This doesn’t seem hard to explain. Trump and Musk are trying to point to examples that show the government has been run by idiots and is full of waste and fraud. They believe doing so will build support for their program of significantly downsizing many federal departments and spending programs. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen (I am skeptical!) but that’s clearly the playbook they are running.
If that was the playbook they would look in the areas full of fraud like Medicare billing, VA disability allowances, Pentagon overcharging, payments to keep schools open etc
They are deliberately looking at plaves with low levels of fraud, which is what makes it a strange strategy.
Well, it's a strange strategy if you assume that the point is to minimise fraud, rather than the actual point which is to sow distrust in government and create as much distraction as possible for their forthcoming set of massive tax cuts for rich people.
In any case, I don't believe a party in which Rick Scott is a leading member is going to be investigating Medicare fraud.
Medicare Advantage should be high on their list. It won't be, of course, because the Insurance Industrial Complex is a major GOP backer. This is from the Wiki Article:
>Given that operators are compensated based on enrollee-specific risk scores, operators been accused of manipulating diagnosis codes to increase risk ratings and thus their compensation.[18] Most large operators including UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance, and Kaiser have faced or are facing federal fraud charges by the Inspector General or the Department of Justice.[19] A 2024 analysis based on Medicare data reported evidence of such behavior. The patients often received no treatment for those diagnoses. The analysis calculated that in the three years ending in 2021, insurers pocketed $50 billion from Medicare for untreated diseases.[20]<
I think they will get there. They are just looking for shiny objects quickly. Medicare billing is complicated. Supercentenarians on the books of SSA anyone can grasp.
It’s so frustrating that the right answer to everything they point to is “hire some more people and give them more authority”, but they are instead using it to fire people and take away authority, so the problems get worse.
Perhaps. I don't know what the future holds, but 150 years ago 1875. We've made a bit of progress since then. Might make some more in the next 150 years.
I think I would easily take the under on manned missions to Mars in 150 years (er, just to be clear, here meaning that I think that a manned mission *will* happen before the year 2175), contingent on no apocalyptic event before then.
It seems unlikely to me that it will ever make sense to *colonize* Mars in the sense of "millions of people live there in a relatively self-sufficient way."
I'm totally onboard with your odds. I think there's a very real chance we'll live to see a crewed mission *to* Mars (I'm more bearish on footprints in the dust).
That's very reasonable. I think it really depends on how technological advances continue. If our knowledge and tech growth wane, then I suspect you are very much correct. However, if they continue at the pace we've been at across the last 300 years, then I think its more feasible.
Greenland. Antarctica and vast stretches of boreal forest are vastly more inhabitable than Mars and pose comparatively trivial transportation difficulties.
Also, I don’t care that much what happens after I die. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice for goals that can only be achieved after my death.
If there is ever a Mars colony, there will be some parents-to-be who will be the very first to consign their child to a lifetime living in a hole. Not a new continent with different trees and different bugs and different weather and maybe different constellations in a N2/O2 sky--a hole.
I think it's frankly rather disturbing and inhuman. Like the disruptive mentally ill dude on the subway ranting and raving about the 5G, I would prefer not to share a car.
You could say the same thing about space generally. If we ever move into the stars (assuming no faster than light technology), then whoever does so will consign generations of living in a box hurtling through space until they potentially reach another world.
Human history is such that there are people willing to endure to reach further than we have gone before. If we lose that, we might be very comfortable here on Earth, but I think we'll have also lost some of our humanity as well.
I admire the polynesians who did the epic open boat journeys, most of which probably ended in death. those that landed on habitable islands with at least a handful of survivors of each gender hit a darwinian jackpot.
however, i have no personal taste for open boat journeys and a distaste for leaders who urge me towards them. georgia is habitable and, with a couple tweaks, can stay that way.
if life on mars is ever better than life on earth, then life on earth probably isn’t worth living.
I’m not sure about that. People would have been less cowed by superstitions involving afterlives and more focused on what was possible within their lifetimes
I mean, don’t you have children? I get the feeling you have and I shared it before my niblings were born. Now I worry more about the world we’re leaving to them.
Only one company in the world is launching re-usable rockets at scale (china is trying hard but failing). Tesla’s going to be the first one to autonomy, launching Robotaxi in June. maybe do 2 minutes of googling before opining next time ….other than that, ya he hasn’t accomplished anything anyone else hasn’t
From occasionally sampling comments at right wing news outlets it does appear to be really energizing to his base. They don't engage with the details (these people aren't actually getting checks) at all because they want to believe it's that simple.
I don't think Trump has a deeply held commitment to cutting government..he may end up doing it but he could just as easily not. I think this description is more true of Musk, but I don't buy that it's out of Musk's self-interest, I think he just thinks it's funny.
It has 0.85% waste and fraud. If you want to cut waste and fraud, you should hire more people and give the systems more information and legal permission to work with other government offices, which would cost some money. You could cut waste and fraud by increasing anti-fraud spending, which might not be “waste” but costs money anyway.
GOA estimates fraud alone is $233 billion and $521[1]
Annual budget 2024 was 6.8 trillion[2]
So fraud alone accounts for 3.43%-7.66%. Now imagine if you add waste lol. I honestly cant believe people are trying to defend this. I'm sorry but the solution isnt to hire more people, it's to upgrade old systems to use modern technology to combat fraud.
You seem to be quoting some general government expenditure figure, not the social security figure. I didn’t look up the number myself - I was quoting a number someone else in this thread cited.
Still, we seem to agree that we shouldn’t be firing people to try to fix this - we should be upgrading systems, which likely involves temporary new expenditures either to hire the people to do the upgrade, or whatever.
"I'm sorry but the solution isnt to hire more people, it's to upgrade old systems to use modern technology to combat fraud."
I'm not sure how you expect to roll over from an old, creaky database to new modern technology without hiring a lot of people to manage the changeover carefully. Any engineer can tell you that database transitions are risky business operations that require all hands on deck.
I’m a software engineer, this isn’t rocket science, it’s been done by most of the private sector years ago. I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but it’s totally achievable by a smart group of people and the number doesn’t need to be in the thousands.
"it’s totally achievable by a smart group of people and the number doesn’t need to be in the thousands"
Yes, exactly. But the number does need to be nonzero, and moreover positive. Which is why people are complaining in this thread that Musk seems to be firing the smart people, rather than trying to make it easier for the government to hire new smart people or retarget smart existing employees towards smoothing those database switches.
No, it's not "full" of waste and fraud. Waste and fraud exist in the system as they exist in every system ever created. They exist in every private sector system too. And the fraud can run in more than one direction, Musk and Trump's own companies engage in waste and fraud on the owners' behalf by not paying contractors and employees..
In the private sector, you get penalized for waste and fraud because your competitors that run a clean shop can will eventually have higher profit margins and you lose market share. Half of this comment section seems against an sort of s audit because "orange. man bad".
Same as everything else. Some of my spending (larger than 0.85%) is waste and abuse (not sure about the fraud part). I daresay, good Francis, that the same could be said about your finances.
No system, even one that coerces funding through taxation, will be free of such things.
Peter-as Matt’s column clearly explains that many departments of the government are indeed to use your words, “ run by idiots” or at least by individuals who have no incentive not to act incompetently and thus appeared to be idiots. Why Matt’s willingness to give the incompetents even more work and power seems to me like a nonsensical solution.At least some of the states do a reasonably good job.
Wait, unless I missed it, this post doesn’t answer the basic question: *why* are the 13 million dead people listed as alive not all receiving improper SS benefits? How does SSA know not to pay them? To be clear, I believe they aren’t being paid, I just was hoping for some explanation as to why that is.
Well, you have to actually apply for your benefits, and not everyone does. And you have to have a functioning bank account for the benefits to be paid out to.
If Sylvester dies intestate and with no heirs or next of kin, and was living on SS, then at some point his bank figures out that he's dead and closes his account. Either the bank keeps the money as a windfall overpayment -- I presume at least SOME do this and manage to stay under the radar, even though it's the stupid thing to do -- or the bank returns the money. Thus, at any given moment, SSA will ALWAYS be showing SOME amount of overpayments, the majority of which will get paid back.
Now, if Ethel dies with heirs or next of kin, then two things can happen. Some small fraction of people might try keeping Aunt Ethel's SS payments for themselves; some portion of those get caught and prosecuted. But most people close out all of Aunt Ethel's affairs, including shutting down her bank account and withdrawing it all to her estate, so that it can be doled out as inheritance. Even if they forget to shut down her SS benefits, the benefits are no longer paying into the bank account. Again, SSA might keep printing Ethel's SS checks, and thus those checks will be temporarily reflected as "overpayments" IE money having gone out the door -- even though, again, they eventually get counted back onto the balance sheet.
A lot of people who are swallowing the Social Security fraud rhetoric don't seem to understand this would require a lot of banks to have been knowingly committing fraud by keeping accounts open of known dead people just so they have can SS checks coming in as deposits. There may be a few small local banks who do this for 1-2 accounts, but major banks have a large incentive to not be caught committing widespread fraud for not a large amount of money that they can't even spend directly.
That was precisely my thinking. Some small struggling community credit union probably could stand to make a few extra bucks on a couple extra thousand or even tens of thousands in overpaid SS deposits, just because it marginally shores up their leverage requirements... but Wells Fargo is making bigger bucks off of bigger frauds than dead people's measly SS money.
I mean the Wells Fargo thing happened with opening accounts in people's names who didn't actually authorize it. So I wouldn't say big banks aren't above committing fraud for what amounts to pennies of their overall profit and revenue.
I mean I'm pretty sure you're right. The Wells Fargo thing happened (if I'm not mistaken) because of some poorly thought incentive structures; employees had quotas to make as far as new accounts to be opened so it created a giant incentive to essentially skirt the rules to basically not get fired (or to get the extra bonus). That's very different from the bank deliberately having a policy to defraud it's customers.
So yes I think for a variety of reasons, Musk is full of it. But yes I can absolutely believe banks would a) commit fraud for negligible amounts of money b) collude in said fraud.
How would the bank know that you are dead? Many people have SS benefits paid by ACH into a joint account. Even if it is not a joint account, how would the bank know who is using e.g. the ATM card?
I went into this more above, but today there are electronic processes in place such that states notify the SSA in real time when they receive notice of a death. The SSA stops all payments based on that information and debits any excess payments they've made.
Fraudulently keeping payments for a co-account holder who died likely is the kind of fraud that exists. But only a small fraction of people are in the situation where that could happen, and some of those people get caught.
I'm talking only about cases where it is known that the person is dead and thus maintaining that account would possibly be fraud behavior, specifically because this conversation was kicked off by the false SS fraud allegations. I don't blame a bank for keeping an account open for someone whose death hasn't been confirmed by anyone.
I'm only talking about fraud knowingly committed by the bank. If people are hiding their relative's death to continue cashing checks, the bank would not have a way of knowing that, but such scams would likely be too complicated to really be widespread. My point is that Social Security fraud is likely not that widespread since it would require incumbent actors beyond the SSA that have an incentive to not commit fraud to knowingly commit fraud.
Because for some reason this particular Trump/Musk claim bothers me more than most, I've dug into this a bit. There is now a system where when a person's death is reported to the county/state, which is required, that death is sent to a state and then national database, AND the SSA.
This process started in 1976, but didn't become truly universal until a few years ago. So today, Ethel's crooked heirs and crooked banks get cut off pretty quickly. In my SIL's case, it was almost instantaneous. Her last SS check was deposited and then removed from her bank within about two days.
So really we're probably mostly just talking about a backlog of really old cases where there wasn't enough documentation to declare them dead, and we're not actually sending them money.
Yes, mostly, the key thing is that the SSA doesn't care if you're dead. They only care, and are only mandated to care, whether or not you are or should be receiving benefits. So there's not a compelling reason for the SSA to declare someone dead.
I believe the IG reports recommended that they clean up their database to just arbitrarily assign a death date or status to presumably dead people. That probably is the best idea, but there is an argument against it. Assigning an arbitrary date doesn't actually make the data more accurate, it just makes it LOOK more accurate.
To be more accurate you would want to investigate and try to track down whether and when these people died, but who wants to spend money on that?
Even spending the money to assign death dates raises the question why. Why spend money on something that makes no difference rather than spend that time/money on something, anything, more relevant?
This is probably right — SS stops issuing checks once someone stops cashing them, and most of the time people don’t fraudulently cash the checks of their dead relatives. But if that is the case this is a legitimately insane practice by SSA. You’d think that if SS stopped issuing checks to people on account of them being dead, it would identify them as dead!
Not insane at all! There's a difference between someone being *ineligible* for payments on account of having some of the symptoms of death -- like a nonfunctioning bank account -- and actually verifying that they ARE in fact dead. You wouldn't want to declare them dead just to have them turn out to be alive-but-incapacitated-and-now-very-angry-that-their-benefits-halted.
Which gets to the heart of Matt's whole reporting issue here. SSA clearly doesn't have the staff on hand to track down every single lapsed bank account to verify that they're dead. It'd be really nice if they could just have a centralized database that aggregates every locality's death records.
Fair enough. But if the answer is “more than 99% of these dead people with active SS numbers aren’t receiving benefits because they stopped cashing their checks when they died and were terminated from the program,” it would have been nice for an explainer on why Musk and Trump are lying to say that. Thank you for the explanation.
The problem is that the same lack of resources that made SS have trouble realizing these people are dead is going to cause even more trouble for a third party like Matt to figure out the explanation of what the situation really is.
The thing we know is that the number of payments being sent to people over 100 is about the same as the census population over 100, and about three orders of magnitude smaller than the number of SSNs belonging to over 100 people not marked “dead”.
What is the percentage of people who cash checks vs those who use ACH? I deal with mostly low-income elderly people, and my guess would be they are about 90% on ACH, so it makes sense to me that higher income folks would also mostly be using ACH. No physical check to cash.
"You wouldn't want to declare them dead just to have them turn out to be alive-but-incapacitated-and-now-very-angry-that-their-benefits-halted."
From the point of view of the person not receiving benefits, I don't see much of a difference here. If anything, I'd have an easier time proving that I am alive than I would getting through to Chase customer service.
See above, today this is all handled electronically and the states notify SSA when someone dies. The nonsense Trump and Musk are citing is about people who died decades ago.
