๐ฉ๋ชฉ์ฐจ
๐ขSocial Securityโs Cost of Fraud
๐ขSocial Security์ ์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ
๐ขSocial Securityโs Cost of Fraud
As of March 05, 2025, the Trump administration has not released an official, detailed timeline specifically titled “Social Security’s Cost of Fraud.” However, based on public statements, actions, and reports from early 2025, I can construct a timeline of events and initiatives related to the administration’s focus on alleged fraud in the Social Security Administration (SSA) and its associated costs. This timeline is derived from available information and reflects the administration’s rhetoric and policy moves as of todayโs date. Note that the term “cost of fraud” is not a formally defined metric by the administration but rather a phrase tied to their broader narrative of addressing waste, fraud, and abuse in the SSA.
Timeline: Trump Administration’s Focus on Social Security Fraud in 2025
- January 20, 2025 โ Trump Inauguration and Initial Signals
- President Donald Trump is sworn in for his second term. During the campaign and transition, he and advisor Elon Musk repeatedly highlighted Social Security fraud as a priority, though without specific figures or a timeline. Trumpโs rhetoric centers on “shocking levels” of fraud, setting the stage for administrative action.
- January 21, 2025 โ Early Policy Statements
- At a White House news conference, Trump mentions Social Security fraud, claiming “millions” of ineligible recipients, including those over 100 years old, are receiving benefits. No detailed plan or timeline is provided, but he signals that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will investigate.
- February 3, 2025 โ Congressional Concerns Emerge
- Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) raises alarms on CNN about potential cuts to Social Security under the guise of fraud prevention, though no specific administration timeline has been confirmed. This reflects growing Democratic pushback to the administrationโs narrative.
- February 16-17, 2025 โ Musk Amplifies Fraud Claims
- Elon Musk posts on X, sharing a chart alleging millions of Social Security recipients are marked “ALIVE” despite being impossibly old (e.g., over 150 years). He calls it a “HUGE problem” and suggests DOGE will address it, though no timeline is specified beyond immediate investigation.
- February 18, 2025 โ Administration Rhetoric Escalates
- Trump, at a Mar-a-Lago press briefing, reiterates claims of millions of fraudulent beneficiaries, reading age-based figures from Muskโs data. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, on Fox News, says Musk and DOGE are tasked with digging into SSA “books” to identify “tens of millions” in fraudulent payments, with no set completion date announced.
- February 21, 2025 โ SSA Organizational Realignment Announced
- The SSA announces the realignment of its Office of Analytics, Review, and Oversight (OARO) to “streamline management” and enhance fraud detection, aligning with Trumpโs directives. Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek ties this to cost savings but provides no specific fraud cost estimates or timeline for results.
- February 23, 2025 โ Trumpโs CPAC Speech
- At CPAC, Trump labels Social Security a “scam” due to fraud, claiming millions in each age group over 100 are receiving benefits. He promises “no tolerance” for fraud under his administration but does not outline a schedule for quantifying or addressing it beyond ongoing DOGE efforts.
- February 24, 2025 โ SSA Terminates Research Agreements
- The SSA ends cooperative agreements with the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium (RDRC), projecting $15 million in savings for FY 2025. This move is framed as part of Trumpโs anti-fraud and waste agenda, though itโs unclear how it directly ties to fraud costs.
- February 28, 2025 โ Workforce Reduction Plans
- Reports emerge of planned cuts to thousands of SSA jobs, aligned with Trumpโs executive order to reduce federal staffing. NPR notes this could impact fraud detection efforts, but the administration frames it as eliminating waste, with no timeline for assessing fraud savings.
- March 4, 2025 โ SSA Highlights Cost Savings
- The SSA press release states it has identified over $800 million in FY 2025 cost savings or avoidance (e.g., payroll, IT, contracts), partly tied to fraud prevention efforts. Acting Commissioner Dudek emphasizes DOGEโs role in auditing SSA data, though no specific “cost of fraud” figure or completion timeline is provided.
- March 5, 2025 (Present Day) โ Ongoing Efforts
- As of today, the administration continues to emphasize fraud as a driver of SSA inefficiency. Trump, in a joint session of Congress speech on March 4, reiterates “shocking levels” of fraud without releasing a detailed report or timeline. DOGE personnel are embedded at SSA with “read-only” access to data, suggesting an audit is underway, but no end date or comprehensive cost estimate has been publicized.
