Just days after concocting an absurd and obviously false story about millions of dead people getting Social Security checks (a misreading of data he suggested “might be the biggest fraud in history”), Trump adviser Elon Musk doubled down on the misinformation by claiming on the Joe Rogan podcast that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
The idea that the country’s most effective anti-poverty program is actually a con goes back at least a few decades, but it’s pretty rare to hear this talking point from right-wing commentators and Republican lawmakers these days.
In the past, the Ponzi Schemers claimed that younger workers were paying into a system that would not exist when they reached retirement age. Musk was making a familiar argument when he said, “If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue.” There is nothing here resembling a scam, though. In the 1980s, lawmakers made adjustments so that the program amassed a surplus – taking in more money than it sent out – in order to account for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.
The Congressional Budget Office issues a report every year that projects the program’s long term financial picture; If the government were to make no changes at all, Social Security would still pay out almost 80 percent of scheduled benefits. Of course, it would be better for everyone if lawmakers took action to address this shortfall, as they did in the past. Eliminating the cap on taxable income, for instance – so that millionaires and billionaires like Musk contributed more – would generate substantial revenue to address any future funding gap.
At the moment, the Trump administration is pursuing a radically different agenda – attempting to slash thousands of jobs at the Social Security Administration, and possibly even outsourcing some functions to private companies (this is a bizarre idea; given that Social Security’s administrative costs are very low, there is little chance that such a move would save much money). These changes will do basically nothing to improve the program’s finances; it is likely we will see a decline in customer service and an erosion in trust for the system overall. And it could be much worse – former commissioner Martin O’Malley has warned that serious disruptions in receiving benefits could happen in a matter of weeks or months.
The level of turmoil that DOGE has created inside SSA has been well-documented. The Washington Post reports that there has been an “exodus” of staff that is “fast depleting decades of expertise” – leading to an increase in wait times and delays in reviews of claims. One employee told the paper, “Morale is in the toilet… We all know what DOGE wants to do, which is just break us, so they can privatize us.”
Staff cuts do more than just harm morale, though. As David Dayen at the American Prospect notes, a recent research paper looked at the effects of Social Security staffing cuts in the 1980s, and found that almost 80,000 people lost benefits that they were eligible to receive.
Perhaps that is the point of making all of these wildly false claims about Social Security: Slashing jobs and attempting to discredit the program is about more than creating a sense of chaos. Many people will stop receiving benefits they need and have earned, and the system as a whole will function poorly for everyone else.
