What DOGE Ought To Do With Social Security
The agency should focus on recommending reforms to make the program more efficient and effective
Throughout early 2025, Americans have been subjected to a barrage of reports on events surrounding Social Security. Many accounts have centered on attempts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access Social Security data. Competing narratives reflect the fears of opposite wings of the U.S. political spectrum: on the right, that DOGE is uncovering massive fraud within the Social Security system, and on the left, that DOGE is the spearhead of a right-wing conspiracy to dismantle the program. Neither of these narratives is anchored in reality. In this charged environment, we would do well to step back and recall salient facts about Social Security, and about the reforms needed to preserve its solvency.
DOGE is correct in asserting that no meaningful reform of federal finances can occur unless the largest, fastest-growing benefit programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are rendered more efficient. Unfortunately, DOGE erred badly out of the gate when approaching these systems, circulating groundless claims that Social Security was paying benefits in the names of tens of millions of people born more than 150 years ago. The claim turned out to be based on a data file of individuals for whom the Social Security Administration (SSA) lacked death information. That file contained nearly 400 million entries, whereas currently there are about 70 million people receiving Social Security benefits. Hence, right off the bat, DOGE should have understood that at least 82% of that data couldn’t have anything to do with current benefit payments.
Since then, DOGE staff has been making the media rounds with unsubstantiated claims about illegal immigrants using Social Security numbers to vote and draw benefits. These various claims have fostered misperceptions that Social Security’s large financing shortfall is driven primarily by fraud, and implied not only that Social Security can remain solvent without any changes to legal benefits, but that we can even afford to give seniors an additional tax break. None of this is true.
Neither have DOGE’s critics been scrupulously factual. Many have hauled out the old trope that DOGE’s attention to Social Security is part of a right-wing plot to destroy or privatize the program. This line of attack has been aimed at conservative reformers for decades. While some politicians back in 1935 were hostile to FDR’s initial efforts to establish Social Security, since then even the most conservative Republicans have generally supported the program, typically differing with Democrats only over the rate at which benefits and tax burdens should grow. Even Social Security’s most loyal friends understand that reforms to mitigate cost growth are sometimes necessary to sustain the program.
Nor is there any reason to believe Elon Musk or his colleagues wish to “privatize” Social Security and profit from administering it. While in the past, some conservatives such as President George W. Bush proposed incorporating a personal savings component into Social Security, even he favored continued administration of the system “by the government.” Progressive Democrats’ stereotype of Republicans plotting to take away everyone’s Social Security benefits lacks a factual basis, especially now when President Trump has positioned himself against even the moderation of benefit growth necessary to keep the system afloat.
If the current conversation surrounding DOGE and Social Security isn’t the one we should be having, what is? If I had the opportunity to speak with DOGE officials about Social Security from the standpoint of government efficiency, the following is what I would say.
Little Fraud and Abuse, but Plenty of Waste
Public policy debates in Washington often invoke references to “waste, fraud and abuse.” While they’re commonly intoned in a single breath, these are three different things, and they have very different levels of relevance to making Social Security more efficient and financially sound.
Social Security currently has a financing shortfall equal to about 25% of all future benefit claims. To maintain Social Security in the form Americans are accustomed to, lawmakers must enact cost savings equal to that amount, a magnitude that far exceeds any previously legislated solvency rescue. Such levels of savings cannot be achieved merely by reducing “waste” in the sense of administrative bloat. Social Security’s total administrative expenses are about 0.5% of all program expenditures. Were we to not merely reduce, but actually eliminate, everyone and everything associated with administering Social Security (a practical impossibility), we’d still have 98% of the shortfall to fix.
We simply cannot make meaningful headway on Social Security’s financing problems by terminating staff or cutting administrative overhead. In some cases, staff cuts may even be counterproductive and result in more spending. Former SSA official Mark Warshawsky finds that the specific downsizing moves pursued by DOGE would have effects “inconsistent with DOGE’s stated purpose to improve efficiency and reduce government spending.”
Likewise, improved policing of fraud is unlikely to make a qualitative difference in Social Security’s finances. There are certainly federal programs where improper payments make up a significant share of expenditures—such as Medicaid, where the evidence indicates that many of those receiving benefits are not legally eligible. That’s not true of Social Security, largely due to its simplicity. Since participation is practically universal, and benefit eligibility is generally a function of age rather than income, it’s a lot easier for SSA to keep track of who should be receiving benefits.
Social Security payments to those over 100 years of age number about 44,000—roughly what one would expect, given that about 86,000 Americans are over 100 years old. Moreover, payments automatically stop, with only unusual exceptions, once an individual reaches age 115. Warshawsky notes that SSA’s incomplete “death master file” certainly limits the government’s ability to detect and correct fraud in these payments. But we’re talking here about 0.06% of all beneficiaries, not nearly enough to make a significant difference in the tough choices required to preserve Social Security’s solvency.
Waste, on the other hand, is a problem—though not in the sense of administrative bloat. Rather, Social Security’s growing costs include many payments that serve no intentional policy consensus. These payments are perfectly legal, indeed mandated under current law, but they are wasteful. DOGE could perform a valuable public service if it called attention to ways in which rising Social Security spending runs counter to bipartisan policy goals, and inspired legislation to fix these problems.
Indeed, because Social Security spending is currently growing at a faster rate than our national economic output, it cannot be financed within a stable tax rate unless its growth rate is moderated. Trying to maintain system solvency without moderating cost growth would simply mean that tax rates must perpetually increase. Containing cost growth without harming program participants requires greater efficiency. DOGE could usefully identify these problems, even if only legislators can correct them.