Key Observations
- Lack of Specificity: The administration has not yet provided a concrete timeline for quantifying “Social Security’s cost of fraud” or a final report from DOGE. Claims remain anecdotal (e.g., payments to “150-year-olds”) and lack evidence beyond Muskโs X posts and SSA database quirks.
- Estimated Fraud Scale: Trump and Musk suggest “tens of millions” of fraudulent payments, far exceeding SSA Inspector General findings (less than 1% improper payments, mostly overpayments, not widespread fraud). No official cost figure has been validated.
- Policy Actions: Moves like OARO realignment, RDRC termination, and staff cuts are framed as fraud-related but focus more on cost savings than direct fraud quantification. The $800 million in savings cited for FY 2025 includes broader efficiencies, not just fraud.
Projected Next Steps (Speculative)
Given the current trajectory, the administration might release a DOGE report on SSA fraud costs later in 2025, possibly mid-year (e.g., June or July), as audits progress. However, without a stated deadline, this remains uncertain. Any timeline would likely align with Trumpโs broader goal of showcasing DOGEโs impact before the 2026 midterms.
๐ขSocial Security์ ์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ
2025๋ ํธ๋ผํ ์ ๋ถ๊ฐ ์ธ๊ธํ๋ “Social Security์ ์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ”๊ณผ ๊ด๋ จ๋ ํ์๋ผ์ธ์ ์ ๋ฆฌํ๊ธฐ ์ํด, ํ์ฌ๊น์ง์ ์ ๋ณด์ ํธ๋ผํ ํ์ ๋ถ์ ์์ง์์ ๋ฐํ์ผ๋ก ์ฃผ์ ์ฌ๊ฑด๊ณผ ๋ฐ์ธ์ ์๊ฐ์์ผ๋ก ๊ตฌ์ฑํ๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค. ์ด๋ ํธ๋ผํ์ ๊ทธ์ ์ธก๊ทผ(ํนํ ์๋ก ๋จธ์คํฌ์ DOGE(Department of Government Efficiency))์ ๊ณต์ ๋ฐ์ธ, ์ ์ฑ ๋ฐฉํฅ, ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ ๊ด๋ จ ๋ณด๋๋ฅผ ์ข ํฉํ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ์ ๋๋ค. ์ฐธ๊ณ ๋ก, ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ” ์์น๋ ํธ๋ผํ์ ๋จธ์คํฌ์ ์ฃผ์ฅ์์ ๋น๋กฏ๋ ๊ฒ์ด๋ฉฐ, ๋ ๋ฆฝ์ ์ธ ๊ฒ์ฆ์ด ๋ถ์กฑํ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ๊ฐ ๋ง์์ ์ ์ํด์ผ ํฉ๋๋ค.
2025๋ ํธ๋ผํ ์ ๋ถ์ Social Security “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ” ๊ด๋ จ ํ์๋ผ์ธ
2024๋ 11์ – ์ ๊ฑฐ ์ดํ ์ด๊ธฐ ๋ฐ์ธ
- ๋ ์ง: 2024๋ 11์ 6์ผ ์ดํ (ํธ๋ผํ ์ฌ์ ํ์ ์์ )
- ์ฌ๊ฑด: ํธ๋ผํ๊ฐ ์ฌ์ ๋๋ฉฐ Social Security์ Medicare๋ฅผ “๊ฑด๋๋ฆฌ์ง ์๊ฒ ๋ค”๋ ์บ ํ์ธ ๊ณต์ฝ์ ์ฌ์ฐจ ๊ฐ์กฐ. ๊ทธ๋ฌ๋ ๋์์ ์ฐ๋ฐฉ ์ ๋ถ ์ง์ถ ์ญ๊ฐ๊ณผ “๋ญ๋น ์ ๊ฑฐ”๋ฅผ ์ํ DOGE ์ค๋ฆฝ์ ์ฝ์.
- ๊ด๋ จ ๋ฐ์ธ: ํธ๋ผํ๋ “์ฐ๋ฆฌ๋ Social Security๋ฅผ ๋ณดํธํ ๊ฒ์ด์ง๋ง, ์ฌ๊ธฐ์ ๋ญ๋น๋ ๋ฟ๋ฆฌ ๋ฝ๊ฒ ๋ค”๊ณ ์ธ๊ธํ๋ฉฐ, ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ” ์์น๋ ์ ์ํ์ง ์์.
