Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) on Tuesday slammed tech billionaire Elon Musk for claiming that Social Security is plagued by widespread fraud and that as many as 20 million “dead” people are receiving Social Security benefits.
“Elon Musk confirmed what many of us had been warning about for a long time: Republicans are getting ready to gut Social Security and Medicare,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.
“The richest man on earth repeated again a bevy of lies that entitlement programs, [which] tens of millions of people rely on, are riddled with fraud and abuse. That’s a pretext to slashing them. But it’s false,” Schumer said.
Schumer noted that Musk said “most of the federal spending is entitlements,” which the head of the Department of Government Efficiency called “the big one to eliminate.”
The Democratic leader said that’s a clear signal Musk wants to cut Social Security.
“It’s rare to hear Republicans tell the truth about their plans so directly. What Elon Musk is saying is that, sooner or later, Republicans are going to target people’s Social Security and Medicare benefits,” he said. “The outrage that the richest man in the world would tell millions of seniors who depend on those checks each month that it’s a fraud, that it’s waste.”
Musk in an interview with Fox Business suggested he wants to cut between $500 billion and $700 billion in government waste.
He claimed there are “20 million people who are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database, something the Social Security Administration has disputed.
Social Security’s inspector general issued a report in 2024 reporting that improper payments accounted for $71.8 billion in spending from 2015 to 2022, less than 1 percent of the $8.6 trillion the agency handed out in benefits during that time.
Musk last week called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan.
“If you look at the future obligations of Social Security it far exceeds, uh, the tax revenue,” Musk argued.
Schumer accused Musk of laying the groundwork to cut Social Security benefits.
“Musk is shamelessly lying about Social Security, claiming it’s riddled with fraud in order to justify taking benefits away from seniors and retirees,” he said.