Better Targeted Spending
Social Security is the largest, most popular and most successful federal income security program. It provides income support to American households when a primary earner permanently leaves the workforce due to old age (retirement) or disability. Workers finance Social Security by paying payroll taxes, and while they don’t exactly enjoy it, they broadly accept the necessity of doing so—an acceptance that speaks to Social Security’s exceptional success. This success can only continue as long as lawmakers remain willing to do in the future what they have done in the past—namely, align the program’s benefit promises with the amounts workers’ payroll taxes can finance.
Because Social Security for the most part works as intended—providing income when households need it most, and redistributing income from better-off households to less-well-off households—many people assume that the program must be accomplishing more when its benefits and costs grow larger, and that hardship would be inflicted if its costs were lessened. This is a mistaken belief. As an income transfer program, Social Security is at best a zero-sum game: No individual can gain net income through it unless another individual loses at least as much. As it turns out, some of the program’s current income redistribution runs counter to national goals and intentions, and scaling it back would lower costs, extend solvency and improve system fairness.
Consider, for example, Social Security’s nonworking spouse benefit, which equals half the primary household worker’s benefit. Its intention is good: to recognize the value of stay-at-home work, including the tangible actuarial benefit of parenting the taxpayers of the future. However, it is inefficiently designed and regressive in its effects, subtracting income from households with less and giving it to households with more. Consider, for example, a working single mother with career average indexed earnings equal to the federal minimum wage ($15,080 per year). Paying payroll taxes for her entire working life, she would be entitled to a full old-age benefit of $13,358 annually if she became benefit-eligible this year.
By contrast, a nonworking spouse who pays no payroll taxes, has no children, marries the highest of high earners and becomes benefit-eligible this year, would be entitled to a nonworking spouse benefit of $23,777 annually. The system thus provides a windfall to those who “marry rich” that is far greater than what many working parents earn with their payroll taxes. For this reason, reformers like those at the Brookings Institution have proposed eliminating the nonworking spouse benefit altogether. Even if legislation doesn’t go that far, certainly the benefits of nonworking, nontaxpaying spouses should not exceed what full-time workers receive after paying payroll taxes over a full career.
Other inefficiencies arise from Social Security’s antiquated benefit formula. Benefits are computed as a function of one’s average taxable (indexed) wages in one’s highest 35 earnings years. Because benefits are based on a lifetime earnings average, the system doesn’t differentiate between workers with dramatically different earnings patterns. For example, it can’t tell the difference between someone who averages $50,000 in taxable earnings throughout 30 years of covered work, and someone who averages $150,000 in taxable earnings in 10 years of covered work.
This is a problem, because Social Security’s formula is designed to pay far more generous returns to lower-income workers. Someone who earns $150,000 a year in 10 years of work isn’t a low-income person; they’re a person with substantial earnings who just hasn’t worked very often. But the current system pays them an unintended windfall because it misconstrues them as being a lower-income worker.
In fact, Social Security’s benefit formula is so inefficient that the majority of individuals it describes as “very low income” workers with 20 years of earnings aren’t likely to be low-income workers at all. 30% are foreign-born, meaning they may have several years of substantial earnings abroad that the system just doesn’t see. Another 14% have state or local pensions the system doesn’t track. A further 26% inhabit a household with a higher-income earner. Even taking into account overlaps between these categories, only 37% of all such beneficiaries have the income limitations Social Security implicitly assumes they do, yet the system gives them more generous returns as though they did.
This situation is exacerbated by the recent enactment of the misnamed Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA), which grants additional Social Security benefits, for which they didn’t pay, to individuals with state or local government pensions. The SSFA repealed the Windfall Elimination Provision, which was designed to prevent Social Security from treating higher-income workers with state pensions as though they were lower-income workers. It also repealed the Government Pension Offset, which means that many state and local employees with their own earnings and pensions will now get Social Security nonworking spouse benefits too. These payments are clearly inappropriate, and a worthy subject of dissection by DOGE.
Another problem is that some generations are taking more out of Social Security than they contributed (plus interest), forcing other generations to give more to the system than they get back. This happened most dramatically with the first generation of Social Security beneficiaries, who received benefits funded mostly by subsequent generations rather than by themselves. This means that to keep Social Security solvent, the rest of us must make a net contribution to solvency, and the task of lawmakers is to spread around these financing burdens as fairly as possible.
Unfortunately, that’s not happening under current law. Baby boomers and Gen Xers are worsening the solvency problem by receiving benefits that exceed what their contributions (plus interest) can fund. For example, in part because participants born from 1954 to 1985 are taking out more than they put in, Social Security can now only afford to pay a medium-earning, two-earner couple born in 2004 85 cents for every tax dollar they contribute. DOGE would serve the public by analyzing these excess payments currently scheduled for middle-aged Americans and recommending ways to constrain them.
Finally, there is the problematic engine driving excess Social Security cost growth: the automatic indexation of benefits written into current law. Currently, Social Security benefits are indexed to increase from one cohort to the next with growth in the national Average Wage Index. The intent is that beneficiaries’ incomes grow as fast as those of workers. But the current formula grows too rapidly and overshoots that target. Benefit claim ages have barely moved, while Americans are living and collecting benefits for much longer and birth rates are dropping.
As a result of these factors, workers’ costs to finance Social Security benefits are rising faster than their wage incomes, causing their standard of living to decline relative to those of Social Security beneficiaries. This doesn’t make policy sense. A government income program such as Social Security ought to become more affordable as American workers earn more. The fact that it doesn’t is an unintended problem, exactly the sort of thing a commission devoted to government efficiency should examine.
There is relatively little fraud, abuse or improper payment in Social Security, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t inefficiency and waste. Just as with our healthcare system, many payments are perfectly legal but nevertheless cost-increasing and wasteful. How Social Security should spend money is a subjective value judgment, but it’s a review that must be undertaken if Social Security is to be made as efficient as it needs to be.
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