Just in: “Why the Real Social Security Fraudsters are Trump and Musk” Read more…

Do not be fooled by Elon Musk backing down from a plan to scrap the Social Security Administration’s phone service.

The impulse behind it remains—despite the momentary reverse.

Even as President Donald Trump repeatedly pledges ”social security will not be touched,” he and First Buddy Musk are sure to continue their ongoing effort to eviscerate the agency that administers it.

And they are doing so with strategies similar to those Trump employed when he sought to steal the 2020 election by falsely claiming his opponent had stolen it.

Back in the aftermath of what Trump still insists was a rigged election, his minions pursued myths about dead voters and discarded ballots and “flipping” voting machines. They re-tallied votes and combed through voter rolls and accused election workers of being party to fraud. And they came up with nothing that would have materially affected the outcome.

After he actually won the 2024 election with the considerable help of Musk’s mega-millions, Trump gave the world’s richest man license to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to chainsaw government spending and dismantle the supposed deep state of right-wing imagining.

In a sworn affidavit first reported by The Washington Post, former senior Social Security Administration (SSA) official Tiffany Flick says DOGE operative Mike Russo appeared to arrive at the agency with the presumption there would be wanton waste and fraud. As the new SSA chief information officer, Russo then unsuccessfully sought to substantiate a myth, just as the Trump crew had after the 2020 election.

Flick, who was then the acting chief of staff to the acting commissioner, says in the affidavit that “as soon as Mr. Russo started, the commissioner’s office offered to assist him in the areas related to potential fraud to help him understand how the programs work, what measures the agency currently takes, and areas that need specific focus.”

Flick says Russo was offered briefings on the current measures “to help ensure the accuracy of benefit payments , including those measures that ensure we are not paying benefits to deceased individuals.”

However, Mr. Russo seemed completely focused on questions from DOGE officials based on the general myth of supposed widespread Social Security fraud, rather than facts,” she adds in the affidavit, which was filed as part of a federal suit filed by Democracy Forward to black DOGE’s intrusions into SSA databases containing private nearly every American.

The DOGE boys, who did not respond to a request for comment, had been diving blindly into SSA data looking for fraud just as the election deniers had into the voting records. They came upon long lists of people more than a century old who had not been recorded as dead. The staff explained to Russo that the failure resulted from the agency using COBOL, a 60-year-old program. The DOGE folks were assured that none of these folks or their relatives were getting checks.

But that was just the truth, and if relayed to Musk, it did not stop him from posting on the social media platform he owns that, “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ‘ALIVE’ when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem. Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second …”

Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

Musk also posted a host of misleading numbers that Trump cited in his joint address the next day.

“Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old,” he said. “It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119…. 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.”