Donald Trump’s administration has taken a sledgehammer to the Social Security system, and it’s using the president’s election denial playbook to do so along the way.
As with his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020, Trump began his political attack on Social Security with baseless claims of widespread fraud by millions of people — even sharing similarly inaccurate stories about dead people and undocumented immigrants.
He’s now moving on to the next phase: attempting to create some kind of paper trail. As part of his election denial efforts, his lawyers assembled hundreds of affidavits from people who purportedly witnessed fraud. But those affidavits fell apart once they were presented to judges, who largely found them unsupported or simply not credible.
This time, Trump is assigning federal prosecutors to look into Social Security fraud and directing an inspector general to investigate recipients over 100 years old with mismatched records under a memorandum signed at the White House on Tuesday.
As with election denial, there’s no evidence for the widespread fraud claims pushed by Trump and his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk.
The most recent inspector general’s audit found that over a five-year period ending in May 2018, an estimated $33.5 million in benefits were redirected to a different bank account, a typical form of Social Security fraud. That’s a relatively small number in a system that pays out $1.5 trillion each year in benefits.
Trump’s claim that “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” are receiving benefits has been thoroughly debunked.
And the wild claims about immigrants undermining Social Security turn out to be the opposite of the truth, as immigrants help support Social Security because they pay into the system without qualifying for benefits. Even undocumented immigrants were estimated to have paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022, according to a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. In 2020, Trump also sought to have legitimate votes thrown out in court. This time, his administration reportedly put 6,300 names of immigrants who obtained Social Security numbers through a legal process onto the “death master file” — essentially legally declaring them dead — with the goal of making it hard for them to access banking services like credit cards and checking accounts, according to reports in The New York Times and other outlets. On election denial, Trump’s goal was to overturn his loss. This time, his goal appears to be to make dramatic cuts to a popular benefits program that might otherwise be politically impossible. Subscribe to Trump’s First 100 Days newsletter for weekly updates on and expert insight into the key issues and figures defining his second term.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW.
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