It is still true that there is not a centralized nationwide system for all deaths and births. Even if the data sharing between the various, meaning 50 state plus several federal data bases, is better, it should just be centralized.
Not a lawyer, but I was always under the impression that although most if-not-all states do it that way, it's possible some small few don't, if for no other reason than the states are quirky and often have dumb quibbly laws like that on the books.
Every state I have been in has an unclaimed funds account. If you don’t claim it in a certain time it goes to them. I had a claim for an insurance rebate that I got a message years later.
It would be very interesting and frankly on-brand for SB to interview, say, a former director of the SSA EDW to nerd out on the topic of social security data
Yes, but there really ought to be a simple high level explanation here. “Yes there are 13 million dead people listed as alive by SSA but they aren’t receiving SS checks because ___.”
Well, there are a number of other explanations on this thread, including that payments stopped when their bank accounts closed or they stopped cashing checks, or they simply never applied. It is probably a combination of all of them. My point is that I would have liked a detailed explanation of how we know these dead people aren’t being paid.
We don’t need a “detailed explanation of how we know these dead people aren’t being paid.” They track payments. It’s very easy to know if they are being paid.
The fact that you’ve pivoted from “why aren’t they being paid” to “how do we know they aren’t being paid” illustrates the current administration’s purpose in providing no explanation. They are intent on destroying government capacity in all spaces, including the extremely low administrative expense entitlement program that is social security. So they benefit from conspiracy minded people walking around saying “I’m just asking questions,” because it’s easier to destroy government capacity with greater mistrust of government.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I have said multiple times that I don’t believe there’s fraud. I was just looking for a more satisfying answer to Musk and Trump’s bullshit statements. If the answer is, “you can run a query on these 13 million dead names and can confirm that 99% of them aren’t receiving benefits for various reasons” that would be a good explanation and doesn’t require more detail. But the post doesn’t really say that so it feels vague.
Yes, we would like to have an explanation for each of these 13 million people. But if the Social Security Agency had a list of dead people who are marked as alive with explanations for why they haven’t collected payments, then they would have updated their database and not marked the person as alive.
I suppose if someone at SSA had some free time, and some legal authority, they could sample some random people over 100 from the database and tell us why those individuals aren’t receiving payments (whether they are alive or not). But I don’t know how many government workers have had sufficient free time to do this sort of thing in the past couple weeks - and it would probably be illegal for social security to report any information they have about any individual, even one presumed dead for decades.
Except the "because" is "they aren't eligible for benefits" which leads to "why aren't they eligible for benefits", "well certainly one reason is they're dead, but there may have been other reasons in the past, myriad reasons."
You're looking at it the wrong way. The default for everyone is they are not eligible for benefits, most people eventually become eligible, but not everyone, and this was especially true early on and especially true among the cohort of people who we're talking about. Some may have received benefits and then we stopped because we figured out they were dead, but absent an actual date of death they're not listed as dead, just not receiving benefits.
This is a totally fair question. My read based on Matt’s article is that the authoritative information the SSA actually cares about is “is eligible to receive benefits and how much?” and that “alive” status is actually orthogonal to that, and at most is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for benefit issuance, so to get benefits you need (isEligible && isAlive) in computer-speak.
Based on the incentives Matt describes above one could see how the SSA would care very much about keeping the eligibility database up to date wheres the “alive” database doesn’t actually matter (except redundantly) such that it becomes more of an afterthought.
Undoubtedly correct but that just reframes the question: how are these people being identified as ineligible? They are old enough to receive benefits and surely the vast majority were eligible for them at one time. So what happened?
Yes, people were issued SS numbers and never qualified for benefits. It's easy to do. Get a ss number, work for a year, or never work, die before you hit age 65, and you never qualify for benefits.
Very common in the early days, wife and husband get social security numbers, but wife doesn't work. Husband collects benefits, wife passes away before husband, never collected on her own behalf, no reason for SS ever to care about recording her death.
They *can*, but did they? My grandmother (b. 1886) was divorced from my grandfather after 30 years of marriage. Back in the day, divorced women weren't eligible for their ex-husband's benefits. So she never got a SS number. She died in 1963.
Right, it's implicit in Musk's criticism that if you're alive you're eligible, but that's not true. My best friend's mom was in this situation. She worked until the kids were born, then stopped to raise them. She and her husband divorced and she received alimony, which allowed her to continue not working, and then didn't receive SS benefits when she hit retirement age because she didn't work enough.
With people like that, what they "actually believe" is hard to really pinpoint, because in their own minds they don't really care what's true, only what's useful.
There's lots of answers in the thread, but none from a systems perspective, and since I'm a systems engineer, I'll chime in as well.
The database Matt refers to in the piece is one of *many* across the whole system. It appears to track people who were assigned SSNs. It also appears to track whether those people are alive or dead (not well), but crucially it does not track:
- where they live
- what benefits they receive
- whether they are even eligible for benefits
So this means there are other systems that are tracking those things, which likely *do* identify also whether they are still alive or dead. They must, in some capacity, or as Matt points out, those people would still be receiving benefits*, and they are not.
That's all to say, this particular artifact of this particular database is a classic red herring. It has *no* relevance to whether or not people are receiving fraudulent benefits, because other systems that interact with it *only* check it to see if an individual has an SSN, they don't check it to see whether they're alive or eligible for benefits.
This is, in database-speak, a "normalized" dataset (mostly). The database contains one type of info, and if you want to get a full picture, you have to search multiple databases and combine ("join", in database lingo) the results. I won't go into why you would design it like this, but "database normalization" is a good search term if you're interested.
*in the case that they ever even did, as many people ITT pointed out
“This quirk in date representation has resulted in some Social Security applicants being assigned a birthdate of May 20, 1875, when their actual birth date is unknown.”
They’re saying a problem with the code is to blame.
I read that, and the underlying report. It's not clear to me that that IS the explanation or just speculation it Might be the explanation. Do you have any insight? I'm in an argument with my brother about this, so any help would be appreciated.
I'd expect that in most cases the answer is "they haven't applied for them" (probably because no-one realises that there is an SSA record for these SSNs).
But there should also be an answer for "so what happens if they do?"
Long story short - SSA has complicated fraud detection systems that are used on receivers of SS, but not on people who just have SS numbers but receive no federal benefits.
Long version - Part of the complexity is that there actually are systems NOW where electronic death certificates being filed automatically notifies the SS. The problem is more people who died before this system was put in place. So if your relative died last week and you try and use their SSN to apply for benefits, you will fail. It takes as little as a week for everything to be frozen.
Previously, a lot of this was prevented by banks themselves. They have their own reasons and mechanisms to alert to the death of account owners, and would notify SS if payments were being issued to the account of someone deceased.
SSA also has dedicated fraud detection teams that use both computer programs/widespread data analysis to pick out “suspicious” cases (which would include unusually old recipients) and individual investigation.
I want to upvote your last paragraph in particular. SSA, and virtually every other government agency, spends a lot of time, money, and effort detecting and preventing fraud. A lot of the conversations I hear, even among this substack's commenters, seem to assume that agencies don't try to prevent fraud and that ripping off the government is some easy con that gets played every day. The exact opposite is true.
There huge mandates written into the laws and certainly in the regs that require that agencies work hard against fraud. That is actually a major component of why agencies appear so inefficient.
Yes - and moreover, SSA in particular has made rapid strides in recent years to really up their fraud detection game, and it’s been a bipartisan effort. A lot of it has involved what the article talks about, ie pushing through changes that allow much more information sharing between federal government agencies, along with increased use of fraud detection software and better data analysis.
Federal agencies just sometimes don’t want to do difficult tasks that might help the government as a whole but aren’t really on their departments shoulders, which can cause problems when there are inefficiencies that aren’t technically on the shoulders of anyone.
(What annoys me is also that people act like private companies don’t have fraud and waste. I wish this article included a comparison to the false payout rates from private insurance companies, it’s much worse!)
I would be surprised if none of these people applied for benefits when they were alive. I guess it’s possible that these are all people who died young or otherwise never received benefits— that would be exactly the type of explanation I’m looking for — but if that was true I would expect that someone would have mentioned that by now. The assumption has been that these are ordinary people whose deaths were not recorded by SSA. And ordinary people, by and large, apply for and receive SS benefits when they turn 65.
The survival rate to 65 for men is only about 82% right now. People who don’t make it aren’t just people who died genuinely YOUNG young, it’s also anyone who doesn’t make it to their 50’s or 60’s. There are a LOT of ordinary people who die before reaching eligibility age.
After the implementation of deemed filing rules, you cannot switch from spousal benefits to your own unless a specific exception applies. If you apply for benefits and are eligible for both spousal and worker benefits, SSA will give you whichever is higher at the time. Some people do apply for their own benefits early then switch to spousal later when their spouse retires. This makes sense only if your spouse makes a LOT more money than you.
I did read both reports actually. Neither directly explain how it is known that the incorrect numbers don’t correspond to incorrect payments, presumably because that is too elementary for the readers of the reports who are familiar with the SS systems, and because they are two separate reports neither of which directly address the relationship between the incorrect names and incorrect payments payments. This comment thread has given me a better understanding of that but I still maintain that an explainer of why Musk and Trump are lying should offer more evidence and explanation as to how we know they are lying. Which again, i have no doubt that they are!
“ if that was true I would expect that someone would have mentioned that by now.”
Facts don’t get mentioned unless someone knows them. So you must mean “if someone know that I would expect they would have mentioned it by now”.
But if someone knew that some individual had died before 65 and thus never applied for social security and never got marked dead on the rolls, then I think their priority would have been marking this person dead on the rolls, rather than notifying the general public that they found a case like this.
I mean wasn’t that one of the conceits of the US version of Shameless, that there was a grandparent buried in the backyard so Frank could go on collecting their checks?
> And ordinary people, by and large, apply for and receive SS benefits when they turn 65.
We're talking about people who were born well over 100 years ago. These people were alive *before* Social Security existed. Why would you apply that assumption to them? Are you aware that eligibility criteria has expanded immensely since the program first started?
There have been a lot of people excluded from getting social security benefits. Housewives who never worked and died before their husbands, government workers who had the pre-Reagan pensions, railroad workers, self-employed people who didn't pay their social security tax on time, people who emigrated from the US and either always worked abroad or renounced their citizenship... I think if you add up all these seemingly small categories plus the issues Matt described, it's pretty easy to get to that 13 million number.
The Type I/Type II error really gets at what pisses me off about DOGE. Well meaning conservative friends and family seem really jazzed about this DOGE stuff and they're surprised to find I'm not. They're totally willing to accept when I point out that the total cost savings from DOGE, even if implemented, will be miniscule. "Yeah I get it's not much, but the government shouldn't be wasting ANY money." Ok, I've been over before the difficulty of distinguishing "waste" from "stuff you don't like," but even if we agree on what constitutes "waste," there are diminishing returns to cracking down. Everybody understands this in their own job. If your higher-ups instituted an crackdown on expenses charged to the company down to the penny, it would probably waste more time and money complying with that rule than it would save in waste. Like if I had to make sure every time I charged mileage to the company I took the exact quickest route and wrote my mileage down to the tenth of a mile, I'd have to waste time figuring out which route they considered quickest. To the extent there would be savings, maybe some employees would say "fuck it" and no longer expense mileage. This also goes for the vague dictum of "don't do woke shit anymore." Great. Now I have to guess what you guys consider "woke."
TLDR; there are diminishing returns to cracking down on waste, especially if you don't understand how the bureaucracy works and you don't care.
"Yeah I get it's not much, but the government shouldn't be wasting ANY money."
We probably underestimate how much Trump reorienting the GOP has turned it into the party of people who don't know how things actually work and are just confused by complex structures.
I'm feeling like the Dems should just lean in to this. They've called Trump Hitler so long it's distracted from the much simpler fact that he's a moron who doesn't know what he's doing. The Dems should make a play for literally everybody with a college degree.
They should aim for a 60% majority. Every party should. It just seems like that's going to be waited on the highly educated side of things. That's fine. Own it.
You're completely right about it not being worth it to track down all fraud. Megan McArdle has written a lot about this.
Now, pretend you work for the company and hate its mission and all its salespeople. You can just demand all the receipts and itemizing and proof you just mentioned. Sales grind to a halt.
So the demand for "NO FRAUD" can just be a bad-faith way to shut down the program.
Just had another thought, this is basically what progressives were trying to do to police departments. "I'm hostile to your mission, so I'll demand perfection and I won't acknowledge any improvements."
“Anti-corruption purges” are also a common tool for new authoritarians in power. Since there’s usually a lot of corruption to be found in the kinds of places that authoritarians come to power.
It really pisses me off to imagine. Musk wants to know 5 things I did this week but he's already made his mind up the whatever I'm doing is bullshit. How motivated am I to explain my job that he wouldnt understand even if he did care?
"Now I have to guess what you guys consider "woke."'
At this point, I'm pretty sure it just means "Anybody not on Trump's side who isn't white or a man".
I'm obviously overexaggerating a bit..but honestly I'm not sure how much.
One thing I've sort of been grappling with for months now is a post on the downsides of not interacting with Trump universe enough. What do I mean by this. Good place to start is the New York Times columnists. There's not one who we consider an out an out Trumpist. Douthat is probably the closest one at this point, especially given his burgeoning bromance with JD. But even that is tenuous Pre 2016 if Douthat or Brett Stephens or David French wrote a column on a particular topic, we could be pretty sure they were speaking for a least some segment of the current GOP of that moment. Now? Who do they speak for? And more importantly, where is the columnist giving the actual full throated defense of Trump and Trumpism generally?
As a result, I feel like of debates that played in MSM last few years on a variety of topics (transgender issues, Gaza, inflation, DEI etc) wasn't really a debate between GOP and Democrats, but more left wing Progressives vs centrists or never Trump Republicans. But meanwhile, there is this 40% of the public having this entirely different conversation just absolutely disconnected from those of us who comment a lot on this substack are having.
I'm the king of "don't over romanticize the 'good ole days'". In fact a lot of you probably get sick of me bringing it up even though I think it explains A LOT with a variety of topics. But I do think pre 2020 and especially pre 2016, MSM was actually more clued in to the actual beliefs and conversations happening on the right.
