BREAKINGVIEWS-White House plays with Social Security fire

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Gabriel Rubin

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Elon Musk sees dead people – a lot of them. The White House’s billionaire cost-cutter-in-chief claims to have uncovered “the biggest fraud in history,” inside the Social Security Administration, after finding 20 million people over 100 years old in its files. Such histrionics, when combined with the administration’s other clumsy meddling so far, make it all too easy to worry that legitimate payments to seniors are a disaster waiting to happen.

The agency responsible for issuing checks to 73 million retired and disabled Americans is sacrosanct in U.S. politics. After Musk strong-armed his way into systems loaded with personal and financial information for all Americans, under the auspices of his Department of Government Efficiency, the acting Social Security chief resigned in protest over the weekend, the Washington Post reported.

Musk’s claims about millions of beneficiaries gaming the system, including by collecting money for presumably long-deceased people born in 1875, are outlandish. There is inevitably some wrongdoing inside a program so big, but 1875 also happens to be the default birth year used for incomplete records, and the agency automatically stops payments for anyone over 115. A 2023 government audit also found that 98% of centenarians in the database are not receiving benefits, and most of the ones who are simply managed to reach a triple-digit age. President Donald Trump regurgitated the attack, telling reporters on Tuesday that "if you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of the sudden we have a very powerful Social Security."

The bluster would be less scary if not for other missteps already made under Trump. In trying to effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the administration nearly cut off access to an essential tool for the mortgage market. Team Trump also is scrambling to rehire nuclear safety workers it fired in the name of saving money.

Social Security, a major category of spending that does not require Congress to regularly reauthorize its funds, almost certainly will need to be revamped in some way to account for the country’s ageing population and the shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. Trump’s avowed plans to restrict immigration also threaten to accelerate the process.

Any suggestion of changes to Social Security, however, typically spurs significant backlash. A 2005 effort under George W. Bush to privatize the agency failed and no serious effort has been attempted since. Trump also has promised to protect the program and even proposed exempting the benefits from taxes. In the extreme, giving outsiders access to the plumbing risks cutting off payments to deserving recipients. Even just shouting hyperbolically about criminal behavior at the agency is playing with fire.

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CONTEXT NEWS

The acting head of the Social Security Administration resigned after aides to Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and White House senior adviser, demanded access to sensitive payment systems, the Washington Post reported on February 16.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that President Donald Trump had asked Musk to find cases of fraud at the pension program, which also handles disability payments.

"They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments," Leavitt told Fox News on February 16.