Vice President JD Vance got a brutal fact check from the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler Tuesday over his latest claim about Social Security benefit fraud being tackled by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force.
“You look at people who are 150 years old who are fraudulently collecting Social Security payments," said Vance in a Fox News interview last week, quoting a debunked claim Musk makes about dead people getting benefits.
He then made a new and even grander claim.
"You see our Social Security system — 40 percent of the people who are calling are actually committing fraud. That means the 60 percent who need their Social Security checks are waiting in line.”
This claim that 40 percent of calls to the Social Security office being fraudulent — being used to justify efforts by DOGE to shut down phone customer service for beneficiaries, which could lead to millions of people having to drive to another town to receive in-person help at a physical office — is outrageously wrong, Kessler wrote.
"As for Vance’s claim that 40 percent of the people who are calling Social Security are committing fraud, that is an absurdity on its face — the kind of twisted logic that turns up at the end of a long game of telephone tag," wrote Kessler. "Vance echoed a statement made by billionaire Elon Musk, when he was campaigning on behalf of a conservative judicial candidate in Wisconsin on March 30. Like Vance, Musk said 40 percent of the calls to Social Security were fraudulent."
What Vance is referring to is a statistic from the Social Security Administration that “approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information.” In other words, it's the reverse of what he claims — 40 percent of fraud involves telephone calls.
"In March, Leland Dudek, the agency’s acting commissioner, told reporters that the agency loses $100 million a year to direct-deposit fraud," wrote Kessler. "That sounds like a lot of money, but Social Security doles out $1.6 trillion in benefit payments a year, with 99.3 percent of those payments made via direct deposit. Put another way, only 0.00625 percent of Social Security benefits are lost to direct-deposit fraud, with 0.0025 percent (40 percent) via Social Security’s 800 number."
"There’s a monumental difference between 40 percent and 0.0025 percent," Kessler concluded. "But in the Trump administration’s scramble to serve up outrage and scandal about alleged fraud at Social Security, Vance went on national television and told a whopper. He earns Four Pinocchios."