I bring it all up, because I look back on everything that happened in 2023 and 2024 and it's hard for me to not conclude that MSM was just asleep at the wheel as far as how actual crazy the GOP had gotten and how crazy the Trump administration would be because they were so disconnected from what was actually going on.
Trumpism is just a cult of personality. There's nothing really to interact with. You either buy that everything he does is genius (it's not) or you don't. I think the new Trad Right or whatever you want to call them has insane views on foreign policy, but it is actually a thing you can sort of kind of engage with. Problem is that Trump isn't even that, he's his own thing. To be a "Trumpist" means to be constantly turd polishing whatever the fuck he just said. Reagan and both Bushes had fandoms but not to the level of cult-like dedication required to be on Trump's "team." So to answer your question, no it isn't possible for the NYT to hire a "Trumpist" columnist.
As for "woke," I don't know. Ask 10 different people what woke means, get 11 different answers. I encourage anti-woke types to be specific about what they mean. Depending on your definition, I don't like "woke" stuff either, but it's impossible to engage with without being specific. Example: I don't believe the SAT is racist just because students from different ethnic backgrounds have different average scores. Tada! I stated my "anti-woke" idea specifically and clearly.
I'm not sure if agree with the characterization that straight white men are excused from the charge of "woke." I've been accused of wokeness by a conservative family member for... I don't even remember what position I was articulating, nothing that crazy I'm sure. It's just a word conservatives recently learned and they're just throwing it at everything. It's completely meaningless at this point.
But the NYT actually could have - and IMHO should have - hired a pro-Trump columnist to do the yeoman's work of "turd polishing" in a manner that would have been legible to the NYT reader. This would have been a productive exercise in some ways; at least one of which would have been to counteract the truism that "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that" - J.S. Mill.
And what would have been the downside? Where have arguments about "normalizing," "platforming," etc., gotten us? As if preserving the moral hygiene of the NYT opinion page is or was essential to some desired democratic outcome. The audience is 95% Democrats and liberals in any event. It's not as if the NYT would have been lacking an overwhelming amount of countervailing opinion to reassure the poor traumatized reader and assist him off the fainting couch, pearls firmly in hand.
OTOH, the rigid and studious avoidance of Trump supporters has resulted in a phony presentation of the actual terms of debate, as Colin has suggested above, whereby the pro-Trump arguments are caricatured by the leftist and liberal opinions, but never defended by the RINOs and never-Trumpers. "Nothing to see here, folks." And all the while confirming the suspicion of many that the NYT is a gated bastion of elite opinion where the unwashed masses are simply not welcome.
There are intellectually serious arguments for "Trump is preferable to the alternatives." That's fine. Problem with Trump is the level of personal loyalty he demands. The NYT columnists are overwhelmingly liberal, but it's not like they're forbidden to criticize Democrats either from the left or the center. To be a Trumpist, you can never criticize the guy. I think Douthat and Stevens are actually pretty good columnists and different flavors of conservative. But just "all hail God Emperor Trump" every column would get old. Fox News already exists.
What I would imagine a pro-Trump columnist in the NYT would be doing would be mostly " intellectually serious arguments for 'Trump is preferable to the alternatives' ", and very little "all hail God Emperor Trump". I am not tracking on how it would be a problem if the lone pro-Trump columnist at the NYT was hesitant to criticize Trump. Again, there would be 10+ other columnists doing that.
If you want to have a stronger argument with them than "the great is the enemy of the good", it's actually worse. They are *wasting money* that was not being wasted before, by making the fed employees _less_ efficient by _screwing with their process_ in basically random un-useful ways.
My wife works for FDA and they randomly had their access to shipping frozen. So she still gets paid to go and collect samples, but ... she can't ship them to the lab for analysis. People squawk and they go "okay, you can ship, but you have to get your manager to sign off."
All states here post-Elon are _simply worse_ than before. To believe that DOGE is doing something useful is to _not actually look at what the hell they are doing_.
I see the lies as having some political value to Musk; it appears as if he has discovered a problem whihc sort of justifies anything else he does. "If SSA can't keep track of who is dead then maybe USAID IS wasting money."
Yeah, I think the benefits of innuendo here are more useful than anything else. He doesn't have to be right, he just has to get the slander out to enough people that they believe it, and then it just won't go away because of anchoring bias.
Yeah, I think MY underestimates the rhetorical value of just wanting to tear down government. It's basically an insinuation of "what ELSE don't THEY want you to know?" when it turns out to be a known problem with a mundane explanation which is more annoying than actually consequential.
I think he understands it in terms of popularism. I just don't think Matthew Yglesias Thought has a real answer to the question of how to do the actual rhetoric to GET the CSDM besides, "I dunno, just get on the right side of 80/20 social issues until the swing voters let you do the CSDM".
Which, okay, is *A* theory of the case. I just don't think it's complete. Sometimes you need a Bernie to get out there and just lead a Beutlerian Jihad against "wasteful government" until you have something that can competently accomplish all the abundance shit you wanna do. And the reason you do that is because the alternative is having a Musk go around lying about Social Security while wrecking the constitutional order.
The way things are SUPPOSED to work is that the left and right don't actually do their own work, they compete to do each other's job better before it gets left to the true believers on the other side by the voters. So, W does Medicare expansion, the Tories protect NHS from itself, Clinton does welfare, and hopefully the next Democrat does a massive housing and environmental dereg.
To piggyback off your point. The main weakness to me of the Yglesias "just get on the right side of 80/20 social issues" and one I think Beutler touches upon (And Stancil as well as when he talks about the harm of social media); how do you account for a liar who has truly not shame whatsoever not matter how blatant the lie. And now, how do you account for a liar with no shame whatsoever, who is able to surround himself with sycophants or people also have no shame about lying blantantly.
This is the part "popularism" can't address. I can already see the Trump turn in July when tariffs have remained in place long enough for there to be sizeable job losses (we probably won't see that until earliest April; guessing a lot of companies are still holding out hope there will some miraculous U-turn). "Groceries aren't high because of tariffs. Canadians are invading our country and stealing the chickens! They've stolen you're eggs. Canada, very untrustworthy. Need to harm them bigly!".
What's the popularist retort to this firehouse of lies?
Well, and that’s where I think Brian’s stylistic commentary comes into play. Matt’s really missing out on how the attention economy is warping the positioning game he wants to run with popularism.
Ed: He’s like an NFL OC who wants to run a bunch of fancy play action concepts but can’t establish a freaking run game first.
The core problem is that most of what Democrats say publicly gets ignored by the public in favor of what Fox/RWM says about Democrats. Dems are stuck on a JFK model of communications: look good on TV, don’t make mistakes, don’t be messy, keep it short and cute.
Popularism, as you say, has nothing to say about how to seize attention in the new attention economy. If the entire Democratic Party signed on to the CSDM and no one went on Rogan to talk about it, would anyone outside of the news addicts who already vote Dem know about it? No! Of course not!
Imagine that Barack Obama or JFK were in their prime today and were sitting Congressmen criticizing Trump’s tariffs and egg prices. I’m pretty sure that they’d be 1000x more successful with those attacks than every IRL congressional Dem from Schumer and Jeffries on down to AOC and Slotkin.
Matt made a big deal last year about the importance of having leaders do the right policies. It’s even more important to have leaders with charisma. And our party’s machine selects for the exact opposite.
> Outside of the UK and its former colonies, virtually every country in the world offers free identity cards to its residents.
In Germany I have to pay on the order of ~30€ to renew my personal ID every ten years, plus the extra expense of a new ID photo. Are these ID cards really free in most other countries? Barring evidence to the contrary, I don't believe that.
Sorry for sounding like an out of touch rich person, but 30 Euro every ten years doesn’t strike me as an onerous expense? I’d be happy to have taxpayers cover it for those below the poverty line.
You also need to pay for their time to go get the card. A trip to the DMV means at least two hours out of a work day, more likely means a whole day off because companies don't let low level hourly people leave for two hours and come back. Plus transportation costs, etc.
What I'm really saying, is that it is a much larger hardship for poor people to access government services than we usually think of. We already know this, and in shittier states like much of the US south this is by design. They're actually happier when "those people" can't actually get all the benefits they're eligible for.
A poor person with an unforgiving work schedule still has to go to the doctor, take their child to the doctor, attend a parent-teacher conference at their child's school, take their car to the shop when it breaks down, show up for jury duty, etc. Compared with all that, a trip to the DMV *every ten years* may be onerous, but doesn't sound undoable.
Again, I'm all for ideas on how to make this more accessible for poor people - have longer hours, more convenient locations, what have you - but this isn't an argument for "well this is too hard for poor people, so let's not do it at all."
Honestly, if an individual citizen is too lazy or stupid to get a FREE ID card maybe they don’t need to be voting. Just bite the bullet…and forever call the GOP bluff on voter fraud.
Two hours at the DMV is just an special American tradition, other places don't have anything like that at all. Do Americans need to go to a building to get a passport or any other ID?
> Do Americans need to go to a building to get a passport or any other ID?
Yes. Usually the Department of Moter Vehicles (or equivalent) to get State photo ID (most people use a driver's license as their ID, hence why the DMV is responsible for all State ID in most States).
For Passports, the US Post Office is most common, though there are other locations and it is possible to visit a US State Department office to apply for a US Passport.
Scrapping ID cards was a disaster for British governance and goes completely against the public will. I have no idea why the government listened to the group.
It's completely bizarre. The need to prove one's identity (to apply for a mortgage, to rent an apartment, to check into a hotel, to board a flight, lots of other times) is a frequent occurrence in modern society. Why not just develop a secure, privacy-protecting, efficient, nationally standardized, low/no cost universal ID card system?
People who think of themselves as "privacy advocates" are typically deeply paranoid in a way that borders on mental illness, and their paranoia seems so sincere that normal people listen to them and wonder if maybe there isn't something they are missing and perhaps they should be worried themselves.
The people who care about privacy see "privacy-protecting" in your list of requirements and assume it wouldn't happen.
It would be really easy to push against a national ID system right now. "Do you want Trump and Musk having your name on a list?" Whatever nominal privacy protections were there, unitary executive would blow right past them.
Oh, I make no claims about the political viability of implementing a national ID system in the US. Doing so can be done in a polity characterized by widespread societal trust, and faith in the competence and benevolence of the state; but this very much doesn't sound like America in the 2020s.
Except...I mean, I'm pretty anti-musk, but him knowing my name and government ID number is basically not a concern? Frankly, my concern would be that they'd delete entries for enemies from whatever actual database would exist, so that my ID gets flagged as fake whenever someone actually tries to check it, but that's not a privacy concern...
And what’s especially absurd is that many of those places (particularly Germany, which you didn’t list, but also fits) are generally more strict about privacy regulation than the anglosphere.
That sounds right and reasonable. Now propose it today and convince me that it would be a good idea to go get my picture taken and associated with all my other data so that Musk, Trump, et all can more easily track me.
Maybe it's still a good idea, but you can also understand why it comes up against pretty heavy push back.
I'm happy to see left of center people realizing that the apparatus of the State can be turned against things and people they care about in a single election. Now to see if they remember the lesson.
This is actually a good place for cryptography. If I'm the only one with the private key to my centralized data account, and the State doesn't hold a plaintext copy anywhere, but I can unlock access for a certain purpose, you could get me to agree to a national ID/ Totally Not Social Control program. Until then, fuck off. It's just a time bomb waiting for the next authoritarian.
It's the argument I use whenever the talk turns to Medicare For All. Even during the 2020 election, when most of the dem candidates were proposing various M4A ideas, I would ask people what do you think would happen if Donald Trump and a Republican trifecta got to decide who and what was covered for care. That would end abortion in this country, without actually having to make it illegal.
No it isn't a good argument just because you dislike the current executive. It is the equivalent of people who didn't want Trump's vaccine or Obama's Medicare. The flaws of the president aren't going to stop an improvement in effectiveness from working for you.
RE: Privacy, there's a concept called security by obscurity. The personal version is shoving stuff in the back of your dresser buried under some socks. The bureaucracy version is having 3,000 separate county level birth certificate record centers. And the digital version is writing your system in COBOL.
The problem is that security by obscurity never works at scale. It's easy for a motivated attacker to learn your arcane system and find where the information is hidden. But the obscurity feels comforting even though it doesn't work, so people keep asking for it.
The right way to do security is like a safe, not a sock drawer. You define who should have access and when, and you make it extremely difficult to get access if you're not authorized. And if you have one centralized system you can put in the resources to get the security right, whereas if you have 1000 shoddily built systems they'll probably all be insecure.
It's not the best as it's clunky, but I feel like a passport would be good enough. You could even issue the international book one and a card regional one that you could get Mexico and Canada to accept and would double as a National ID.
Ironically, the government is actually quite harsh when it goes after overpayment cases, at least for the disability and welfare forms of social security. When I worked in legal aid, some of the toughest cases were based on people underreporting income - unintentionally, based on income or living situations that fluctuated month to month, which is quite common - and then suddenly having to pay back benefits months or years after spending the checks they’d received. The enforcement on the other side was quite harsh. One more illustration of why means testing can be extremely complicated to implement, especially in a world where people make money from something like DoorDash and don’t have any kind of steady paycheck.
If one’s opinion has merit then one does not need to lie. So what are Musk and Trump’s opinion on Social Security?
Is it that Social Security is full of waste and fraud? Well they are blatantly lying about the level of fraud (at best they are unconcerned with knowing and learning basic facts which signals they don’t care about fraud.)
This means they see Social Security as a waste. They are only lying about fraud to disguise the fact they see a popular program purely as a waste.
Why are we taking the administration’s claims about fraud (or almost anything else they say) seriously? Or do we think saying “umm, actually” is going to be effective this time around? Or am I just grumpy because my kid was up all night and I haven’t slept much?
I learned a lot from this piece, I think it's an interesting vehicle to understand social security overpayments and the benefits of a national ID system.
Rare and, speaking as a lawyer for SSA claimants and recipients, a really inefficient way of recouping costs due to a lot of really boneheaded internal policies and the amount of appeals and payment plans.
What frequently happens:
1. Benefits recipient works a little bit while receiving benefits, reports it (potentially incorrectly).
2. SSA fails to process this information for 2+ years.
3. SSA realizes they’ve overpaid someone by $10k, computer generates some complete gibberish alerting the recipient to the overpayment (“we believe we overpaid you because we believe you have been overpaid”), may or may not ever actually send the notice.
