DOGE first grabbed the headlines with astonishing claims of massive fraud in Social Security. First Elon Musk, head and not-head of DOGE, announced they had found twenty million dead-but-alive Social Security Numbers in “the database.”1 White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt then told everyone that the folks at DOGE “suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security benefits.”2 And President Trump, in his first address to Congress of his second term, said: “We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors[.]”3 Soon after, Musk added a new wrinkle, stating that most of the fraud they were finding wasn’t in SS itself, but rather SS was being used as a “bank shot” for fraud in other programs, like unemployment, disability, “sort of fake medical payments,” and “other things.”4
Given all this outrageous fraud that was being found and eliminated in these entitlement programs, we’d expect to see that spending on those programs has gone down by a lot. Very oddly, it appears spending on all entitlement programs has actually gone up! How is that possible if DOGE eliminated so much fraud?
Your guess is as good as mine.
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