When Elon Musk and his DOGE boys were raiding the Social Security Administration (SSA) and coming up with their nutty fantasies about millions of dead people getting Social Security, they apparently didn’t bother to spend any time looking at actual data about the program. If they had, they might have gotten a bit of understanding about not only the program, but also the labor market and immigration.

Elon Musk has been obsessed with the “Great Replacement theory,” a far-right conspiracy theory that has someone (usually “the Jews”) conspiring to replace good white Americans with immigrants. The surge in immigration during the Biden years is supposed to be key evidence for this story. As Musk and others are eager to point out, the number of foreign-born workers has risen sharply in the last five years, whereas the number of native-born workers has been virtually stagnant.

While Musk seems convinced this is evidence for the great conspiracy, reality fans see something much simpler at work: the retirement of the baby boom cohorts. Since all of us boomer types were born between 1946 and 1964, it was possible to know, even without AI, that large numbers would be retiring in the years 2020 and 2025.

The SSA knew this back in 2005. If Musk and DOGE boys ever did their homework (generally a good idea for those interested in “efficiency”) they could have looked at the 2005 Social Security Trustees Report. They then would have discovered the plans for the Great Replacement. (I’m sure it was in earlier reports also, just happened to grab that one.)

The Trustees Report shows that the number of workers covered by the program was projected to increase by 2.66 million from 2020 to 2025, going from 176,049,000 in 2020 to 178,705,000 in 2025. The Report also gives projections for immigration for these years. It projected an average of 900,000 immigrants would come here each year between 2020 and 2025, for a total of 4,500,000.

The bulk of immigrants who come to the United States come here to work. Last year, the employment to population ratio for non-native people was 63.7 percent. Applying this to the 4.5 million immigrants projected by SSA gives us a projection of 2.87 immigrant workers.

Elon Musk told us that his DOGE boys were “super-high IQ.” That presumably means that they could figure out that if the total number of workers in the country rises by 2.66 million, and the number of immigrant workers rises by 2.87 million, then the number of native-born workers is falling by a bit more than 200,000.

There you have it. The SSA predicted the Great Replacement way back in 2005, before they even knew about the surge in immigration following the pandemic. This was before the even knew that Joe Biden would be president in 2020-24. And Elon Musk and the DOGE boys could have discovered all this if they just took a minute to look around at SSA’s publicly available documents, instead of getting all the confidential data about our work history and tax payments.