- ๋ฐฐ๊ฒฝ: ๋น๋นํ์ ๋จ์ฒด์ธ Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget๋ ํธ๋ผํ์ ์ธ๊ธ ๊ฐ๋ฉด ์ ์ฑ (์: Social Security ํํ ์ธ๊ธ ํ์ง)์ด 2031๋ ๊น์ง ๊ธฐ๊ธ ๊ณ ๊ฐ์ ๊ฐ์ํํ ์ ์๋ค๊ณ ๊ฒฝ๊ณ .
2025๋ 1์ – ํธ๋ผํ ์ทจ์ ๋ฐ ์ด๊ธฐ ํ์ ๋ช ๋ น
- ๋ ์ง: 2025๋ 1์ 20์ผ (์ทจ์์ผ)
- ์ฌ๊ฑด: ํธ๋ผํ๊ฐ ์ทจ์ ํ ์ฆ์ DOGE๋ฅผ ๊ณต์ ์ถ๋ฒ์ํค๋ฉฐ, ์๋ก ๋จธ์คํฌ์ ๋น๋ฒก ๋ผ๋ง์ค์๋ฏธ๋ฅผ ๊ณต๋ ์ฑ ์์๋ก ์๋ช . Social Security๋ฅผ ํฌํจํ ์ฐ๋ฐฉ ๋ณต์ง ํ๋ก๊ทธ๋จ์ “์ฌ๊ธฐ์ ๋ญ๋น” ์กฐ์ฌ๊ฐ ์ฐ์ ๊ณผ์ ๋ก ์ง์ ๋จ.
- ๊ด๋ จ ๋ฐ์ธ: ๋จธ์คํฌ๊ฐ X์์ “์ฐ๋ฐฉ ๋ณต์ง ํ๋ก๊ทธ๋จ์ ์ฌ๊ธฐ๋ ๋ด๊ฐ ๋ค์ด๋ณธ ๋ชจ๋ ๋ฏผ๊ฐ ์ฌ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ํฉ์น ๊ฒ๋ณด๋ค ํจ์ฌ ํฌ๋ค”๊ณ ์ฃผ์ฅํ๋ฉฐ, ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ ์ฆ๊ฑฐ ์์ด “์์กฐ ๋ฌ๋ฌ” ๊ท๋ชจ์ ์ฌ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ์์.
2025๋ 2์ – Social Security ์ฌ๊ธฐ ์ฃผ์ฅ ๋ณธ๊ฒฉํ
- ๋ ์ง: 2025๋ 2์ 11์ผ
- ์ฌ๊ฑด: ๋จธ์คํฌ๊ฐ X์ “Social Security์์ SSN(์ฌํ๋ณด์ฅ๋ฒํธ)์ด ์๋ ์ฌ๋๋ค์๊ฒ ์ฐ๊ฐ 1000์ต ๋ฌ๋ฌ ์ด์์ด ์ง๊ธ๋๋ค”๊ณ ์ฃผ์ฅ. ํธ๋ผํ๋ ์ด๋ฅผ ์ง์งํ๋ฉฐ CPAC ์ฐ์ค(2์ 22์ผ)์์ “์๋ฐฑ๋ง ๋ช ์ด 100์ธ ์ด์์ธ ๊ฒ์ฒ๋ผ ํํ์ ๋ฐ๊ณ ์๋ค. ์ด๊ฑด ๋ช ๋ฐฑํ ์ฌ๊ธฐ”๋ผ๊ณ ๋ฐ์ธ.
- ์ธ๋ถ ๋ด์ฉ:
- ๋จธ์คํฌ๋ ๋ฐ์ดํฐ๋ฒ ์ด์ค ์ค๋ฅ(1875๋ ์์ผ๋ก ๊ธฐ๋ณธ ์ค์ ๋ ๊ฒฝ์ฐ 150์ธ๋ก ํ์)๋ฅผ ์ฌ๊ธฐ๋ก ์ค์ธํ ๋ฏํ ์ฃผ์ฅ์ ํผ์นจ.