4. Recipient’s check gets reduced, they panic and contact SSA, are advised to file a recon and a waiver.
5. Recon gets auto-denied, waived goes to informal conference where the SSA supervisor agrees that the situation qualifies for waiver but says they can’t approve it because they have a policy against approving waivers over $5k.
6. Recipient gets stuck on a payment plan for $10/month which will realistically never repay the overpayment.
7. Recipient files a hearing request on the recon and waiver denials.
8. About a year later the overpayment case - which isn’t digitized and is done totally on paper for some reason - goes in front of an annoyed judge who goes “they should have approved this waiver a year ago” and orders the waiver approved and an underpayment issued.
9. SSA’s processing center takes a year to get the memo, during which they continue to pay the wrong amounts and the cycle repeats.
So much money saved going after those dastardly overpayments.
I liked the piece but the confusion around Trump's motives seem teleported in from another time. Especially the assumption that he will pay a price for lying about this. To be fair I didn't fully follow the bond market argument as to why he would. But he does, in fact, get away with lying and misdirecting blame all of the time.
Yes, I find this line vexing: “This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim.” Donald lies all the time about everything. He doesn’t always have a good reason in terms of trying to “set up” something. And even when he is setting up something, it’s very often not a particular policy outcome connected to the lie. He wants to destroy trust in all kinds of institutions and norms. He believes (or at least wants everyone else to believe) that everyone is cheating on everything and so anyone following the pro-social rules at some personal cost (waiting in line, taking only what they need, telling the truth when a lie would go undetected or unpunished) is a sucker. That seems like a pretty important and obvious aspect of Donald that we’ve watched repeatedly for ten years.
He lies constantly. He's also pig ignorant about vast swaths of public policy. Often the two intersect. I strongly suspect the average SB reader (no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum) is vastly better informed about the country's fiscal facts than the current US president.
Years ago in another life I was involved in some research at the finest university in the South. Although just doing pipette scut work, it was fun to be in a laboratory setting as someone who wasn't going into a scientific field (and it helped to have a bit of income.) Anyway, the purpose of editing the DNA was to produce some kind of cellular structure (I forget the name) that was present in the nerve cells of Alzheimer's patients and, I think, Lou Gehrig's disease. It was all federally funded research and my position was paid for by the "administrative" side of the grant funding the project. So, yeah, transgenic mice are used for Alzheimer's research.
"So, yeah, transgenic mice are used for Alzheimer's research."
Apologies for not being clear - I'm not disputing that.
I'm saying there were _other_ specific studies specifically using transgenic mice to study hormone therapy, and as I understand it, _those_ are the ones being complained about/shut down.
If he's shutting down _all_ transgenic mice studies that's not what I understood, I thought he was just complaining about these.
Is there actually a specific case Trump was talking about? Did he list a grant number in his rant? Or is it just a bunch of people speculating whether he misheard the word “transgenic” as “transgender” or whether he instead heard about some sex hormone study in mice and added the word “transgender” or whether he just made it up?
Sounds like a good study! But is there any reason to think that Trump had heard about it? The mere fact that he used some words that line up with it is basically no evidence.
This is where I have seriously wondered if it’s worth just throwing any sense of decorum to the wind and fighting back on the same turf, viz.
Trumpets: they’re transing mice, cut their funding.
Nerds: Hey, you fucking retard - “transgenic” has nothing to do with “transgender.” Learn English before you open your miserable piehole, you barely human piece of shit.
Maybe it’s the same result, but it matches the tone better.
Good point. I guess I mean Matt and Matt’s audience who know that the claims of fraud are not sincere and merely provide cover for dismantling various government agencies. I don’t feel like he needs to pretend Trump actually cares one way or the other about the truthfulness of his claims. Not for our sake, anyways.
is he sincerely trying to dismantle the agencies or merely cower them into docility? also, do musk and trump see eye to eye? neither of those questions have obvious answers.
the tensions within maga are very interesting and under-discussed.
i’m sincerely curious whether the evangelicals will push a national abortion ban in congress. evangelicals are the biggest pillar of maga, and they’ve been pretty quiet.
If you get into the tracking numbers, that’s for livestock in interstate commerce. Personal livestock doesn’t get tracked, and even producers do not always know when an animal dies or gives birth.
We have some tracking, but it is not better than Social Security.
When you keep thinking “I don't understand why Trump and Musk are lying about this,” you must at least consider the idea that they think it’s true!
Musk has strong priors that tell him that the government is poorly run and that his particular faction of big tech could fix all of it instantly. When he and his team of tweens examine various executive agencies and wonder “why does something work this way,” his impulse is strongly predisposed toward “because government is stupid and being taken advantage of,” rather than “because it’s complicated and not quite as weird as at seems at first glance, hence I should reserve judgment until I understand it better.”
As for Trump: I don’t think it’s useful to speculate about whether Trump is truly lying or is just misinformed. I’m convinced there’s a significant amount of overlap between them in his mind.
Based on previous evidence, I suspect Musk has a similar sort of “retconning” he applies to his own memories. When his strong claim is proven false, I think he lies to himself and decides that he meant something different — or that disproving the literal thing he said is just a cynical tactic and he was actually speaking about a _deeper_ truth that has not yet been refuted. Narcissists cannot be wrong.
The “are they lying to others or to themselves” saga has been going on for years. As little as I enjoy psychoanalyzing politicians with personality disorders, it’s hard to write about this stuff without at least dabbling in it. I'm extremely reluctant to spend any more of my short time on earth thinking about what Trump _thinks_, but at a certain point both he and Musk no longer deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt here.
What I think we’re dealing with is the very first clicktocracy - rule by the very online. These are people whose views of the world are entirely found online, the type of people who think online is more real than real. For things he has direct experience with Musk at least as that. But outside of that all experience is online.
Matt says he doesn't know why they're lying about this but to me it's pretty obvious. Republicans have, for a very long time, always pointed to some Boogeyman to distract from their own goals of making things better for rich people, which they know is very unpopular. So they try to distract people. To use another timely example...they've built up this narrative that the reason people can't find jobs anymore is because of free trade. So Trump does tariffs. And now he says there might some growing pains and people will have to suffer before they get to see the gains from his policy. They'll do the same thing with SS...say the problem is fraud, privatize it in the name of fighting fraud, and then even when their supporters are worse off they'll say "yeah but there's no more fraud" and their supporters will buy it hook, line, and sinker just like they do everything else because all they do is watch Fox News. These people have been cutting off their noses to spite their faces for decades and I don't see any reason why it will change now.
As you said, *usually* they’re doing it to try to do something that is better for rich people. But in *this* case, it’s hard to see what rich people are getting out of any of this.
Well, cutting SS and Medicare to finance tax cuts for the rich is pretty obvious. As for the tariff stuff...that is less clear. If the wealthy can't find a way to exploit the situation my guess is they will eventually find a way to get Trump to back down. But even then I'm guessing it will be done in a way that allows them to benefit while he saves some face.
This is all very straightforward. Yes, Trump is lying, because of course he is. Yes, we should have a national birth/death registry and a rationally designed national ID system. A+, no notes.
Meanwhile, ICE agents seized a Green Card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, who has said bad/anti-Semitic/pro-Hamas things, and are holding him at a facility in an unknown location (Louisiana?) and threatening to deport him.
I don't like Khalil and I don't agree with his views, but we're talking about government agents arresting a Green Card holder, who is in this country *legally*, and threatening him with deportation for saying bad things.
"The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens."
"This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim. "
Question - lots of my teacher friends were happy with the SSA Fairness Act because it allowed teachers and others retired on public pensions to continue receiving their SPOUSE'S social security benefits after their spouse had died. Previously if a teacher and their spouse were retired and the non-teacher spouse died, the teacher was not eligible to continue receiving their spouse's social security benefits.
Was that the sweetener used to pass a deal that ultimately increased payouts even to those who had never paid in? My teacher friends were pleased and allowing a public employee to receive their spouse's death benefits seems fair, so I didn't dig much further into the bill. What was specifically ill-advised about the SSA Fairness Act beyond that?
"Retired public school educators in 15 states where school districts don’t participate in Social Security, and instead only participate in a public employees pension system, will now receive full federal retirement benefits for any income they earned from other Social Security-eligible jobs. While they still will not be eligible for Social Security benefits from working in schools in those states, they can now collect federal retirement benefits if they spent portions of their career in the private sector or elsewhere in the country."
Do you have a source for this? If I'm understanding your example, if you somehow made $100,000 for just one year, you'd then be collecting $3200 a month as though you had paid in for 35 years.
I looked and couldn't find this stated anywhere. Everything I've seen has described it as removing the 2/3 pension deduction from *actually earned* Social Security benefits.
Still wrong, and now I suspect you don't even know how Social Security works. Your payout is a function of how much you contributed over your working years and your retirement age. The public pension "penalty" meant that people who made mid career changes into education (after working social security jobs for potentially 10+ years) would be excluded from receiving the benefits anyone else would be entitled to.
All of which to say is I am still wondering what was "misguided" about this bill
The biggest complaint about it is that SS is a progressive program that takes from high income earners and redistributes to low income workers. Public pension workers look like low income workers in their contributions when in reality they were usually higher than average income workers. So they get the benefits of a progressive system but based on their earned income and additional pension, don't need/deserve such consideration.
I keep thinking about how my mother died around midnight on the last day of the month. I had been helping her out financially while still at the age where I feared "baglady syndrome" for myself. I would have welcomed the following month's SS payment, paltry as it was for most women in those days.
This doesn’t seem hard to explain. Trump and Musk are trying to point to examples that show the government has been run by idiots and is full of waste and fraud. They believe doing so will build support for their program of significantly downsizing many federal departments and spending programs. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen (I am skeptical!) but that’s clearly the playbook they are running.
If that was the playbook they would look in the areas full of fraud like Medicare billing, VA disability allowances, Pentagon overcharging, payments to keep schools open etc
They are deliberately looking at plaves with low levels of fraud, which is what makes it a strange strategy.
Well, it's a strange strategy if you assume that the point is to minimise fraud, rather than the actual point which is to sow distrust in government and create as much distraction as possible for their forthcoming set of massive tax cuts for rich people.
In any case, I don't believe a party in which Rick Scott is a leading member is going to be investigating Medicare fraud.
Medicare Advantage should be high on their list. It won't be, of course, because the Insurance Industrial Complex is a major GOP backer. This is from the Wiki Article:
>Given that operators are compensated based on enrollee-specific risk scores, operators been accused of manipulating diagnosis codes to increase risk ratings and thus their compensation.[18] Most large operators including UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance, and Kaiser have faced or are facing federal fraud charges by the Inspector General or the Department of Justice.[19] A 2024 analysis based on Medicare data reported evidence of such behavior. The patients often received no treatment for those diagnoses. The analysis calculated that in the three years ending in 2021, insurers pocketed $50 billion from Medicare for untreated diseases.[20]<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Advantage
Fifty billion here, fifty billion there. Pretty soon we're talking about real money.
I think they will get there. They are just looking for shiny objects quickly. Medicare billing is complicated. Supercentenarians on the books of SSA anyone can grasp.
It’s so frustrating that the right answer to everything they point to is “hire some more people and give them more authority”, but they are instead using it to fire people and take away authority, so the problems get worse.
It also leaves Musk and Trump with fewer people to actually carry out their wishes, though…
However much anti-government outrage Musk foments— no one wants their social security cut.
Musk is the king of unlikely goals. We will never colonize Mars and he’s a nitwit for trying.
Never is a very long time.
"Never" is a very long time for a mathematician. "Never" for an engineer is, oh, call it 150 or 200 years.
(I'll take the *long* over on either of those numbers)
Perhaps. I don't know what the future holds, but 150 years ago 1875. We've made a bit of progress since then. Might make some more in the next 150 years.
I think I would easily take the under on manned missions to Mars in 150 years (er, just to be clear, here meaning that I think that a manned mission *will* happen before the year 2175), contingent on no apocalyptic event before then.
It seems unlikely to me that it will ever make sense to *colonize* Mars in the sense of "millions of people live there in a relatively self-sufficient way."
I'm totally onboard with your odds. I think there's a very real chance we'll live to see a crewed mission *to* Mars (I'm more bearish on footprints in the dust).
That's very reasonable. I think it really depends on how technological advances continue. If our knowledge and tech growth wane, then I suspect you are very much correct. However, if they continue at the pace we've been at across the last 300 years, then I think its more feasible.
Greenland. Antarctica and vast stretches of boreal forest are vastly more inhabitable than Mars and pose comparatively trivial transportation difficulties.
Also, I don’t care that much what happens after I die. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice for goals that can only be achieved after my death.
If there is ever a Mars colony, there will be some parents-to-be who will be the very first to consign their child to a lifetime living in a hole. Not a new continent with different trees and different bugs and different weather and maybe different constellations in a N2/O2 sky--a hole.
I think it's frankly rather disturbing and inhuman. Like the disruptive mentally ill dude on the subway ranting and raving about the 5G, I would prefer not to share a car.
You could say the same thing about space generally. If we ever move into the stars (assuming no faster than light technology), then whoever does so will consign generations of living in a box hurtling through space until they potentially reach another world.
Human history is such that there are people willing to endure to reach further than we have gone before. If we lose that, we might be very comfortable here on Earth, but I think we'll have also lost some of our humanity as well.
I admire the polynesians who did the epic open boat journeys, most of which probably ended in death. those that landed on habitable islands with at least a handful of survivors of each gender hit a darwinian jackpot.
however, i have no personal taste for open boat journeys and a distaste for leaders who urge me towards them. georgia is habitable and, with a couple tweaks, can stay that way.
if life on mars is ever better than life on earth, then life on earth probably isn’t worth living.
polar bears don’t do well in texas.
> If we ever move into the stars
You're so close to getting it...
preach it
"Also, I don’t care that much what happens after I die. I’m certainly not going to sacrifice for goals that can only be achieved after my death."
If everyone was like you, we'd still be living in huts.
I’m not sure about that. People would have been less cowed by superstitions involving afterlives and more focused on what was possible within their lifetimes
I mean, don’t you have children? I get the feeling you have and I shared it before my niblings were born. Now I worry more about the world we’re leaving to them.
I have a son. I certainly want to feed and educate him, but I think most parents valorize sacrifice.
