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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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President Donald Trump's commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, a billionaire businessman who was confirmed in his role by the Senate on Tuesday, warned of widespread fraud in the Social Security program, which he described as "wrong."
Lutnick suggested on Fox News on Wednesday that the Trump administration's Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was tapped by the president to shrink the size of the federal government, will be looking into cuts to the program which represents a crucial lifeline for millions of Americans.
Why It Matters
Over 68 million Americans receive Social Security benefits every month, according to the latest data shared by the Social Security Administration (SSA), which manages the program. More than 54 million of these are retired workers and their dependents, more than 5 million are family members of deceased retired workers, and more than 8 million are disabled workers and their dependents.
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The benefits are crucial to help older Americans, workers with disabilities, and families in which a spouse or parent has died maintain financial stability. Any cut to the program, which is already struggling with the looming threat of insolvency, could make an enormous difference in beneficiaries' financial health.
What To Know
Lutnick didn't offer any evidence of widespread fraud within the Social Security program. He said that the program would be looked at by DOGE.
"When I set up DOGE with Elon [Musk], so back in October [...] I flew down to Texas, got Elon Musk to do it. Here was our agreement: that Elon was going to cut a trillion dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse," Lutnick said on Wednesday, speaking to Fox News host Jesse Watters.
"Think about it: we have almost $4 trillion in entitlements and no one has ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong. You know Medicaid and Medicare are wrong," the commerce secretary said.
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"So, he [Musk] is going to cut a trillion, and then we'll get rid of all those tax scams that hammer against America and we're going to raise a trillion dollars of revenues," he said. "Our objective, under Donald Trump, is to bounce this budget and I'm telling you, you watch it, we're going to do it."
Recently, both Trump and Musk claimed that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments, a statement that was rejected by the new head of the SSA Lee Dudek. Dudek said that while some improper payments have likely been made, the numbers mentioned by the president and Musk are overstated.
According to data reviewed by Newsweek, 18.9 million people in the Social Security database were listed as 100 years or older in 2023; by comparison, Census Bureau data found only 86,000 people in the U.S. were living past the age of 100. But crucially, the majority of those listed in the database were not still receiving monthly checks. Of 18.4 million who had not earned benefits for 50 years and were deemed likely dead, only 44,000 were still earning checks, with just 13 of those listed as age 112 or older.
"Only about 44,000 of these were actually linked to payments. We're talking about database quirks here, not grand theft," Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, previously told Newsweek. "This kind of fearmongering about fraud isn't just wrong. It's flat-out dangerous. We're talking about a program that 67 million Americans rely on for retirement, disability, or survivor benefits. Real people, real lives."
What People Are Saying
Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, said: "A previous investigation revealed the SSA paid at least $71.8 billion in improper payments. The Social Security Administration is now working to find even more waste, fraud, and abuse in the Administration's whole-of-government effort to protect American taxpayers."
Chuck Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told the Associated Press: "By all means—go after any improper payments that are found, but let's not pretend that's where the system's biggest financial problems are." According to Blahous, Social Security "would be near the bottom of the list" of places in the federal government where error rates are high.
Sita Nataraj Slavov, a professor of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told the news agency: "The real concern is that this claim may mislead people into thinking there's an easy fix to Social Security's financial problems—that we can somehow restore solvency without making sacrifices through higher taxes or lower benefits. This is simply not true."
What's Next
DOGE's audit of the SSA could translate into an interruption in the release of Social Security benefits, the agency's former commissioner Martin O'Malley stated earlier this week.
"At this rate, they [DOGE] will break it. And they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits," he, according to a report by The Washington Post.
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