packages, significantly for aged and disabled Individuals), although it nonetheless plans to limit recipients’ skill to vary bank-deposit data over the cellphone.
In latest weeks, confusion has rippled by means of the Social Safety workforce and the general public; many individuals drop off kinds in individual, however workplace closures may disrupt that. In accordance with ProPublica, a number of IT contracts have been reduce or scaled again, and a number of other workers reported that their tech techniques are crashing day by day. Hundreds of jobs are being reduce, together with in regional discipline places of work, and your complete Social Safety employees has been supplied buyouts (at this time is the deadline for staff to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the company, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is searching for at Social Safety may set off “system collapse and an interruption of advantages” throughout the subsequent one to a few months.
In going wherever close to Social Safety—in saying the company’s identify in the identical sentence because the phrase get rid of—Musk is venturing additional than any presidential administration has in latest many years. Entitlement advantages are extraordinarily standard, and chopping the packages has lengthy been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the thought of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died earlier than it may make it to a vote within the Home or Senate.
The DOGE plan to chop $1 trillion in spending whereas leaving entitlements, which make up the majority of the federal finances, alone at all times appeared implausible. Within the November Wall Road Journal op-ed saying the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who’s now not a part of DOGE) wrote that those that say “we will’t meaningfully shut the federal deficit with out taking intention at entitlement packages” are deflecting “consideration from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE goals to handle.” However till there’s clear proof that this “magnitude” of fraud exists inside Social Safety, such claims allow Musk to poke at what was beforehand untouchable.
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Night Learn
I’d Had Jobs Earlier than, however None Like This
By Graydon Carter
I stayed with my aunt the primary night time and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the subsequent morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: just a few pairs of shorts, denims, a jacket, a few shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and a few Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable studying matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of many largest rail yards on this planet. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved out and in on a single day. Like many different younger males my age, I used to be slim, unmuscled, and comfortable. Within the corridor the place they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I appeared over a big poster that confirmed the define of a male physique and the costs the railroad paid in case you misplaced part of it. As I recall, legs introduced you $750 apiece. Arms had been $500. A foot introduced a mere $250. In Canadian {dollars}.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this text.
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