So many of us would be happy to support colonizing Mars if it meant we could send Elon there.
spoken like a trust elitist, with the 1992 harvard degree in your bio and all!
FYI Harvard Extension is “night school”—open enrollment and lower cost than most comparable programs.
The point was you proudly want everyone to know you have a Ivy League education, but kudos to you to pointing out they are overpriced!
Musk is the king of accomplishing things people didn’t think was possible. There, I fixed it for you.
has tesla achieved anything the chinese haven’t? i get that he’s a successful industrialist, but there are hundreds of those.
Only one company in the world is launching re-usable rockets at scale (china is trying hard but failing). Tesla’s going to be the first one to autonomy, launching Robotaxi in June. maybe do 2 minutes of googling before opining next time ….other than that, ya he hasn’t accomplished anything anyone else hasn’t
From occasionally sampling comments at right wing news outlets it does appear to be really energizing to his base. They don't engage with the details (these people aren't actually getting checks) at all because they want to believe it's that simple.
I don't think Trump has a deeply held commitment to cutting government..he may end up doing it but he could just as easily not. I think this description is more true of Musk, but I don't buy that it's out of Musk's self-interest, I think he just thinks it's funny.
We know it is full of waste and fraud though, the GAO admits this .
But that's a different number than what Musk and Trump claim.
It has 0.85% waste and fraud. If you want to cut waste and fraud, you should hire more people and give the systems more information and legal permission to work with other government offices, which would cost some money. You could cut waste and fraud by increasing anti-fraud spending, which might not be “waste” but costs money anyway.
Where you getting that number from:
GOA estimates fraud alone is $233 billion and $521[1]
Annual budget 2024 was 6.8 trillion[2]
So fraud alone accounts for 3.43%-7.66%. Now imagine if you add waste lol. I honestly cant believe people are trying to defend this. I'm sorry but the solution isnt to hire more people, it's to upgrade old systems to use modern technology to combat fraud.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105833
[2]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=Outlays%20in%20fiscal%20year%202024,year%20average%20of%2021.1%20percent.
You seem to be quoting some general government expenditure figure, not the social security figure. I didn’t look up the number myself - I was quoting a number someone else in this thread cited.
Still, we seem to agree that we shouldn’t be firing people to try to fix this - we should be upgrading systems, which likely involves temporary new expenditures either to hire the people to do the upgrade, or whatever.
"I'm sorry but the solution isnt to hire more people, it's to upgrade old systems to use modern technology to combat fraud."
I'm not sure how you expect to roll over from an old, creaky database to new modern technology without hiring a lot of people to manage the changeover carefully. Any engineer can tell you that database transitions are risky business operations that require all hands on deck.
I’m a software engineer, this isn’t rocket science, it’s been done by most of the private sector years ago. I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but it’s totally achievable by a smart group of people and the number doesn’t need to be in the thousands.
"it’s totally achievable by a smart group of people and the number doesn’t need to be in the thousands"
Yes, exactly. But the number does need to be nonzero, and moreover positive. Which is why people are complaining in this thread that Musk seems to be firing the smart people, rather than trying to make it easier for the government to hire new smart people or retarget smart existing employees towards smoothing those database switches.
No, it's not "full" of waste and fraud. Waste and fraud exist in the system as they exist in every system ever created. They exist in every private sector system too. And the fraud can run in more than one direction, Musk and Trump's own companies engage in waste and fraud on the owners' behalf by not paying contractors and employees..
In the private sector, you get penalized for waste and fraud because your competitors that run a clean shop can will eventually have higher profit margins and you lose market share. Half of this comment section seems against an sort of s audit because "orange. man bad".
People are against the "audit" because, as Trump and Elon are running it now, it is more of an ideological purge than an audit.
That’s not why people are against audits, and anyone that is against an audit for that reason is not a smart person.
Same as everything else. Some of my spending (larger than 0.85%) is waste and abuse (not sure about the fraud part). I daresay, good Francis, that the same could be said about your finances.
No system, even one that coerces funding through taxation, will be free of such things.
.85% is not the correct number. I posted above.
The 0.85% (0.84% in the original post by MY) was explicitly about Social Security. That was the whole subject of today's post.
Ok
Peter-as Matt’s column clearly explains that many departments of the government are indeed to use your words, “ run by idiots” or at least by individuals who have no incentive not to act incompetently and thus appeared to be idiots. Why Matt’s willingness to give the incompetents even more work and power seems to me like a nonsensical solution.At least some of the states do a reasonably good job.
Wait, unless I missed it, this post doesn’t answer the basic question: *why* are the 13 million dead people listed as alive not all receiving improper SS benefits? How does SSA know not to pay them? To be clear, I believe they aren’t being paid, I just was hoping for some explanation as to why that is.
Well, you have to actually apply for your benefits, and not everyone does. And you have to have a functioning bank account for the benefits to be paid out to.
If Sylvester dies intestate and with no heirs or next of kin, and was living on SS, then at some point his bank figures out that he's dead and closes his account. Either the bank keeps the money as a windfall overpayment -- I presume at least SOME do this and manage to stay under the radar, even though it's the stupid thing to do -- or the bank returns the money. Thus, at any given moment, SSA will ALWAYS be showing SOME amount of overpayments, the majority of which will get paid back.
Now, if Ethel dies with heirs or next of kin, then two things can happen. Some small fraction of people might try keeping Aunt Ethel's SS payments for themselves; some portion of those get caught and prosecuted. But most people close out all of Aunt Ethel's affairs, including shutting down her bank account and withdrawing it all to her estate, so that it can be doled out as inheritance. Even if they forget to shut down her SS benefits, the benefits are no longer paying into the bank account. Again, SSA might keep printing Ethel's SS checks, and thus those checks will be temporarily reflected as "overpayments" IE money having gone out the door -- even though, again, they eventually get counted back onto the balance sheet.
A lot of people who are swallowing the Social Security fraud rhetoric don't seem to understand this would require a lot of banks to have been knowingly committing fraud by keeping accounts open of known dead people just so they have can SS checks coming in as deposits. There may be a few small local banks who do this for 1-2 accounts, but major banks have a large incentive to not be caught committing widespread fraud for not a large amount of money that they can't even spend directly.
That was precisely my thinking. Some small struggling community credit union probably could stand to make a few extra bucks on a couple extra thousand or even tens of thousands in overpaid SS deposits, just because it marginally shores up their leverage requirements... but Wells Fargo is making bigger bucks off of bigger frauds than dead people's measly SS money.
"this would require a lot of banks to have been knowingly committing fraud"
Unfortunately, the modal bluecheck response would just be that a lot of banks have been knowingly committing fraud.
A big, big problem with the internet is that the average person knows nothing about how complex systems work.
Hey, I've been to a bank - I've literally seen the tubes they run on.
I mean the Wells Fargo thing happened with opening accounts in people's names who didn't actually authorize it. So I wouldn't say big banks aren't above committing fraud for what amounts to pennies of their overall profit and revenue.
I mean I'm pretty sure you're right. The Wells Fargo thing happened (if I'm not mistaken) because of some poorly thought incentive structures; employees had quotas to make as far as new accounts to be opened so it created a giant incentive to essentially skirt the rules to basically not get fired (or to get the extra bonus). That's very different from the bank deliberately having a policy to defraud it's customers.
And as far as cooperation among banks, I'm fairly certain banks did collude to in order to manipulate the LIBOR rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal#:~:text=The%20scandal%20arose%20when%20it,approximately%20%24350%20trillion%20in%20derivatives.).
So yes I think for a variety of reasons, Musk is full of it. But yes I can absolutely believe banks would a) commit fraud for negligible amounts of money b) collude in said fraud.
How would the bank know that you are dead? Many people have SS benefits paid by ACH into a joint account. Even if it is not a joint account, how would the bank know who is using e.g. the ATM card?
I went into this more above, but today there are electronic processes in place such that states notify the SSA in real time when they receive notice of a death. The SSA stops all payments based on that information and debits any excess payments they've made.
Fraudulently keeping payments for a co-account holder who died likely is the kind of fraud that exists. But only a small fraction of people are in the situation where that could happen, and some of those people get caught.
I'm talking only about cases where it is known that the person is dead and thus maintaining that account would possibly be fraud behavior, specifically because this conversation was kicked off by the false SS fraud allegations. I don't blame a bank for keeping an account open for someone whose death hasn't been confirmed by anyone.
In that case, I'm not understanding your original comment. It makes more sense to me that, where fraud occurs, the bank has no way of knowing that.
I'm only talking about fraud knowingly committed by the bank. If people are hiding their relative's death to continue cashing checks, the bank would not have a way of knowing that, but such scams would likely be too complicated to really be widespread. My point is that Social Security fraud is likely not that widespread since it would require incumbent actors beyond the SSA that have an incentive to not commit fraud to knowingly commit fraud.
Do you really think banks have *no* way of finding out whether you are alive or dead? Have you never had to interact with a public records system?
Because for some reason this particular Trump/Musk claim bothers me more than most, I've dug into this a bit. There is now a system where when a person's death is reported to the county/state, which is required, that death is sent to a state and then national database, AND the SSA.
This process started in 1976, but didn't become truly universal until a few years ago. So today, Ethel's crooked heirs and crooked banks get cut off pretty quickly. In my SIL's case, it was almost instantaneous. Her last SS check was deposited and then removed from her bank within about two days.
So really we're probably mostly just talking about a backlog of really old cases where there wasn't enough documentation to declare them dead, and we're not actually sending them money.
Yes, mostly, the key thing is that the SSA doesn't care if you're dead. They only care, and are only mandated to care, whether or not you are or should be receiving benefits. So there's not a compelling reason for the SSA to declare someone dead.
I believe the IG reports recommended that they clean up their database to just arbitrarily assign a death date or status to presumably dead people. That probably is the best idea, but there is an argument against it. Assigning an arbitrary date doesn't actually make the data more accurate, it just makes it LOOK more accurate.
To be more accurate you would want to investigate and try to track down whether and when these people died, but who wants to spend money on that?
Even spending the money to assign death dates raises the question why. Why spend money on something that makes no difference rather than spend that time/money on something, anything, more relevant?
Same with my late wife (the claw back part; not the being crooked).
This is probably right — SS stops issuing checks once someone stops cashing them, and most of the time people don’t fraudulently cash the checks of their dead relatives. But if that is the case this is a legitimately insane practice by SSA. You’d think that if SS stopped issuing checks to people on account of them being dead, it would identify them as dead!
Not insane at all! There's a difference between someone being *ineligible* for payments on account of having some of the symptoms of death -- like a nonfunctioning bank account -- and actually verifying that they ARE in fact dead. You wouldn't want to declare them dead just to have them turn out to be alive-but-incapacitated-and-now-very-angry-that-their-benefits-halted.
Which gets to the heart of Matt's whole reporting issue here. SSA clearly doesn't have the staff on hand to track down every single lapsed bank account to verify that they're dead. It'd be really nice if they could just have a centralized database that aggregates every locality's death records.
Fair enough. But if the answer is “more than 99% of these dead people with active SS numbers aren’t receiving benefits because they stopped cashing their checks when they died and were terminated from the program,” it would have been nice for an explainer on why Musk and Trump are lying to say that. Thank you for the explanation.
The explainer is "they opened their mouths and vibrated their vocal cords."
The problem is that the same lack of resources that made SS have trouble realizing these people are dead is going to cause even more trouble for a third party like Matt to figure out the explanation of what the situation really is.
The thing we know is that the number of payments being sent to people over 100 is about the same as the census population over 100, and about three orders of magnitude smaller than the number of SSNs belonging to over 100 people not marked “dead”.
What is the percentage of people who cash checks vs those who use ACH? I deal with mostly low-income elderly people, and my guess would be they are about 90% on ACH, so it makes sense to me that higher income folks would also mostly be using ACH. No physical check to cash.
If your bank account is closed, the ACH will fail, same effect (and if you die your relatives are likely to close the account).
"You wouldn't want to declare them dead just to have them turn out to be alive-but-incapacitated-and-now-very-angry-that-their-benefits-halted."
From the point of view of the person not receiving benefits, I don't see much of a difference here. If anything, I'd have an easier time proving that I am alive than I would getting through to Chase customer service.
Proving you are not dead is much worse
Worse in what sense?
See above, today this is all handled electronically and the states notify SSA when someone dies. The nonsense Trump and Musk are citing is about people who died decades ago.
It is still true that there is not a centralized nationwide system for all deaths and births. Even if the data sharing between the various, meaning 50 state plus several federal data bases, is better, it should just be centralized.
I think in most cases when you die without heirs your estate is transferred to the government.
True, but that would be the *local* government, which might not always bother to notify SSA.
And by local government, you mean state government.
Not a lawyer, but I was always under the impression that although most if-not-all states do it that way, it's possible some small few don't, if for no other reason than the states are quirky and often have dumb quibbly laws like that on the books.
Every state I have been in has an unclaimed funds account. If you don’t claim it in a certain time it goes to them. I had a claim for an insurance rebate that I got a message years later.
It would be very interesting and frankly on-brand for SB to interview, say, a former director of the SSA EDW to nerd out on the topic of social security data
Yes, but there really ought to be a simple high level explanation here. “Yes there are 13 million dead people listed as alive by SSA but they aren’t receiving SS checks because ___.”
“They never paid in” is a likely answer for a large percentage.
Well, there are a number of other explanations on this thread, including that payments stopped when their bank accounts closed or they stopped cashing checks, or they simply never applied. It is probably a combination of all of them. My point is that I would have liked a detailed explanation of how we know these dead people aren’t being paid.
We don’t need a “detailed explanation of how we know these dead people aren’t being paid.” They track payments. It’s very easy to know if they are being paid.
The fact that you’ve pivoted from “why aren’t they being paid” to “how do we know they aren’t being paid” illustrates the current administration’s purpose in providing no explanation. They are intent on destroying government capacity in all spaces, including the extremely low administrative expense entitlement program that is social security. So they benefit from conspiracy minded people walking around saying “I’m just asking questions,” because it’s easier to destroy government capacity with greater mistrust of government.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I have said multiple times that I don’t believe there’s fraud. I was just looking for a more satisfying answer to Musk and Trump’s bullshit statements. If the answer is, “you can run a query on these 13 million dead names and can confirm that 99% of them aren’t receiving benefits for various reasons” that would be a good explanation and doesn’t require more detail. But the post doesn’t really say that so it feels vague.
