Elon Musk, President Trump’s emotional support billionaire, took great delight in announcing the millions of dead Americans on Social Security.

It was, like many of his pronouncements, debunked, watered down, walked back, and wrong. But a hyped-up claim shouted from a rooftop finds a larger audience than a fact-checking follow-up. Certainly, fraud should be rooted out and eliminated. But using fraud as an argument to discredit Social Security is like blaming banks for bank robbers. As Willie Sutton said, “It’s where the money is.”

Musk and others also pushed the false narrative that Social Security was used as a way to fraudulently register noncitizens to vote.

Even if we take President Trump at his word—not a generally rewarding policy, but whatever—that he will not privatize Social Security, it’s not out of the question that he could create the conditions that would make privatizing the popular program attractive.

How?

By making the program a lot less popular.

DOGE’s ultimate goal is cutting costs—and taxes. Instead of providing better services more efficiently, DOGE’s tactics so far have leaned into simply not providing many of the services—whether it’s the work of USAID and Voice of America, or the NIH and the National Weather Service. Why should we think Musk, who has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” is working to improve the program instead of to implode it?

 While Musk wants to push those receiving Social Security benefits to interacting with the system either online or in person—not on the phone or through mail—he is also proposing cutting staff and closing some of the regional offices. And if you’ve ever tried to explain a TV remote to an elderly person—or understand it yourself—you know that the interface with technology isn’t always as intuitive as, say, a leader in the tech industry might think it is.

MarketWatch explains how a privatization scenario can emerge from Musk’s initiatives:

“The Social Security Administration is in the midst of major reforms triggered by “DOGE,” including staffing reductions, budget cuts and a transition to online or in-person visits for certain services. These changes, along with more expected to come, could erode customer service, impact benefits and — eventually, experts say — diminish consumer confidence to the point the federal government chooses to hand the program off to the private sector.

“You take them down the road of, ‘Why do we have Social Security in the first place? Why don’t we have a private system if the government can’t do its job?’” said Jason Fichtner, former acting deputy commissioner at the SSA under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In a “Policy Basics” fact sheet from a year ago, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reminded us of a number of important facts to keep in mind about Social Security:

• • • It rewards personal saving and private pensions because it isn’t means-tested—it doesn’t reduce or deny benefits to people whose income or assets exceed a certain level.
    • Universal participation and the absence of means-testing make Social Security very efficient to administer. Administrative costs amount to only 0.5 percent of annual benefits, far below the percentages for private retirement annuities.
    • Social Security lifted 4 million children above the poverty line in 2022.
    • Without Social Security benefits, nearly 4 in 10 adults aged 65 and older would have incomes below the official poverty line, all else being equal, according to our estimates based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2023 Current Population Survey. Social Security benefits lift more than 16.5 million older adults above the official poverty line, these estimates show.
    • Social Security is the largest source of income for most beneficiaries. For 4 in 10 retirees in 2015, it provided at least 50 percent of their income, and for 1 in 7 it provided at least 90 percent of income.

In my book The Privatization of Everything, I wrote that privatizing Social Security would place vulnerable Americans at the mercy of the market (and if one is looking for what could possibly go wrong with placing America’s retirement funds in the stock market, the last couple of months is what).

As I said in the book, “The privatization boosters seem to either have short memories that magically exclude the last recession or believe that an average rate of return means that everyone will actually get that rate of return. In fact, some retirees will win in a privatized Social Security system, and some will lose spectacularly. On the other hand, there are always stockbrokers, money managers, and assorted middlemen in these Social Security privatization schemes. They will always win.”

Donald Cohen
Executive Director