Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush’s second-term honeymoon was ending, and Social Security was to blame. Voters rebelled against his plan to partially privatize the popular retirement program and, the following year, stripped the GOP of its majorities in Congress. The events of 2005 cemented Social Security’s reputation as the “third rail of American politics.” For the next two decades, Republicans didn’t touch it.
Perhaps Elon Musk wasn’t paying attention. Back then, he had yet to vote in a U.S. election (or launch a rocket). Now, as a leader of DOGE, he’s opened an unexpected crusade against Social Security.
Musk recently called the program “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and claimed that it’s rife with waste and fraud. DOGE staffers have gained entry to the Social Security Administration and obtained sensitive taxpayer data, and the Trump administration has cut the agency’s workforce by thousands. Earlier this week, Social Security officials announced changes that could make it harder for retirees to access their benefits. These moves—and Musk’s rhetoric—have frightened voters, who have jammed congressional phone lines and town-hall meetings to register their concerns. And they’ve alarmed GOP lawmakers, who could pay for Musk’s decisions in next year’s midterms.
If Musk wants to meet his goal of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending, he’ll have to do a lot more than eliminate USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and even the Department of Education. He knows the real money is in the three pillars of America’s social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. “Most of the federal spending is entitlements,” he said earlier this month. “That’s the big one to eliminate.”
Republicans have learned that going after these programs carries a huge electoral risk. Musk, apparently, has not. “He doesn’t think politically,” Tom Davis, a former House Republican from Virginia who ran the party’s campaign committee in the early 2000s, told me. His approach, Davis said, is “ready, fire, aim.”
Musk has “been quite successful in business, but he is clearly not very popular, and his DOGE actions are making him less popular,” a senior GOP strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking a fight with the president or his wealthy lieutenant. “He will end up being a heavy weight around the neck of not only President Trump but Republicans generally.”
Most elected Republicans have been careful to avoid criticizing Trump or Musk. But as DOGE has continued to assail Social Security, some have started feeling pressure from their constituents. Callers inundated Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan with concerns about Social Security cuts during a telephone town hall the Republican held earlier this month. He assured them the program would not be touched. “I will admit that there have been times where Elon Musk has tweeted first and thought second,” Huizenga told me, summarizing his message to constituents.
Trump might be able to claim a mandate from voters to justify some of his early cost cutting; he’s long criticized foreign aid, for example. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeatedly vowed to preserve entitlements, even when some in his party wanted to trim them. Republicans have relied on those promises to try to reassure voters that their benefits are safe. “I think President Trump has made it very clear that he does not want to touch Social Security,” Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, a Trump ally, told reporters at the Capitol last week. “We are not cutting Social Security.”
Musk’s offensive against Social Security, however, has made those claims harder to sustain. And Trump himself has amplified some of Musk’s most specious charges about the program. During the president’s address to Congress earlier this month, he said his administration had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security. But the examples he cited—people born in the 19th century supposedly still getting checks—were almost certainly data-processing errors that reflected the program’s antiquated computer systems, not fraud.
The administration’s attempts to reduce fraud could jeopardize legitimate recipients. Beginning next month, people will no longer be able to call the Social Security Administration to file for benefits or update their banking information. Instead they’ll have to do so on the agency’s website or—if they can’t verify their identity online—visit an SSA office in person. The new requirements could be a particular hardship for older beneficiaries who live in rural areas—a constituency that leans heavily Republican.
“If they kill the ability to phone Social Security with questions, that will cause real problems with seniors,” the GOP strategist warned. “This would give Democrats an opening.”
Polling backs up the strategist’s claims. In a survey released yesterday, the Democratic firm Blueprint read respondents a list of 20 different facts about Musk and what he has done with DOGE, then asked which ones they found concerning. The four examples that respondents worried about most all involved possible cuts to Social Security. “This is what Democrats need to get through their heads: It’s all Social Security right now,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s pollster, told reporters during a briefing.
What Trump and Musk are doing now is far different from what Bush proposed two decades ago. His plan called for structural changes to Social Security that would allow recipients to put their benefits into private investment accounts, which Bush argued could yield more earnings for beneficiaries while extending the fiscal solvency of the program. Davis was serving in the House when the public rejected Bush’s idea. He offered a reminder that Trump and Musk might want to consider: “When you move too far, too fast in politics,” Davis said, “the voters pull you back.”
