Image Source: Vivek Ramaswamy, via AI image generation – Public Domain
Yesterday the Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it was reversing plans to eliminate the option of providing service over the phone. This was a response to a public outcry over the proposed policy. The reason for the outcry was that many older people (the type most likely to get Social Security benefits) are distrustful and uncomfortable with the Internet. They therefore rely on telephone service for things like arranging direct deposit of their Social Security benefits. (SSA is still not allowing changes to direct deposit over the phone, contrary to what I wrote in an earlier version.)
SSA should be applauded for reversing an obviously wrongheaded policy, but it is worth asking how it ever came up with the idea of eliminating phone service to begin with. Apparently, this was one of the efficiency enhancing measures that the “super-high IQ” DOGE team developed. This is a great example of how the ostensible “efficiency” being pushed by Elon Musk and his DOGE team has little to do with actually promoting efficiency in government.
There are some simple and obvious points that we can say about government efficiency. First, we have a $7 trillion federal budget. That fact means that we can be absolutely certain that there is some waste, fraud, and abuse. We also can be sure that some of the 2.4 million workers employed by the federal government are lazy and/or incompetent, just as we can be certain that some of the 154 million workers employed in the private sector are lazy and/or incompetent.
But moving from these obvious truths to increasing government efficiency is a big step. We actually do have people within the government that have been working for years trying to improve efficiency. Most obviously, there is the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which regularly audits various government departments and makes specific recommendations on how they can increase efficiency.
We also have the inspector generals (IG) of the agencies and departments, who review processes and contracts within agencies like USAID and look for fraud and abuse. Many of the widely publicized incidents of fraud or abuse have been uncovered by these IGs.
Incredibly, one of Donald Trump’s first moves in office was to fire most of the IGs. While it is questionable whether he even has the legal authority to do this (the law says that they can only be fired with cause), it makes zero sense that a president anxious to get rid of waste in government would fire people who in many cases have decades of experience exposing waste and fraud.
One defense of the firings is that the IGs have not been successful in eliminating waste, but this line is just repeated to generate confusion. The IGs only have power to make recommendations, they can’t do anything on their own. If Trump, Musk, and DOGE were actually interested in eliminating waste and abuse, they would review the reports from the various IGs, as well as recommendations from GAO and use these as a guide for eliminating problems that have already been identified.
Instead, they have largely run around blindly, making cuts at agencies before they even bothered to learn what the agencies or their workers do. This is exactly what happened when they fired essential staff at the National Nuclear Security Administration before they realized they were needed to ensure the safety of our nuclear weapon stockpile. They subsequently had to rush to rehire them. They had difficulty tracking down some workers because they had deleted their government e-mails.
The story is perhaps nowhere more egregious than with Social Security. Elon Musk and his DOGE team have tried to get into our confidential files on our work and benefit history. There is no remotely plausible reason that DOGE needs our personal information to detect fraud and abuse in Social Security. If they want to evaluate whether the records are accurate, they can use deidentified data, where our names are kept confidential. Researchers both inside and outside the Social Security Administration (SSA) have used this data for decades to detect problems in the program. They did not need to get, and possibly alter, confidential data.
The other problem with Elon and the DOGE gang’s reckless approach to Social Security is that they haven’t bothered to make any effort to understand the program and instead seem determined to just develop confused propaganda points to attack the program. Their most widely touted point is that Social Security has millions of dead people on their roles, many of them well over 100 years old, some over 200 years old.
Contrary to what Musk and Trump have told the country these dead people are not getting benefits. The SSA knows very well that these people are dead. They haven’t removed them from their lists because it would cost millions of dollars to do so, and there seemed no obvious reason to do so. A department actually interested in efficiency might agree with this decision.
The other line that Musk has been pressing is that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. This is more than a bit fantastic as a claim. The program has been around for more than 80 years and has paid every penny of scheduled benefits. And we know exactly where money will come from to support the program for the indefinite future.
The only sense in which it is a Ponzi scheme is that future benefits will depend on people paying taxes into the system. But government bonds could be said to be a Ponzi scheme in the same way. If no one was paying taxes to the government, government bonds would not be worth anything. But if we want to go to this level of absurdity, even stocks of private companies would qualify as Ponzi schemes, since shares of Tesla and SpaceX probably will also not be worth very much if the U.S. government collapses.
Musk clearly has no interest in making Social Security more efficient, he is just interested in trying to undermine the credibility of the program, presumably with the goal of making people more amenable to cuts and/or privatization. DOGE is clearly not about efficiency. Maybe a better acronym would be DOPE, Department of Propaganda Enhancement.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