Yes, we would like to have an explanation for each of these 13 million people. But if the Social Security Agency had a list of dead people who are marked as alive with explanations for why they haven’t collected payments, then they would have updated their database and not marked the person as alive.
I suppose if someone at SSA had some free time, and some legal authority, they could sample some random people over 100 from the database and tell us why those individuals aren’t receiving payments (whether they are alive or not). But I don’t know how many government workers have had sufficient free time to do this sort of thing in the past couple weeks - and it would probably be illegal for social security to report any information they have about any individual, even one presumed dead for decades.
Except the "because" is "they aren't eligible for benefits" which leads to "why aren't they eligible for benefits", "well certainly one reason is they're dead, but there may have been other reasons in the past, myriad reasons."
You're looking at it the wrong way. The default for everyone is they are not eligible for benefits, most people eventually become eligible, but not everyone, and this was especially true early on and especially true among the cohort of people who we're talking about. Some may have received benefits and then we stopped because we figured out they were dead, but absent an actual date of death they're not listed as dead, just not receiving benefits.
This is a totally fair question. My read based on Matt’s article is that the authoritative information the SSA actually cares about is “is eligible to receive benefits and how much?” and that “alive” status is actually orthogonal to that, and at most is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for benefit issuance, so to get benefits you need (isEligible && isAlive) in computer-speak.
Based on the incentives Matt describes above one could see how the SSA would care very much about keeping the eligibility database up to date wheres the “alive” database doesn’t actually matter (except redundantly) such that it becomes more of an afterthought.
This is just pure spitballing on my part though.
Undoubtedly correct but that just reframes the question: how are these people being identified as ineligible? They are old enough to receive benefits and surely the vast majority were eligible for them at one time. So what happened?
One literally has to apply for benefits. One could get a card, die unrecorded at 59 and the number, apparently, continues on.
"...surely the vast majority were eligible for them at one time."
I'm not sure this is true. Remember, these people were born more than 100 years ago. They lived during the very early years of SS. And, as MY wrote:
"... when Social Security was created, only 56 percent of the workforce was covered by the system."
Yes. People forget you have to pay in to qualify for benefits. Lots of people didn’t for various reasons.
But did people not covered by the system receive SS numbers? Again, these are the types of questions I would have liked this post to address.
Yes, people were issued SS numbers and never qualified for benefits. It's easy to do. Get a ss number, work for a year, or never work, die before you hit age 65, and you never qualify for benefits.
Very common in the early days, wife and husband get social security numbers, but wife doesn't work. Husband collects benefits, wife passes away before husband, never collected on her own behalf, no reason for SS ever to care about recording her death.
I believe anyone can apply for a SSN (now appropriately called a taxpayer id number). Applying for benefits is a different process.
They *can*, but did they? My grandmother (b. 1886) was divorced from my grandfather after 30 years of marriage. Back in the day, divorced women weren't eligible for their ex-husband's benefits. So she never got a SS number. She died in 1963.
For example they don’t have the 40 quarters of earnings you need to be eligible for SS.
Right, it's implicit in Musk's criticism that if you're alive you're eligible, but that's not true. My best friend's mom was in this situation. She worked until the kids were born, then stopped to raise them. She and her husband divorced and she received alimony, which allowed her to continue not working, and then didn't receive SS benefits when she hit retirement age because she didn't work enough.
It would not surprise me whatsoever to learn that Musk is sufficiently incurious as to actually believe this.
With people like that, what they "actually believe" is hard to really pinpoint, because in their own minds they don't really care what's true, only what's useful.
There's lots of answers in the thread, but none from a systems perspective, and since I'm a systems engineer, I'll chime in as well.
The database Matt refers to in the piece is one of *many* across the whole system. It appears to track people who were assigned SSNs. It also appears to track whether those people are alive or dead (not well), but crucially it does not track:
- where they live
- what benefits they receive
- whether they are even eligible for benefits
So this means there are other systems that are tracking those things, which likely *do* identify also whether they are still alive or dead. They must, in some capacity, or as Matt points out, those people would still be receiving benefits*, and they are not.
That's all to say, this particular artifact of this particular database is a classic red herring. It has *no* relevance to whether or not people are receiving fraudulent benefits, because other systems that interact with it *only* check it to see if an individual has an SSN, they don't check it to see whether they're alive or eligible for benefits.
This is, in database-speak, a "normalized" dataset (mostly). The database contains one type of info, and if you want to get a full picture, you have to search multiple databases and combine ("join", in database lingo) the results. I won't go into why you would design it like this, but "database normalization" is a good search term if you're interested.
*in the case that they ever even did, as many people ITT pointed out
Also, COBOL:
https://www.techspot.com/news/106926-millions-dead-social-security-recipients-actually-caused-cobol.html
COBOL is just the code language used for the interface. The data in the database itself is a different issue.
From the link:
“This quirk in date representation has resulted in some Social Security applicants being assigned a birthdate of May 20, 1875, when their actual birth date is unknown.”
They’re saying a problem with the code is to blame.
I read that, and the underlying report. It's not clear to me that that IS the explanation or just speculation it Might be the explanation. Do you have any insight? I'm in an argument with my brother about this, so any help would be appreciated.
I have no personal insight. I’m not DOGE.
I'd expect that in most cases the answer is "they haven't applied for them" (probably because no-one realises that there is an SSA record for these SSNs).
But there should also be an answer for "so what happens if they do?"
Long story short - SSA has complicated fraud detection systems that are used on receivers of SS, but not on people who just have SS numbers but receive no federal benefits.
Long version - Part of the complexity is that there actually are systems NOW where electronic death certificates being filed automatically notifies the SS. The problem is more people who died before this system was put in place. So if your relative died last week and you try and use their SSN to apply for benefits, you will fail. It takes as little as a week for everything to be frozen.
Previously, a lot of this was prevented by banks themselves. They have their own reasons and mechanisms to alert to the death of account owners, and would notify SS if payments were being issued to the account of someone deceased.
SSA also has dedicated fraud detection teams that use both computer programs/widespread data analysis to pick out “suspicious” cases (which would include unusually old recipients) and individual investigation.
I want to upvote your last paragraph in particular. SSA, and virtually every other government agency, spends a lot of time, money, and effort detecting and preventing fraud. A lot of the conversations I hear, even among this substack's commenters, seem to assume that agencies don't try to prevent fraud and that ripping off the government is some easy con that gets played every day. The exact opposite is true.
There huge mandates written into the laws and certainly in the regs that require that agencies work hard against fraud. That is actually a major component of why agencies appear so inefficient.
Yes - and moreover, SSA in particular has made rapid strides in recent years to really up their fraud detection game, and it’s been a bipartisan effort. A lot of it has involved what the article talks about, ie pushing through changes that allow much more information sharing between federal government agencies, along with increased use of fraud detection software and better data analysis.
Federal agencies just sometimes don’t want to do difficult tasks that might help the government as a whole but aren’t really on their departments shoulders, which can cause problems when there are inefficiencies that aren’t technically on the shoulders of anyone.
(What annoys me is also that people act like private companies don’t have fraud and waste. I wish this article included a comparison to the false payout rates from private insurance companies, it’s much worse!)
I would be surprised if none of these people applied for benefits when they were alive. I guess it’s possible that these are all people who died young or otherwise never received benefits— that would be exactly the type of explanation I’m looking for — but if that was true I would expect that someone would have mentioned that by now. The assumption has been that these are ordinary people whose deaths were not recorded by SSA. And ordinary people, by and large, apply for and receive SS benefits when they turn 65.
Matt said on Politix last week that many are foreigners who lived & worked here for a time and then returned to their home countries.
I have a friend who has an SSN and never has worked in the US. If you pay enough US taxes for remote working, you have to get an SSN.
And there are people who worked in the US for a time and left. And people who died before 65. And probably more.
The survival rate to 65 for men is only about 82% right now. People who don’t make it aren’t just people who died genuinely YOUNG young, it’s also anyone who doesn’t make it to their 50’s or 60’s. There are a LOT of ordinary people who die before reaching eligibility age.
Don’t most folks apply at 62? Usually under a spouse so they can start claiming their own at 70?
About 27% of people claim benefits at 62.
After the implementation of deemed filing rules, you cannot switch from spousal benefits to your own unless a specific exception applies. If you apply for benefits and are eligible for both spousal and worker benefits, SSA will give you whichever is higher at the time. Some people do apply for their own benefits early then switch to spousal later when their spouse retires. This makes sense only if your spouse makes a LOT more money than you.
You can, if you want, read the Inspector General's report Matt cited in the article. It's all pretty well laid out there.
I did read both reports actually. Neither directly explain how it is known that the incorrect numbers don’t correspond to incorrect payments, presumably because that is too elementary for the readers of the reports who are familiar with the SS systems, and because they are two separate reports neither of which directly address the relationship between the incorrect names and incorrect payments payments. This comment thread has given me a better understanding of that but I still maintain that an explainer of why Musk and Trump are lying should offer more evidence and explanation as to how we know they are lying. Which again, i have no doubt that they are!
“ if that was true I would expect that someone would have mentioned that by now.”
Facts don’t get mentioned unless someone knows them. So you must mean “if someone know that I would expect they would have mentioned it by now”.
But if someone knew that some individual had died before 65 and thus never applied for social security and never got marked dead on the rolls, then I think their priority would have been marking this person dead on the rolls, rather than notifying the general public that they found a case like this.
I mean wasn’t that one of the conceits of the US version of Shameless, that there was a grandparent buried in the backyard so Frank could go on collecting their checks?
> And ordinary people, by and large, apply for and receive SS benefits when they turn 65.
We're talking about people who were born well over 100 years ago. These people were alive *before* Social Security existed. Why would you apply that assumption to them? Are you aware that eligibility criteria has expanded immensely since the program first started?
You're exhibiting an extreme recency bias here.
There have been a lot of people excluded from getting social security benefits. Housewives who never worked and died before their husbands, government workers who had the pre-Reagan pensions, railroad workers, self-employed people who didn't pay their social security tax on time, people who emigrated from the US and either always worked abroad or renounced their citizenship... I think if you add up all these seemingly small categories plus the issues Matt described, it's pretty easy to get to that 13 million number.
The Type I/Type II error really gets at what pisses me off about DOGE. Well meaning conservative friends and family seem really jazzed about this DOGE stuff and they're surprised to find I'm not. They're totally willing to accept when I point out that the total cost savings from DOGE, even if implemented, will be miniscule. "Yeah I get it's not much, but the government shouldn't be wasting ANY money." Ok, I've been over before the difficulty of distinguishing "waste" from "stuff you don't like," but even if we agree on what constitutes "waste," there are diminishing returns to cracking down. Everybody understands this in their own job. If your higher-ups instituted an crackdown on expenses charged to the company down to the penny, it would probably waste more time and money complying with that rule than it would save in waste. Like if I had to make sure every time I charged mileage to the company I took the exact quickest route and wrote my mileage down to the tenth of a mile, I'd have to waste time figuring out which route they considered quickest. To the extent there would be savings, maybe some employees would say "fuck it" and no longer expense mileage. This also goes for the vague dictum of "don't do woke shit anymore." Great. Now I have to guess what you guys consider "woke."
TLDR; there are diminishing returns to cracking down on waste, especially if you don't understand how the bureaucracy works and you don't care.
"Yeah I get it's not much, but the government shouldn't be wasting ANY money."
We probably underestimate how much Trump reorienting the GOP has turned it into the party of people who don't know how things actually work and are just confused by complex structures.
See also too, DOT or NHTSA or whoever putting a number on how much a life is "worth" when engaged in cost-benefit analysis.
YOU CAN'T PUT A PRICE ON A HUMAN LIFE!!!1
Same people will complain about overspending.
I'm feeling like the Dems should just lean in to this. They've called Trump Hitler so long it's distracted from the much simpler fact that he's a moron who doesn't know what he's doing. The Dems should make a play for literally everybody with a college degree.
Unfortunately, in high turnout elections, people with college degrees aren’t a majority of voters.
They should aim for a 60% majority. Every party should. It just seems like that's going to be waited on the highly educated side of things. That's fine. Own it.
Harris got something north of 70% of people with degrees. The dems already own those voters.
Try 56%, your claim is wildly inaccurate:
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
I'm picturing a two pronged approach.
1. If you're in the bottom two thirds or so, we'll be objectively better for your pocketbook.
2. If that doesn't appeal to you, at least we won't do anything crazy and tank the stock market.
You're completely right about it not being worth it to track down all fraud. Megan McArdle has written a lot about this.
Now, pretend you work for the company and hate its mission and all its salespeople. You can just demand all the receipts and itemizing and proof you just mentioned. Sales grind to a halt.
So the demand for "NO FRAUD" can just be a bad-faith way to shut down the program.
Just had another thought, this is basically what progressives were trying to do to police departments. "I'm hostile to your mission, so I'll demand perfection and I won't acknowledge any improvements."
“Anti-corruption purges” are also a common tool for new authoritarians in power. Since there’s usually a lot of corruption to be found in the kinds of places that authoritarians come to power.
It really pisses me off to imagine. Musk wants to know 5 things I did this week but he's already made his mind up the whatever I'm doing is bullshit. How motivated am I to explain my job that he wouldnt understand even if he did care?
"Now I have to guess what you guys consider "woke."'
At this point, I'm pretty sure it just means "Anybody not on Trump's side who isn't white or a man".
I'm obviously overexaggerating a bit..but honestly I'm not sure how much.
One thing I've sort of been grappling with for months now is a post on the downsides of not interacting with Trump universe enough. What do I mean by this. Good place to start is the New York Times columnists. There's not one who we consider an out an out Trumpist. Douthat is probably the closest one at this point, especially given his burgeoning bromance with JD. But even that is tenuous Pre 2016 if Douthat or Brett Stephens or David French wrote a column on a particular topic, we could be pretty sure they were speaking for a least some segment of the current GOP of that moment. Now? Who do they speak for? And more importantly, where is the columnist giving the actual full throated defense of Trump and Trumpism generally?