- ํธ๋ผํ๋ “200์ธ์ธ ์ฌ๋์๊ฒ ์ง๊ธ๋๋ ํํ”์ ์ธ๊ธํ๋ฉฐ, ์ค์ ๋ก๋ SSA ๊ฐ์ฐฐ๊ด ๋ณด๊ณ ์์์ ๋ถ์ ์ง๊ธ ๊ท๋ชจ๊ฐ ํจ์ฌ ์์(2024๋ 7์ ๊ธฐ์ค 1% ๋ฏธ๋ง)์ ๋ฌด์.
- ๋ฐ์: ์ ๋ฌธ๊ฐ๋ค์ ์ด ์ฃผ์ฅ์ด ๊ณผ์ฅ๋์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ์ค์ ๋ถ์ ์ง๊ธ์ ์ฐ๊ฐ ์์ญ์ต ๋ฌ๋ฌ ์์ค์ ๋ถ๊ณผํ๋ค๊ณ ๋ฐ๋ฐ.
2025๋ 2์ ๋ง – SSA ๊ฐํธ ๋ฐ ์ธ๋ ฅ ๊ฐ์ถ ๋ฐํ
- ๋ ์ง: 2025๋ 2์ 28์ผ
- ์ฌ๊ฑด: SSA๊ฐ ํธ๋ผํ์ ํ์ ๋ช ๋ น์ ๋ฐ๋ผ 2025 ํ๊ณ์ฐ๋์ 40๋ง ๋ช ์ด์์ ์ฐ๋ฐฉ ๊ณต๋ฌด์ ๊ฐ์ถ ๊ณํ์ ๋ฐํ. SSA ์ง์๋ ์ฝ 5๋ง ๋ช ์ผ๋ก ์ค์ด๋ ๋ชฉํ ์ค์ .
- ๊ด๋ จ ๋ฐ์ธ: SSA ๋ํ ์ปค๋ฏธ์ ๋ ๋ฆฌ ๋๋ฑ(Lee Dudek)์ “์ฌ๊ธฐ์ ๋ญ๋น๋ฅผ ์ ๊ฑฐํด ๊ตญ๋ฏผ์ ์ ๋ขฐ๋ฅผ ํ๋ณตํ๊ฒ ๋ค”๊ณ ๋ฐํ.
- ์ํฅ: SSA ๋ ธ์กฐ๋ “์ต์ ์ธ๋ ฅ ์์ค์์ 10,000๋ช ์ฉ ๋์ด๋๋ ์ํ์๋ฅผ ๊ฐ๋นํ ์ ์๋ค”๋ฉฐ ๋ฐ๋ฐ.
2025๋ 3์ – ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ” ์ฃผ์ฅ๊ณผ ๋ฐ๋ฐ
- ๋ ์ง: 2025๋ 3์ 4์ผ
- ์ฌ๊ฑด: SSA๊ฐ DOGE์ ์ง์์ ๋ฐ๋ผ DEI ์ฐ๊ตฌ ๊ณ์ฝ ์ข ๋ฃ ๋ฑ์ผ๋ก 1500๋ง ๋ฌ๋ฌ ์ ๊ฐํ๋ค๊ณ ๋ฐํ. ํธ๋ผํ๋ “์ด๊ฒ์ ์์์ผ ๋ฟ, ์์กฐ ๋ฌ๋ฌ์ ์ฌ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ ๋ง๊ฒ ๋ค”๊ณ ์ฃผ์ฅ.
- ์ธ๋ถ ๋ด์ฉ:
- ๋จธ์คํฌ์ ํธ๋ผํ๋ “์ฃฝ์ ์ฌ๋์๊ฒ ์ง๊ธ๋๋ ์์ญ์ต ๋ฌ๋ฌ”๋ฅผ ๊ฐ์กฐํ๋ฉฐ, SSA ๋ฐ์ดํฐ๋ฒ ์ด์ค์์ 100์ธ ์ด์ ์ํ์ 89,106๋ช (2024๋ 12์ ๊ธฐ์ค)์ ์ฌ๋ก๋ก ๋ฆ.
- ๊ทธ๋ฌ๋ ์ด๋ ์ ์ฒด ์ํ์ 7300๋ง ๋ช ์ 0.12%์ ๋ถ๊ณผํ๋ฉฐ, ๋๋ถ๋ถ ํฉ๋ฒ์ ์์ด ํ์ธ๋จ.
