If Elon Musk possessed even a sliver of humility, he might consider keeping a low profile and refraining from opining on matters he clearly knows little about. Thanks in part to Musk’s combination of arrogance and misinformation, the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) retirement claim processing has reportedly slowed by 25%, creating a backlog of approximately 140,000 unprocessed claims now more than two months old.
Unlike Musk, most Americans awaiting Social Security benefits don’t have access to billions in assets or massive credit lines to manage day-to-day expenses. These delays, caused by a policy rooted in distorted statistics, disproportionately harm the very people SSA was created to protect: retirees, widows, and working-class Americans nearing the end of their careers.
In April, Musk made headlines by portraying SSA as an agency beset by incompetence—claiming that “40 percent of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent.” Speaking at a town hall in Wisconsin while inserting himself into a state Supreme Court race, Musk alleged that nearly half of all SSA phone calls were made by scammers attempting to redirect benefits to fraud rings.
DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi repeated a similar claim on Fox News, stating that 40% of phone calls made to SSA regarding direct deposit changes came from fraudsters.
But like the individual who appointed him to his DOGE role, Musk tends to gloss over inconvenient facts. SSA data actually shows that 40% of direct deposit fraud cases are associated with phone calls—not that 40% of all calls are fraudulent. That distinction is enormous, yet it was misunderstood – or conveniently ignored — in Musk’s alarmist framing.
This misinformation was used to justify the hasty rollout of an anti-fraud detection tool targeting benefit claims made over the phone. According to an internal May document obtained by Nextgov/FCW, only two out of more than 110,000 claims reviewed by the tool had a high probability of being fraudulent—and even those weren’t confirmed. Fewer than 1% of claims were flagged as even potentially suspicious.
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the document stated.
Nonetheless, SSA revised its phone procedures to implement the new fraud detection system on the backend. This included a three-day processing hold for retirement claims filed by phone—a change that has created needless hardship by delaying payments to seniors in need. The agency also briefly barred individuals from filing benefit claims or changing direct deposit information over the phone entirely, before walking back those restrictions in response to internal and public pressure.
To be clear, the SSA’s handling of the policy rollout is not above criticism. Initially, the anti-fraud tool was applied to all phone-based claims, including disability benefits, before the scope was narrowed following internal objections. Still, in contrast to Musk’s exaggerated claims, SSA’s own data makes clear that fraud through benefit claims is extremely rare—particularly when compared with performance metrics from major U.S. financial institutions.
SSA vs. U.S. banks
While Musk sounded alarms about supposed government incompetence, he ignored a key fact: the SSA’s fraud prevention record outperforms that of many major American banks.
According to SSA oversight data, only 0.3% of Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) payments are classified as “improper”—a figure that includes clerical errors such as missing signatures. The actual rate of confirmed fraud is just a small fraction of that.
Compare that to the private sector: in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission reported more than $8.8 billion in consumer fraud losses—up 30% from the year before. Much of this fraud involved phishing, identity theft, and account takeover schemes targeting customers of banks and fintech platforms. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, account takeover fraud alone cost over $13 billion in 2023.
Yet major financial institutions rarely face the same level of scrutiny or operational disruption. Banks also lack the transparency mandated of government agencies. While SSA is subject to audits by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Office of the Inspector General, most fraud-related data in the private sector is self-reported—or not reported at all.
At JPMorgan Chase, a twentysomething tech entrepreneur named Charlie Javice allegedly duped America’s largest bank—run by the supposedly shrewd Jamie Dimon—into acquiring her student loan startup for $175 million, based on her claim that the company had four million customers. In reality, the number was closer to 300,000.
When it comes to fraud control, SSA outperforms much of Wall Street. Yet it’s SSA—and its millions of beneficiaries—who suffer the consequences of misinformation campaigns led by powerful public figures.
Real cost of misinformation
Musk’s false narrative, echoed by DOGE officials and amplified by members of the Trump administration, triggered a cascade of poorly considered decisions at SSA. These policies not only delayed critical benefit payments but forced aging and often mobility-limited Americans to travel to SSA offices to verify their identities—all to combat a fraud threat that, by the agency’s own analysis, is nearly nonexistent.
Nextgov/FCW, the outlet that broke the story based on an internal SSA document, appears to be a nonpartisan publication focused on government technology. While Atlantic Media, its parent company, owns the overtly far-left and rabidly anti-Trump Atlantic, Nextgov/FCW’s reporting in this instance does not appear ideologically biased.
In fact, after publication, the outlet added comments from Leland Dudek, a Trump-appointed acting commissioner who now serves as a senior advisor to SSA. Dudek claimed that in the last 30 days, the agency had stopped 20,000 fraudulent attempts across all transactions involving direct deposit—both phone and internet-based. However, the internal document cited by Nextgov/FCW referred solely to claims made by phone. The agency did not respond to a follow-up request for clarification after Dudek’s comment.
I’m not certain what to make of Dudek, given this damning profile by independent Brooklyn-based journalist Marisa Kabas, who reported that Dudek “proudly admits to violating multiple agency protocols and ethical standards in service of Musk’s SSA team.” According to Kabas, most SSA folks had never heard of Dudek until Musk plucked him from obscurity, declared him a hero, and briefly put him in change of SSA.
Rather than promoting falsehoods that undermine public trust in government, leaders and public figures like Musk should focus on facts. The SSA, though not perfect, seemingly remains one of the most fraud-resilient institutions in the federal government. That’s not incompetence—it’s an operational success that deserves recognition and appreciation.
Vacuum of credibility
One of the few public figures to recognize the chaos Musk contributed to SSA operations is Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who in April launched a “Social Security War Room” with other lawmakers to push back against recent policy shifts.
“The Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans,” she told Nextgov/FCW in response to the publication’s findings. “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.”
However, despite Warren’s policy fluency and sophistication, her effectiveness is undercut by close ties to figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose credibility has been diminished by their performative protests of economic inequality—often while traveling in private jets or flying first class. Warren understands the damaging implications of stock buybacks, but her efforts to rein them in have had little impact.
It’s a sad state of affairs. America suffers from a lack of credible political and media leadership willing or able to seriously challenge the influence and recklessness of billionaires like Musk. Washington increasingly resembles a modern-day Tower of Babel, where partisan talking heads and a biased media drown out and distort rational discourse, and the public grows ever more disillusioned.
For the 140,000 Americans still waiting for the Social Security payments they are rightfully owed, the cost of that dysfunction is painfully real.