As a result, I feel like of debates that played in MSM last few years on a variety of topics (transgender issues, Gaza, inflation, DEI etc) wasn't really a debate between GOP and Democrats, but more left wing Progressives vs centrists or never Trump Republicans. But meanwhile, there is this 40% of the public having this entirely different conversation just absolutely disconnected from those of us who comment a lot on this substack are having.
I'm the king of "don't over romanticize the 'good ole days'". In fact a lot of you probably get sick of me bringing it up even though I think it explains A LOT with a variety of topics. But I do think pre 2020 and especially pre 2016, MSM was actually more clued in to the actual beliefs and conversations happening on the right.
I bring it all up, because I look back on everything that happened in 2023 and 2024 and it's hard for me to not conclude that MSM was just asleep at the wheel as far as how actual crazy the GOP had gotten and how crazy the Trump administration would be because they were so disconnected from what was actually going on.
Trumpism is just a cult of personality. There's nothing really to interact with. You either buy that everything he does is genius (it's not) or you don't. I think the new Trad Right or whatever you want to call them has insane views on foreign policy, but it is actually a thing you can sort of kind of engage with. Problem is that Trump isn't even that, he's his own thing. To be a "Trumpist" means to be constantly turd polishing whatever the fuck he just said. Reagan and both Bushes had fandoms but not to the level of cult-like dedication required to be on Trump's "team." So to answer your question, no it isn't possible for the NYT to hire a "Trumpist" columnist.
As for "woke," I don't know. Ask 10 different people what woke means, get 11 different answers. I encourage anti-woke types to be specific about what they mean. Depending on your definition, I don't like "woke" stuff either, but it's impossible to engage with without being specific. Example: I don't believe the SAT is racist just because students from different ethnic backgrounds have different average scores. Tada! I stated my "anti-woke" idea specifically and clearly.
I'm not sure if agree with the characterization that straight white men are excused from the charge of "woke." I've been accused of wokeness by a conservative family member for... I don't even remember what position I was articulating, nothing that crazy I'm sure. It's just a word conservatives recently learned and they're just throwing it at everything. It's completely meaningless at this point.
But the NYT actually could have - and IMHO should have - hired a pro-Trump columnist to do the yeoman's work of "turd polishing" in a manner that would have been legible to the NYT reader. This would have been a productive exercise in some ways; at least one of which would have been to counteract the truism that "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that" - J.S. Mill.
And what would have been the downside? Where have arguments about "normalizing," "platforming," etc., gotten us? As if preserving the moral hygiene of the NYT opinion page is or was essential to some desired democratic outcome. The audience is 95% Democrats and liberals in any event. It's not as if the NYT would have been lacking an overwhelming amount of countervailing opinion to reassure the poor traumatized reader and assist him off the fainting couch, pearls firmly in hand.
OTOH, the rigid and studious avoidance of Trump supporters has resulted in a phony presentation of the actual terms of debate, as Colin has suggested above, whereby the pro-Trump arguments are caricatured by the leftist and liberal opinions, but never defended by the RINOs and never-Trumpers. "Nothing to see here, folks." And all the while confirming the suspicion of many that the NYT is a gated bastion of elite opinion where the unwashed masses are simply not welcome.
There are intellectually serious arguments for "Trump is preferable to the alternatives." That's fine. Problem with Trump is the level of personal loyalty he demands. The NYT columnists are overwhelmingly liberal, but it's not like they're forbidden to criticize Democrats either from the left or the center. To be a Trumpist, you can never criticize the guy. I think Douthat and Stevens are actually pretty good columnists and different flavors of conservative. But just "all hail God Emperor Trump" every column would get old. Fox News already exists.
What I would imagine a pro-Trump columnist in the NYT would be doing would be mostly " intellectually serious arguments for 'Trump is preferable to the alternatives' ", and very little "all hail God Emperor Trump". I am not tracking on how it would be a problem if the lone pro-Trump columnist at the NYT was hesitant to criticize Trump. Again, there would be 10+ other columnists doing that.
Douthat is kind of there. But sure, there could be more right-leaning columnists who criticize Trump less frequently.
The next Democrat with any power has to get rid of the Republican media ecosystem before anything.
If you want to have a stronger argument with them than "the great is the enemy of the good", it's actually worse. They are *wasting money* that was not being wasted before, by making the fed employees _less_ efficient by _screwing with their process_ in basically random un-useful ways.
My wife works for FDA and they randomly had their access to shipping frozen. So she still gets paid to go and collect samples, but ... she can't ship them to the lab for analysis. People squawk and they go "okay, you can ship, but you have to get your manager to sign off."
All states here post-Elon are _simply worse_ than before. To believe that DOGE is doing something useful is to _not actually look at what the hell they are doing_.
I see the lies as having some political value to Musk; it appears as if he has discovered a problem whihc sort of justifies anything else he does. "If SSA can't keep track of who is dead then maybe USAID IS wasting money."
Yeah, I think the benefits of innuendo here are more useful than anything else. He doesn't have to be right, he just has to get the slander out to enough people that they believe it, and then it just won't go away because of anchoring bias.
“Look at this fictional fraud so that I can distract from my actual fraud and criminal embezzlement of Congressional mandated funds.”
Yeah, I think MY underestimates the rhetorical value of just wanting to tear down government. It's basically an insinuation of "what ELSE don't THEY want you to know?" when it turns out to be a known problem with a mundane explanation which is more annoying than actually consequential.
I think he understands it in terms of popularism. I just don't think Matthew Yglesias Thought has a real answer to the question of how to do the actual rhetoric to GET the CSDM besides, "I dunno, just get on the right side of 80/20 social issues until the swing voters let you do the CSDM".
Which, okay, is *A* theory of the case. I just don't think it's complete. Sometimes you need a Bernie to get out there and just lead a Beutlerian Jihad against "wasteful government" until you have something that can competently accomplish all the abundance shit you wanna do. And the reason you do that is because the alternative is having a Musk go around lying about Social Security while wrecking the constitutional order.
The way things are SUPPOSED to work is that the left and right don't actually do their own work, they compete to do each other's job better before it gets left to the true believers on the other side by the voters. So, W does Medicare expansion, the Tories protect NHS from itself, Clinton does welfare, and hopefully the next Democrat does a massive housing and environmental dereg.
To piggyback off your point. The main weakness to me of the Yglesias "just get on the right side of 80/20 social issues" and one I think Beutler touches upon (And Stancil as well as when he talks about the harm of social media); how do you account for a liar who has truly not shame whatsoever not matter how blatant the lie. And now, how do you account for a liar with no shame whatsoever, who is able to surround himself with sycophants or people also have no shame about lying blantantly.
This is the part "popularism" can't address. I can already see the Trump turn in July when tariffs have remained in place long enough for there to be sizeable job losses (we probably won't see that until earliest April; guessing a lot of companies are still holding out hope there will some miraculous U-turn). "Groceries aren't high because of tariffs. Canadians are invading our country and stealing the chickens! They've stolen you're eggs. Canada, very untrustworthy. Need to harm them bigly!".
What's the popularist retort to this firehouse of lies?
Well, and that’s where I think Brian’s stylistic commentary comes into play. Matt’s really missing out on how the attention economy is warping the positioning game he wants to run with popularism.
Ed: He’s like an NFL OC who wants to run a bunch of fancy play action concepts but can’t establish a freaking run game first.
The core problem is that most of what Democrats say publicly gets ignored by the public in favor of what Fox/RWM says about Democrats. Dems are stuck on a JFK model of communications: look good on TV, don’t make mistakes, don’t be messy, keep it short and cute.
Popularism, as you say, has nothing to say about how to seize attention in the new attention economy. If the entire Democratic Party signed on to the CSDM and no one went on Rogan to talk about it, would anyone outside of the news addicts who already vote Dem know about it? No! Of course not!
Imagine that Barack Obama or JFK were in their prime today and were sitting Congressmen criticizing Trump’s tariffs and egg prices. I’m pretty sure that they’d be 1000x more successful with those attacks than every IRL congressional Dem from Schumer and Jeffries on down to AOC and Slotkin.
Matt made a big deal last year about the importance of having leaders do the right policies. It’s even more important to have leaders with charisma. And our party’s machine selects for the exact opposite.
"The fall will probably kill ya!"
Anglophone countries really need ID cards and a universal personal ID number for all government interactions.
I can't help but think of the late Kevin Drum on this topic. He was a big advocate of moving in this direction.
https://jabberwocking.com/voter-id-solved/comment-page-1/#comments
> Outside of the UK and its former colonies, virtually every country in the world offers free identity cards to its residents.
In Germany I have to pay on the order of ~30€ to renew my personal ID every ten years, plus the extra expense of a new ID photo. Are these ID cards really free in most other countries? Barring evidence to the contrary, I don't believe that.
Sorry for sounding like an out of touch rich person, but 30 Euro every ten years doesn’t strike me as an onerous expense? I’d be happy to have taxpayers cover it for those below the poverty line.
It's not an onerous expense, but I wanted to dispute this instance of <policy unavailable in the US is free everywhere else>.
You also need to pay for their time to go get the card. A trip to the DMV means at least two hours out of a work day, more likely means a whole day off because companies don't let low level hourly people leave for two hours and come back. Plus transportation costs, etc.
What I'm really saying, is that it is a much larger hardship for poor people to access government services than we usually think of. We already know this, and in shittier states like much of the US south this is by design. They're actually happier when "those people" can't actually get all the benefits they're eligible for.
Being a poor person is hard, water is wet, etc.
A poor person with an unforgiving work schedule still has to go to the doctor, take their child to the doctor, attend a parent-teacher conference at their child's school, take their car to the shop when it breaks down, show up for jury duty, etc. Compared with all that, a trip to the DMV *every ten years* may be onerous, but doesn't sound undoable.
Again, I'm all for ideas on how to make this more accessible for poor people - have longer hours, more convenient locations, what have you - but this isn't an argument for "well this is too hard for poor people, so let's not do it at all."
100%. This foot-dragging and arguing edge cases on voter ID is a classic example of nonsensical anti-popularism. Voter ID is a 85-15 issue! https://news.gallup.com/poll/652523/americans-endorse-early-voting-voter-verification.aspx
Honestly, if an individual citizen is too lazy or stupid to get a FREE ID card maybe they don’t need to be voting. Just bite the bullet…and forever call the GOP bluff on voter fraud.
Two hours at the DMV is just an special American tradition, other places don't have anything like that at all. Do Americans need to go to a building to get a passport or any other ID?
> Do Americans need to go to a building to get a passport or any other ID?
Yes. Usually the Department of Moter Vehicles (or equivalent) to get State photo ID (most people use a driver's license as their ID, hence why the DMV is responsible for all State ID in most States).
For Passports, the US Post Office is most common, though there are other locations and it is possible to visit a US State Department office to apply for a US Passport.
Britain had a broadly popular pressure group called No2ID that effectively ended plans for ID cards in the country. What a waste of time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NO2ID
Scrapping ID cards was a disaster for British governance and goes completely against the public will. I have no idea why the government listened to the group.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/support-for-the-introduction-of-a-system-of-national-identity-cards-in-the-uk
It's completely bizarre. The need to prove one's identity (to apply for a mortgage, to rent an apartment, to check into a hotel, to board a flight, lots of other times) is a frequent occurrence in modern society. Why not just develop a secure, privacy-protecting, efficient, nationally standardized, low/no cost universal ID card system?
People who think of themselves as "privacy advocates" are typically deeply paranoid in a way that borders on mental illness, and their paranoia seems so sincere that normal people listen to them and wonder if maybe there isn't something they are missing and perhaps they should be worried themselves.
The people who care about privacy see "privacy-protecting" in your list of requirements and assume it wouldn't happen.
It would be really easy to push against a national ID system right now. "Do you want Trump and Musk having your name on a list?" Whatever nominal privacy protections were there, unitary executive would blow right past them.
Oh, I make no claims about the political viability of implementing a national ID system in the US. Doing so can be done in a polity characterized by widespread societal trust, and faith in the competence and benevolence of the state; but this very much doesn't sound like America in the 2020s.
Except...I mean, I'm pretty anti-musk, but him knowing my name and government ID number is basically not a concern? Frankly, my concern would be that they'd delete entries for enemies from whatever actual database would exist, so that my ID gets flagged as fake whenever someone actually tries to check it, but that's not a privacy concern...
What makes absurd is that places like France, India, Estonia and Chile in fact most countries have had such a system for years
And what’s especially absurd is that many of those places (particularly Germany, which you didn’t list, but also fits) are generally more strict about privacy regulation than the anglosphere.
Yes. Authentication is a core government function!
No2ID. Fighting the good fight.
That sounds right and reasonable. Now propose it today and convince me that it would be a good idea to go get my picture taken and associated with all my other data so that Musk, Trump, et all can more easily track me.
Maybe it's still a good idea, but you can also understand why it comes up against pretty heavy push back.
I'm happy to see left of center people realizing that the apparatus of the State can be turned against things and people they care about in a single election. Now to see if they remember the lesson.
This is actually a good place for cryptography. If I'm the only one with the private key to my centralized data account, and the State doesn't hold a plaintext copy anywhere, but I can unlock access for a certain purpose, you could get me to agree to a national ID/ Totally Not Social Control program. Until then, fuck off. It's just a time bomb waiting for the next authoritarian.
It's the argument I use whenever the talk turns to Medicare For All. Even during the 2020 election, when most of the dem candidates were proposing various M4A ideas, I would ask people what do you think would happen if Donald Trump and a Republican trifecta got to decide who and what was covered for care. That would end abortion in this country, without actually having to make it illegal.
Most elective abortions are cash procedures anyway, because of the Hyde Amendment!
Which is fine, though I would prefer it be covered by a direct tax on Catholics.
The more subtle argument is that as you increase the power and scope of the State, the stakes increase for control and the fights get nastier.
No it isn't a good argument just because you dislike the current executive. It is the equivalent of people who didn't want Trump's vaccine or Obama's Medicare. The flaws of the president aren't going to stop an improvement in effectiveness from working for you.
There's certainly no way they could find you now.
Let 'em look!
This is my only online presence, and I bump my feed through a dozen different servers in a dozen different countries like you see in a spy show.
RE: Privacy, there's a concept called security by obscurity. The personal version is shoving stuff in the back of your dresser buried under some socks. The bureaucracy version is having 3,000 separate county level birth certificate record centers. And the digital version is writing your system in COBOL.
