There’s one thing that Elon Musk’s has done efficiently: Spread wild misinformation about Social Security. Unfortunately, he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have the political power to act on his conspiracy theories, and they are doing serious damage to the Social Security Administration in the process.

A few months ago, Musk suggested that Social Security was the “biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and “might be the biggest fraud in history.”  In April, he pushed a different and absurdly specific lie about phones and fraud:

“One interesting statistic was that 40 percent of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent, meaning that it was someone trying to get a Social Security payment that was going to a senior instead to go to a fraud ring.”

The most interesting part of this is that it’s completely wrong. The Social Security Administration estimates that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud originates with phone calls – not that 40 percent of callers are trying to commit fraud. In fact, Social Security fraud is incredibly rare; as we pointed out recently, a 2024 report found $71 billion in improper payments over a seven year period – or roughly 0.3 percent of the total benefits paid out. And improper payments are not necessarily fraud; about one third of those improper payments were recovered.

Musk’s lie about phone fraud probably explains why he has tried to curtail SSA’s phone-based customer service, a move that has been walked back after considerable public outcry. But DOGE and Musk did not give up on their quest to vindicate themselves. As reported by Next Gov, while Musk was making his wild claims about phone fraud, DOGE was rolling out a new anti-fraud system. To no one’s surprise, it did not find anything resembling Musk’s conspiracy theory:

Under the new policy, the agency found that only two benefit claims out of over 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent — and they aren’t guaranteed to be so. Less than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially fraudulent at all.

This would be amusing – or even humiliating for Musk – if there wasn’t real damage being done in the process. According to an internal SSA memo, the changes have slowed claims processing by 20 percent and led to a “degradation of public service.”

The good news is that SSA appears to have abandoned this anti-fraud procedure – yet one more example of DOGE’s incompetence and inefficiency. But the state of the Social Security Administration is dire, thanks in large part to Elon Musk’s crusade. As the Washington Post reports, claims processing has been severely hampered by staff cuts, the website constantly crashes, and phone service has slowed.

DOGE’s incompetence is real, and extraordinarily well-documented. But if their goal is to degrade – or eventually privatize – Social Security, they might be succeeding. As Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) put it, “Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits… There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”