WASHINGTON — Elon Musk’s next target as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appears to be federal benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
During an interview Monday on Fox Business, Musk claimed the programs are fraught with waste, saying billions in funding needs to be cut.
“Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk said. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”
Approximately half of all federal government spending is through entitlement programs. Musk said somewhere between $500 million and $700 million in waste can be cut from the programs.
Musk has been slashing through the budgets of government agencies since President Donald Trump created DOGE through an executive order signed in January. Trump has tasked Musk with eliminating wasteful government spending and reducing the overall size of the federal government.
While Trump has promised to defend cuts from being made to Social Security, Musk has routinely criticized the program, calling it “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
Musk claimed wasteful and fraudulent payments continue to be made by the various entitlement programs, but he’s aiming to stop it. Musk then again repeated a previously made claim that 20 million dead people appear in the Social Security database.
Although the people may appear in the database, acting Social Security commissioner Lee Dudek said payments are not going out to those people.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said last month.
While he didn’t specifically indicate the cuts to entitlement programs would impact available benefits, Musk accused Democrats of using the programs to sway voters. Musk then falsely claimed that by making cuts to the programs, it would hurt the Democratic Party who use the payments to attract undocumented immigrants.
“That is also a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters,” Musk said. “This is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation…. if we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, they will leave and (Democrats) will lose voters.”
Undocumented immigrants cannot vote in elections and cannot obtain federal benefits such as Medicare, SNAP or Social Security.
Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin responded to the interview in a post on Musk’s social media platform X, saying Musk is targeting benefits.
“Musk said the quiet part out loud: he’s going after your Social Security and Medicare. Period. Mark my words,” Slotkin wrote. “They will make you pay in every part of your life.”