Elon Musk Admits Troubling Details We All Suspected About Social Security

The Department of Government Efficiency (otherwise known as DOGE) led by Elon Musk has been making radical and widespread changes to various arms of the federal government. Recently, these actions have led some people to be worried about the status of Social Security in 2025, and following some statements made by Musk in an interview with Fox News on March 9th, unfortunately, these fears may soon be manifesting in reality. In the interview, Musk made claims that the federal benefits program is experiencing high levels of fraud that need to be dealt with to the tune of cutting billions of dollars of funding to the program.

However, one certainly has a right to wonder exactly how valid these claims of fraud actually are. Social Security is utilized by millions of retirees across the nation, and cutting significant funding to this program could have far-reaching consequences to those that benefit from it. At the same time, per the Social Security website, tax payer revenue is effectively how this program is funded, and if tax dollars are indeed being misused through any of the alleged fraud, American citizens have a right to know. Here's what Musk plans to do with the Social Security Administration, as well as what the consequences would be if he cuts funding to it.

The fate of Social Security under DOGE and the Trump administration looks rather precarious. Under the direction of DOGE, the agency announced it is letting go of 12% of the workforce this month, and in a recent interview with Fox News, Elon Musk claimed that large levels of entitlement fraud have been a massive issue with the program. As a solution to this, he stated that he intends to cut somewhere in the range of $500-$700 billion dollars of annual funding to the program.

Social Security entitlement fraud is when someone uses false information to receive financial benefits from the program. This can be enacted in a variety of different ways, including using someone else's identity for financial gain (i.e. identity theft), continuing to receive financial benefits after the death of the beneficiary, and making false statements on a claim, to name a few. Partaking in any fraud of this nature has significant legal consequences and could cause someone to lose their Social Security benefits altogether. Regardless, according to the Social Security inspector general, only around $72 billion dollars worth of improper payments were issued between 2015 and 2022. This amounts to around $9 billion dollars per year during this period, a number far lower than Musk's $500-$700 billion dollar claims of annual fraud.

In light of the fiasco caused by Elon Musk's remarks, the Trump administration issued a press release ensuring that it will not be cutting any funding towards Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid payments for recipients. It was also further stated in the release that the U.S. government loses somewhere between $200-$500 billion dollars annually to fraud based on data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office published in April of 2024. This includes the $72 billion in improper payments by Social Security between 2015-2022 and another $140 billion from the offices of Medicare and Medicaid in 2024 alone.

I is likely that the 73 million current beneficiaries of Social Security don't have much to worry about in regards to their benefits being slashed. However, the Social Security trust funds do, as they are currently facing imminent bankruptcy if nothing is done by Congress. This inaction would result in the federal agency only being able to pay out 83% of what it owes to recipients by 2035. Knowing this, cutting funding to an already financially unstable federal agency certainly won't be doing it any justice. At the same time, seeing as deca-billions worth of our tax dollars are currently being wasted on fraud, it's clear that something has to be done about it. It just has to be done appropriately so that beneficiaries of agencies like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are not negatively impacted in the process.