Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ramping up baseless claims that tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security payments, laying the groundwork to cut out “waste” and “fraud” as they look to make dramatic cuts for some of the most expensive programs in the federal budget to pay for astronomical tax cuts for America’s wealthiest households.
Despite promises on the campaign trail that his administration would not touch Social Security, and claiming that his Democratic rivals are the ones trying to end it, Trump and the world’s wealthiest man and his allies are trying to justify cuts to Social Security and federal health programs Medicare and Medicaid to come up with Musk’s target figure of more than $1 trillion in savings.
On Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News on Wednesday, recently confirmed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hailed the work of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is “gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick said.
“Think about it. We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements and no one has looked at it before,” he said.
“You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong, so he's going to cut one trillion,” Lutnick added. “Get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against Americans and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars in revenue, and our objective, under Donald Trump, is to balance this budget.”
Lutnick also suggested Trump will create an “External Revenue Service” and abolish the IRS to let “all the outsiders pay” federal taxes for which Americans are responsible.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday, Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something.”
“It’s going to be strengthened,” he said. “Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched.”
In remarks to supporters at Mar-a-Lago Wednesday, Trump returned to Musk’s bogus claims that people who are hundreds of years old are collecting Social Security.
“We have a very corrupt country. Very corrupt country. And it’s a sad thing to say, but, uh, we’re figuring it out. But the good thing about Social Security, and what I read, is, if you take all of those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent, or, incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security, with people that are 80, and 70, and 90, but not 200 years old,” according to Trump. “So it’s a very positive thing.”
On Monday, Musk wrote on X that “having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ‘ALIVE’ when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem.”
“Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second,” he said.
Musk’s bogus statements largely stem from Social Security running on a software that uses the COBOL programming language, which doesn’t include a date type, WIRED reported.
Social Security administrators have acknowledged, however, that less than 1 percent of its benefits are paid out improperly, according to a 2024 inspector general report. The number of beneficiaries 99 or older is less than 90,000, in a country of more than 330 million, according to figures from the administration.
Earlier this year, the government began to claw back more than $31 million federal payments — not just Social Security — that appeared to be improperly distributed to dead people. The Treasury Department estimated that a recovery process would collect $215 million within a three-year period up to 2026 — far below Musk’s $1 trillion goal.
Any meaningful reduction of government spending to get to Musk’s $1 trillion or $2 trillion figure would require some combination of severe cuts to expensive but critical government programs — as well as the Department of Defense — and tax increases.
The national debt is expected to increase by roughly $20 trillion within the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Trump, meanwhile, is commanding lawmakers to make massive tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest households. House Republicans are proposing a budget blueprint that would add $4.5 trillion in new deficits through tax cuts, with an additional $2 trillion in cuts to “mandatory” spending that covers programs like Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance.
A budget plan negotiated by House Speaker Mike Johnson, and approved by Trump, would cut $880 billion from Medicaid over the next decade to pay for a portion of the president’s proposed tax cuts.
Trump has separately promised to exempt Social Security benefits from income taxes, which would cost the program more than $2 trillion over the next decade, without any plan to recover those costs elsewhere.
