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During a Fox Business Network interview on Monday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and supposed head of the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), suggested that so-called federal “entitlement” programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid could be the next to face substantial funding cuts under his watch.
Musk suggested that somewhere between $500 billion to $700 billion should be cut from those programs, dubiously claiming that was the amount of waste they generated. However, fraud levels for those programs are very low — indeed, an estimate of wasteful spending from Social Security between the years 2015 and 2022 found that only around $71 billion in waste was actually found, equaling less than 1 percent of the total benefits paid out by the program during that time.
Entitlement spending is “the big one to eliminate” from federal funding, Musk added.
Musk pushed other claims that the programs make payments to “20 million people who are definitely dead,” mirroring assertions he made earlier this month that were also deemed false by fact-checkers. He also baselessly claimed that Democrats are using the programs to attract undocumented immigrants to enter the country “by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.”
Undocumented immigrants cannot legally access benefits from these social safety net programs, though many working in the U.S. are paying taxes toward them. Even if a person can obtain green card status, they are disallowed from accessing benefits for at least five years.
Musk’s insistence that he and DOGE could “eliminate” hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending is inconsistent with previous assurances from President Donald Trump that his administration wouldn’t “touch” those widely popular programs.
Recent polling shows Americans want more spending, not less, on these three programs. An Economist/YouGov poll from last week, for example, found that 77 percent of Americans want spending levels kept the same or increased for Medicaid, while 87 percent said the same for Medicare and 88 percent for Social Security.
Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders also said Musk’s errant statements on the programs were intentional.
“Why do you make it look like it’s a broken, dysfunctional system? The reason is to get people to lose faith in the system and then you can give it over to Wall Street,” Sanders said in a CNN interview on Monday night, reacting to Musk’s statements.
He added:
I think this is a prelude not only to cutting benefits but to privatizing Social Security itself. I think that’s in the back of their mind, if you make the system dysfunctional, why would anybody want to support it?
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