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‘A huge scandal’: Internal doc exposes Trump hunt for Social Security fraud as a sham


Story by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams • 23h • 3 min read

© provided by AlterNet

An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.

The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely claimed in March that “40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent.”

The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, “No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases.” Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services.

Nextgov/FCW noted Thursday that the Trump administration’s deployment of the anti-fraud tools beginning last month “did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.”

“The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the anti-fraud [checks], a move that ‘delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,'” Nextgov/FCW reported, citing the internal document.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that “the Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans.”

“Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits,” said Warren. “There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”

On social media, Warren called the revelations in the internal administration document “a HUGE scandal.”

It’s long been clear that Social Security fraud is minuscule, with an inspector general report published last year estimating that just 0.84% of Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022 were dispensed improperly—and even those improper payments were not necessarily fraudulent.

The new reporting out Thursday bolstered warnings that the Trump administration’s hunt for fraud is a mere pretext for slashing Social Security benefits and weakening the program.

“Turns out there ISN’T rampant Social Security fraud, but Elon’s witch hunt, driven by his insane conspiracy theories, IS keeping seniors from getting their benefits as quickly as they should be,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media. “THIS is Republican governing: hunting for nonexistent fraud while breaking Social Security.”

Frank Bisignano, the newly confirmed SSA administrator, has close ties to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and has defended the president’s false claim that tens of millions of “dead” people are receiving Social Security benefits.

CNN reported earlier this week that as SSA combs “through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead” at Trump and Musk’s behest, agency staffers are “seeing more people coming in to be resurrected” after being falsely deemed deceased.

“I’ve been saying it all along,” former SSA chief Martin O’Malley wrote Thursday. “Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security.”

FDR’s grandson issues new warning about Trump’s targeting of Social Security


James Roosevelt Jr., Henry Scott Wallace And June Hopkins, Common Dreams

April 06, 2025 | 08:38AM ET

Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.

Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America’s workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.

The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.

Save Social Security. Don’t “outsource” it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the worldis over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in “entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate“.

Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.

Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security “will not be touched, it will only be strengthened” (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).

Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It’s an outrage against all working people.

But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to “strengthen” Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as “outsourcing.”

The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).

The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).

What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It’s an outrage against all working people.

What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.

Save Social Security. Don’t “outsource” it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.