- ๋ฐ์: ๋ฏผ์ฃผ๋น๊ณผ ์ ๋ฌธ๊ฐ๋ค์ “์ฌ๊ธฐ ๊ท๋ชจ๊ฐ ๊ณผ์ฅ๋์๋ค”๋ฉฐ, ์ค์ ๋ฌธ์ ๋ ๊ธฐ๊ธ ๊ณ ๊ฐ(2035๋ ์์)์ด๋ผ ์ง์ .
2025๋ 3์ 5์ผ (ํ์ฌ)
- ์ํฉ: ํธ๋ผํ ์ ๋ถ๋ Social Security “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ”์ ๊ณ์ ๊ฐ์กฐํ๋ฉฐ, DOGE๋ฅผ ํตํด ์ถ๊ฐ ๊ฐ์ฌ๋ฅผ ์งํ ์ค. ๊ทธ๋ฌ๋ ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ ์ฌ๊ธฐ ๊ธ์ก(์: “์์กฐ ๋ฌ๋ฌ”)์ ๋ํ ์ฆ๊ฑฐ๋ ์์ง ์ ์๋์ง ์์.
- ์ ๋ง: SSA๋ 3์ 13์ผ๊น์ง OPM(์ธ์ฌ๊ด๋ฆฌ๊ตญ)์ ๊ฐ์ ๊ณํ์ ์ ์ถํด์ผ ํ๋ฉฐ, ์ดํ ๋๊ท๋ชจ ์ ๋ฆฌํด๊ณ ๊ฐ ์์๋ ๊ฐ๋ฅ์ฑ.
์์ฝ ๋ฐ ๋ถ์
- ํธ๋ผํ ์ ๋ถ ์ฃผ์ฅ: Social Security์ “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ”์ด ์์กฐ ๋ฌ๋ฌ์ ๋ฌํ๋ฉฐ, ์ด๋ฅผ ์ ๊ฑฐํ๋ฉด ํ๋ก๊ทธ๋จ์ ๊ฐํํ ์ ์๋ค๋ ์ ์ฅ. ์ฃผ์ ์ฌ๋ก๋ก “์ฃฝ์ ์ฌ๋ใธใฎ ์ง๊ธ”๊ณผ “100์ธ ์ด์ ๊ณผ๋ค ์ํ์”๋ฅผ ์ธ๊ธ.
- ํ์ค: SSA ๊ฐ์ฐฐ๊ด ๋ฐ ๋ ๋ฆฝ ์ฐ๊ตฌ์ ๋ฐ๋ฅด๋ฉด ๋ถ์ ์ง๊ธ์ ์ฐ๊ฐ ์์ญ์ต ๋ฌ๋ฌ ์์ค์ผ๋ก, ํธ๋ผํ์ ๋จธ์คํฌ์ ์ฃผ์ฅ๋ณด๋ค ํจ์ฌ ์์. ๋ฐ์ดํฐ๋ฒ ์ด์ค ์ค๋ฅ๋ ์ค๋๋ ์์คํ ๋ฌธ์ ๊ฐ ๊ณผ์ฅ๋ ์ธก๋ฉด์ด ํผ.
- ํ์๋ผ์ธ ์ ๋ง: 2025๋ ์๋ฐ๊ธฐ ๋์ DOGE์ ๊ฐ์ฌ์ ์ธ๋ ฅ ๊ฐ์ถ์ด ๊ณ์๋๋ฉฐ, “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ” ๋ ผ์์ด ์ ์ฑ ๋ณํ(์: ํํ ์ญ๊ฐ, ์ธ๊ธ ์กฐ์ )๋ก ์ด์ด์ง ๊ฐ๋ฅ์ฑ.
์ด ํ์๋ผ์ธ์ 2025๋ 3์ 5์ผ ํ์ฌ๊น์ง์ ์ ๋ณด๋ฅผ ๊ธฐ๋ฐ์ผ๋ก ํ๋ฉฐ, ์ดํ ํธ๋ผํ ์ ๋ถ์ ์ถ๊ฐ ๋ฐํ๋ ์ ์ฆ ์๋ฃ์ ๋ฐ๋ผ ์์ ๋ ์ ์์ต๋๋ค. “์ค์บ ๋น์ฉ”์ ๊ตฌ์ฒด์ ์ธ ๊ท๋ชจ๋ ์ฌ์ ํ ๋ ผ๋์ ์ฌ์ง๊ฐ ์์ผ๋ฉฐ, ๋ ๋ฆฝ์ ์ธ ๊ฒ์ฆ์ด ํ์ํฉ๋๋ค.