Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual, suggested on Monday that his government cost-cutting team would scrutinize Social Security and other entitlement spending, describing the expenditures as rife with fraudulent transactions and repeating a conspiracy theory that Democrats were using the programs as a “gigantic magnet to attract illegal immigrants and have them stay in the country.”
In an interview with Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business commentator who served as Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser in his first term, Mr. Musk said that his team now numbered over 100 staff members and repeated familiar and unsupported claims about entitlement spending that dovetailed with the great replacement conspiracy theory — the idea that white Americans are deliberately being pushed out by noncitizens — which Mr. Musk has nodded to on other occasions.
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending, which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements,” he claimed, “so that’s the big one to eliminate.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Musk referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And he has dispatched members of his cost-cutting team — known as the Department of Government Efficiency — to access databases housed at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency that manages the health coverage of more than 100 million people, to flag suspicious payments.
Contrary to Mr. Musk’s claims on Monday, undocumented immigrants working in the United States do not collect Social Security payments, but they pay tens of billions of dollars into the program every year. An analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that in 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed more than $25 billion in Social Security taxes. Those funds effectively act as a subsidy for American beneficiaries.
Mr. Musk has frequently seized on limited discoveries over the course of his audits of federal agencies, publicizing minor accounting hiccups as evidence of systematic fraud.
He and Mr. Trump have already done so with Social Security, trumpeting a finding that tens of millions of people born over a century ago remain in the Social Security Administration databases with no recorded date of death. But while both men have pointed to that as evidence of widespread fraud, the issue is well-known, and almost none of those people listed are recorded as receiving payments from the agency.
Democrats have criticized Mr. Musk’s apparent appetite to scrutinize entitlement programs, whose popularity has been durable. They have described the efforts as a thinly veiled attempt to pare back programs that millions of retirees depend upon. Previous Republican attempts to whittle down those programs proved to be a political third rail and had been abandoned after public pushback.
During the interview, Mr. Musk repeated claims he has made in recent weeks that his team’s goal was to “defeat” what he described as “rule by the bureau,” in which he said civil servants have worked to “thwart presidential policy.”
He said that his team had scrutinized “pretty much” every federal agency in what he referred to as “tech support” for the departments being cut.
Even as lawsuits have moved forward in federal court challenging the constitutionality of Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting initiatives, he said his team may well remain in place for another year.
“I mean, frankly, I can’t believe I’m here doing this, it’s kind of bizarre,” he said.
“Really I just don’t want America to go bankrupt,” he added.
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