The problem is that security by obscurity never works at scale. It's easy for a motivated attacker to learn your arcane system and find where the information is hidden. But the obscurity feels comforting even though it doesn't work, so people keep asking for it.
The right way to do security is like a safe, not a sock drawer. You define who should have access and when, and you make it extremely difficult to get access if you're not authorized. And if you have one centralized system you can put in the resources to get the security right, whereas if you have 1000 shoddily built systems they'll probably all be insecure.
“Anglophone countries really need ID cards and a universal personal ID number for all government interactions”
Why?
So pension systems know when people have died.
It's not the best as it's clunky, but I feel like a passport would be good enough. You could even issue the international book one and a card regional one that you could get Mexico and Canada to accept and would double as a National ID.
Ironically, the government is actually quite harsh when it goes after overpayment cases, at least for the disability and welfare forms of social security. When I worked in legal aid, some of the toughest cases were based on people underreporting income - unintentionally, based on income or living situations that fluctuated month to month, which is quite common - and then suddenly having to pay back benefits months or years after spending the checks they’d received. The enforcement on the other side was quite harsh. One more illustration of why means testing can be extremely complicated to implement, especially in a world where people make money from something like DoorDash and don’t have any kind of steady paycheck.
If one’s opinion has merit then one does not need to lie. So what are Musk and Trump’s opinion on Social Security?
Is it that Social Security is full of waste and fraud? Well they are blatantly lying about the level of fraud (at best they are unconcerned with knowing and learning basic facts which signals they don’t care about fraud.)
This means they see Social Security as a waste. They are only lying about fraud to disguise the fact they see a popular program purely as a waste.
And it’s a stupid game because people will notice if their benefits are cut
Why are we taking the administration’s claims about fraud (or almost anything else they say) seriously? Or do we think saying “umm, actually” is going to be effective this time around? Or am I just grumpy because my kid was up all night and I haven’t slept much?
I learned a lot from this piece, I think it's an interesting vehicle to understand social security overpayments and the benefits of a national ID system.
What did you learn about Social Security overpayments other than that they're very rare?
Rare and, speaking as a lawyer for SSA claimants and recipients, a really inefficient way of recouping costs due to a lot of really boneheaded internal policies and the amount of appeals and payment plans.
What frequently happens:
1. Benefits recipient works a little bit while receiving benefits, reports it (potentially incorrectly).
2. SSA fails to process this information for 2+ years.
3. SSA realizes they’ve overpaid someone by $10k, computer generates some complete gibberish alerting the recipient to the overpayment (“we believe we overpaid you because we believe you have been overpaid”), may or may not ever actually send the notice.
4. Recipient’s check gets reduced, they panic and contact SSA, are advised to file a recon and a waiver.
5. Recon gets auto-denied, waived goes to informal conference where the SSA supervisor agrees that the situation qualifies for waiver but says they can’t approve it because they have a policy against approving waivers over $5k.
6. Recipient gets stuck on a payment plan for $10/month which will realistically never repay the overpayment.
7. Recipient files a hearing request on the recon and waiver denials.
8. About a year later the overpayment case - which isn’t digitized and is done totally on paper for some reason - goes in front of an annoyed judge who goes “they should have approved this waiver a year ago” and orders the waiver approved and an underpayment issued.
9. SSA’s processing center takes a year to get the memo, during which they continue to pay the wrong amounts and the cycle repeats.
So much money saved going after those dastardly overpayments.
I suspected this particular bit of Trump/Musk bullshit was making your head explode.
I’ve been snatching myself bald over it!
I liked the piece but the confusion around Trump's motives seem teleported in from another time. Especially the assumption that he will pay a price for lying about this. To be fair I didn't fully follow the bond market argument as to why he would. But he does, in fact, get away with lying and misdirecting blame all of the time.
Yes, I find this line vexing: “This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim.” Donald lies all the time about everything. He doesn’t always have a good reason in terms of trying to “set up” something. And even when he is setting up something, it’s very often not a particular policy outcome connected to the lie. He wants to destroy trust in all kinds of institutions and norms. He believes (or at least wants everyone else to believe) that everyone is cheating on everything and so anyone following the pro-social rules at some personal cost (waiting in line, taking only what they need, telling the truth when a lie would go undetected or unpunished) is a sucker. That seems like a pretty important and obvious aspect of Donald that we’ve watched repeatedly for ten years.
He lies constantly. He's also pig ignorant about vast swaths of public policy. Often the two intersect. I strongly suspect the average SB reader (no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum) is vastly better informed about the country's fiscal facts than the current US president.
Trumpets: they’re transing mice, cut their funding
Nerds: *pushes glasses up*
Umm, actually, they’re not researching transgender mice. Transgenic mice are genetically altered for research purposes like curing Alzheimer’s.
Trumpets: whatever we cut Alzheimer’s research funding too
AIUI in this case they were altered to study the effects of hormone treatments that transgender people would use, correct?
That is scientifically worthwhile, and it's not technically making mice transgender, but it's not "transgenic mice for Alzheimer's research'".
Years ago in another life I was involved in some research at the finest university in the South. Although just doing pipette scut work, it was fun to be in a laboratory setting as someone who wasn't going into a scientific field (and it helped to have a bit of income.) Anyway, the purpose of editing the DNA was to produce some kind of cellular structure (I forget the name) that was present in the nerve cells of Alzheimer's patients and, I think, Lou Gehrig's disease. It was all federally funded research and my position was paid for by the "administrative" side of the grant funding the project. So, yeah, transgenic mice are used for Alzheimer's research.
"So, yeah, transgenic mice are used for Alzheimer's research."
Apologies for not being clear - I'm not disputing that.
I'm saying there were _other_ specific studies specifically using transgenic mice to study hormone therapy, and as I understand it, _those_ are the ones being complained about/shut down.
If he's shutting down _all_ transgenic mice studies that's not what I understood, I thought he was just complaining about these.
Is there actually a specific case Trump was talking about? Did he list a grant number in his rant? Or is it just a bunch of people speculating whether he misheard the word “transgenic” as “transgender” or whether he instead heard about some sex hormone study in mice and added the word “transgender” or whether he just made it up?
This one was real:
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830
Sounds like a good study! But is there any reason to think that Trump had heard about it? The mere fact that he used some words that line up with it is basically no evidence.
This is where I have seriously wondered if it’s worth just throwing any sense of decorum to the wind and fighting back on the same turf, viz.
Trumpets: they’re transing mice, cut their funding.
Nerds: Hey, you fucking retard - “transgenic” has nothing to do with “transgender.” Learn English before you open your miserable piehole, you barely human piece of shit.
Maybe it’s the same result, but it matches the tone better.
Who is “we?”. Trump is speaking to many different audiences.
Good point. I guess I mean Matt and Matt’s audience who know that the claims of fraud are not sincere and merely provide cover for dismantling various government agencies. I don’t feel like he needs to pretend Trump actually cares one way or the other about the truthfulness of his claims. Not for our sake, anyways.
is he sincerely trying to dismantle the agencies or merely cower them into docility? also, do musk and trump see eye to eye? neither of those questions have obvious answers.
the tensions within maga are very interesting and under-discussed.
i’m sincerely curious whether the evangelicals will push a national abortion ban in congress. evangelicals are the biggest pillar of maga, and they’ve been pretty quiet.
The USDA tracks livestock inventory via surveys of a representative sample of operations.
It does not track livestock births and deaths in detail.
See https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Cattle_Inventory/
Aw man, I wanted to find the secret web portal where I could look up the fifteen-digit identifier for this specific bratwurst's hog of origin.
If you get into the tracking numbers, that’s for livestock in interstate commerce. Personal livestock doesn’t get tracked, and even producers do not always know when an animal dies or gives birth.
We have some tracking, but it is not better than Social Security.
When you keep thinking “I don't understand why Trump and Musk are lying about this,” you must at least consider the idea that they think it’s true!
Musk has strong priors that tell him that the government is poorly run and that his particular faction of big tech could fix all of it instantly. When he and his team of tweens examine various executive agencies and wonder “why does something work this way,” his impulse is strongly predisposed toward “because government is stupid and being taken advantage of,” rather than “because it’s complicated and not quite as weird as at seems at first glance, hence I should reserve judgment until I understand it better.”
As for Trump: I don’t think it’s useful to speculate about whether Trump is truly lying or is just misinformed. I’m convinced there’s a significant amount of overlap between them in his mind.
Based on previous evidence, I suspect Musk has a similar sort of “retconning” he applies to his own memories. When his strong claim is proven false, I think he lies to himself and decides that he meant something different — or that disproving the literal thing he said is just a cynical tactic and he was actually speaking about a _deeper_ truth that has not yet been refuted. Narcissists cannot be wrong.
The “are they lying to others or to themselves” saga has been going on for years. As little as I enjoy psychoanalyzing politicians with personality disorders, it’s hard to write about this stuff without at least dabbling in it. I'm extremely reluctant to spend any more of my short time on earth thinking about what Trump _thinks_, but at a certain point both he and Musk no longer deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt here.
What I think we’re dealing with is the very first clicktocracy - rule by the very online. These are people whose views of the world are entirely found online, the type of people who think online is more real than real. For things he has direct experience with Musk at least as that. But outside of that all experience is online.
Matt says he doesn't know why they're lying about this but to me it's pretty obvious. Republicans have, for a very long time, always pointed to some Boogeyman to distract from their own goals of making things better for rich people, which they know is very unpopular. So they try to distract people. To use another timely example...they've built up this narrative that the reason people can't find jobs anymore is because of free trade. So Trump does tariffs. And now he says there might some growing pains and people will have to suffer before they get to see the gains from his policy. They'll do the same thing with SS...say the problem is fraud, privatize it in the name of fighting fraud, and then even when their supporters are worse off they'll say "yeah but there's no more fraud" and their supporters will buy it hook, line, and sinker just like they do everything else because all they do is watch Fox News. These people have been cutting off their noses to spite their faces for decades and I don't see any reason why it will change now.
“Republicans have, for a very long time, always pointed to some Boogeyman to distract from their own goals…”
Democrats do that too.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have a specific example in mind?
As you said, *usually* they’re doing it to try to do something that is better for rich people. But in *this* case, it’s hard to see what rich people are getting out of any of this.
Well, cutting SS and Medicare to finance tax cuts for the rich is pretty obvious. As for the tariff stuff...that is less clear. If the wealthy can't find a way to exploit the situation my guess is they will eventually find a way to get Trump to back down. But even then I'm guessing it will be done in a way that allows them to benefit while he saves some face.
This is all very straightforward. Yes, Trump is lying, because of course he is. Yes, we should have a national birth/death registry and a rationally designed national ID system. A+, no notes.
Meanwhile, ICE agents seized a Green Card holder, Mahmoud Khalil, who has said bad/anti-Semitic/pro-Hamas things, and are holding him at a facility in an unknown location (Louisiana?) and threatening to deport him.
I don't like Khalil and I don't agree with his views, but we're talking about government agents arresting a Green Card holder, who is in this country *legally*, and threatening him with deportation for saying bad things.
John Ganz over on his Substack nails it: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-abduction-of-mahmoud-khalil
"The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens."
Sorry to go off topic, but it looks like we're actually going to be doing the Great Leap Forward backyard smelters thing: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-seeks-minerals-refining-pentagon-bases-boost-us-output-sources-say-2025-03-10/
How am I supposed to fit a smelter in the back yard where I was just told to put the chicken coop?
If you put the chicken coop on top of the smelter, the coop doubles as a roaster on days when you're trying to meet your refined ores quota.
Don't forget to leave space to plant some avocado trees for when avocado prices go sky-high thanks to Trump's tariffs on Mexico.
lol
"This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim. "
matt, this is getting tiring.
Question - lots of my teacher friends were happy with the SSA Fairness Act because it allowed teachers and others retired on public pensions to continue receiving their SPOUSE'S social security benefits after their spouse had died. Previously if a teacher and their spouse were retired and the non-teacher spouse died, the teacher was not eligible to continue receiving their spouse's social security benefits.
Was that the sweetener used to pass a deal that ultimately increased payouts even to those who had never paid in? My teacher friends were pleased and allowing a public employee to receive their spouse's death benefits seems fair, so I didn't dig much further into the bill. What was specifically ill-advised about the SSA Fairness Act beyond that?
My understanding is you get full social security payment despite never paying in for most of your career. Basically you are now a SS moocher
I don't think that's true?
"Retired public school educators in 15 states where school districts don’t participate in Social Security, and instead only participate in a public employees pension system, will now receive full federal retirement benefits for any income they earned from other Social Security-eligible jobs. While they still will not be eligible for Social Security benefits from working in schools in those states, they can now collect federal retirement benefits if they spent portions of their career in the private sector or elsewhere in the country."
Source: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/thousands-of-teachers-will-get-a-retirement-boost-heres-how-it-works/2025/01#:~:text=No.,workers%2C%20or%20to%20certain%20subgroups.
Yes so if you had a summer job, that's enough to get full career worth of ss.
They are counting your non tax paying years as if you paid in for calculation
You need 40 quarters of paying into the system.
Do you have a source for this? If I'm understanding your example, if you somehow made $100,000 for just one year, you'd then be collecting $3200 a month as though you had paid in for 35 years.
I looked and couldn't find this stated anywhere. Everything I've seen has described it as removing the 2/3 pension deduction from *actually earned* Social Security benefits.
Still wrong, and now I suspect you don't even know how Social Security works. Your payout is a function of how much you contributed over your working years and your retirement age. The public pension "penalty" meant that people who made mid career changes into education (after working social security jobs for potentially 10+ years) would be excluded from receiving the benefits anyone else would be entitled to.
All of which to say is I am still wondering what was "misguided" about this bill
The biggest complaint about it is that SS is a progressive program that takes from high income earners and redistributes to low income workers. Public pension workers look like low income workers in their contributions when in reality they were usually higher than average income workers. So they get the benefits of a progressive system but based on their earned income and additional pension, don't need/deserve such consideration.
But SS benefits aren't means tested and low earners get less benefit than high earners because they paid in less over their working years.
I keep thinking about how my mother died around midnight on the last day of the month. I had been helping her out financially while still at the age where I feared "baglady syndrome" for myself. I would have welcomed the following month's SS payment, paltry as it was for most women in those days.
My condolences.