Fingerhut reported from Des Moines, Iowa and Mulvihill from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
states that “almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.” And, as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.Chuck Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said, “Two cheers for Elon Musk if he can root out and put a stop to improper payments.”
But to pick the places in the federal government where error rates are high, “Social Security would be near the bottom of the list, not near the top,” Blahous said. “Medicaid improper payment rates are quite substantial, and soared after the Medicaid expansion of the ACA.”“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,” he said.Sita Nataraj Slavov, a professor of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said the claims by Musk and Trump will make people think the solutions to the government’s financial problems are simpler than they appear.
“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,” Slavov said. “This is simply not true.”Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, referred back to the Social Security’s inspector general report.
“A previous investigation revealed the SSA paid at least $71.8 billion in improper payments,” she said. “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.”
President Donald Trump stepped back into the presidency this week moving quickly to set a new agenda, but from his, particularly since his loss in the 2020 presidential race, has argued that his executive order will secure the vote against illegal voting by noncitizens. Multiple studies and investigations
have shown that noncitizens casting ballots in federal elections, already a felony,. Noncitizen voting is allowed in some local races.
An estimated 9% of U.S. citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, do not have proof of citizenship readily available, according to aby the Brennan Center for Justice and other groups.