As you know, so-called fiscal hawks in Congress and the Trump Administration succeeded in making historic cuts to Medicaid over the summer. This fall they’re setting their sights on seniors’ most cherished programs: Social Security and Medicare.

As members of Congress return to Washington, DC, from summer recess, the threats are mounting — from expanding Medicare privatization and further weakening customer service at the Social Security Administration (SSA), to backdoor schemes that could open the way to Social Security privatization.

And fueling some of these attacks are distorted claims of “waste, fraud and abuse” built on misinformation and outright lies from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk.

Yet, DOGE’s “findings” have repeatedly fallen apart under scrutiny:

• DOGE and Musk claimed that 40% of calls to SSA requesting changes were fraudulent. Internal SSA data shows only two likely fraud cases out of 110,000 calls.

• They flagged payments to centenarians and deceased individuals as fraud — when in fact these were routine data entry quirks, not real abuse.
  

• They boasted of savings in the hundreds of billions of dollars — independent experts revealed DOGE’s actions may actually have cost taxpayers billions while undermining vital services.