Newly released facts from Social Security demolish Elon Musk's fraud claims - again

By Brett Arends

We taxpayers are still waiting for our $1 trillion of annual savings. This latest report shows we will be waiting a long time. Until eternity, actually.

"It's often impossible to prove a negative, but the latest report is yet another one suggesting that this big pot of gold just doesn't exist - and never did," writes Brett Arends.

I'm not surprised that President Donald Trump and the Social Security Administration put out the latest inspector-general report the day before Thanksgiving, when nobody is paying attention.

It's yet another embarrassment.

The latest 57-page report to Congress details a variety of Social Security frauds that took place under Trump's first administration, only to be caught, stopped and prosecuted ... er ... under Joe Biden.

And it confirms what has long been suspected, and which will come as no surprise to MarketWatch readers: namely that Elon Musk and Trump were talking total nonsense for the first six months of this year, when they were claiming that there was a "huge" amount of fraud in Social Security, including hundreds of thousands of dead people claiming benefits.

None of this, of course, will catch up with the Trillion-Dollar Man himself, Musk, who got months of juicy headlines promising huge fraud discoveries, then fled town before the facts arrived. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Musk promised voters he would find "$2 trillion" in savings from the federal budget, though it later turned out he was supposed to say only $1 trillion. Well, the great entrepreneur must have had the budget savings number confused with the Tesla (TSLA) pay deal he was simultaneously in pursuit of.

We taxpayers are still waiting for our $1 trillion of annual savings. And, importantly, we are still waiting for the Social Security program to be rescued from its imminent funding crisis by the exposure of all this waste and fraud.

As the latest report shows, we will be waiting a long time. Until eternity, actually.

The savings are so small that the report actually spells them out in full - "$194,380,293" in fines and restitution, for example, rather than, say, "$194.4 million" or even "$0.194 billion."

Social Security spends $1.6 trillion a year - or, to put it in those same terms, $1,600,000,000,000. It has 70 million beneficiaries, or, if you prefer, 70,000,000.

So we may have to calm our excitement that total fines and restitution in the first half came to $194 million, as mentioned, or that another $287 million in costs have been "questioned," or that another $819 million has been "put to better use."

That last figure represents the total amount of "improper payments" that the inspector general's team reckon the Social Security Administration has avoided making during the past six months.

The figure during the equivalent six months last year, with Biden in the Oval Office? Er ... $10.5 billion.

In total, the inspector general says that if all of the efficiency recommendations were put into effect, the total savings would equal $6.68 billion. That's a total figure, not a recurring, annual one.

The total number of "impostor scam" allegations received in total is 27,665, the report says. This isn't the number of scams, just the number of allegations. This includes people nationwide claiming that a scam artist called them up and falsely said they were from the Social Security Administration, as well as all those allegations of people falsely and fraudulently trying to claim Social Security benefits.

During the six-month period, the Social Security Administration referred 845 people to the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution for fraud or attempted fraud, and another 111 to state or local prosecutors.

Look, I don't mean to be churlish. It is always good news if they find waste or fraud and they stop it. That should be obvious. And I don't mean to underappreciate the people at the Social Security inspector general's office, who I am sure do fine work. As a taxpayer, a Social Security in-payer, and someone who appreciates efficiency and good government, I am grateful.

But for a period of several months earlier this year, there was a massive political and propaganda campaign run out of Washington, D.C., that sought to persuade us that there was gigantic, epic, "yuge" waste, fraud and abuse in these federal programs.

It's not news to anyone - at least, anyone over about age 14 - that there is some waste, fraud and abuse in a $1.6 trillion program. Your household pet probably could have worked that out. The claim was that it was enormous, that there was a huge conspiracy to hide it, and that when Trump, Musk, Howard Lutnick and the so-called and now-disbanded Department of Government Efficiency got into the bureaucracy it was going to root it out. And, above all, the claim was that the fraud was so vast that it was going to make a material difference to the budget, to taxes and to Social Security. We could slash taxes, even at a time of eye-watering federal deficits, because putting a stop to all the fraud was going to pay for it.

It's famously difficult to prove a negative, but the latest report is yet another one suggesting that this big pot of gold just doesn't exist - and never did.

Which, as I say, helps explain why they put it out the day before Thanksgiving.

-Brett Arends

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

11-28-25 1234ET