Stephen Miller claimed this week that the federal budget could be balanced simply by cutting payments to ineligible recipients — and experts, economists, and legal analysts wasted no time calling it out as fantasy.
"Based on what I've heard, we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them," Miller said.
The response was swift and brutal.
New York Times columnist David French called it "wildly false" and warned it "breeds a dangerous level of ignorance and wishful thinking in the American public."
Immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick was more blunt: "Stephen Miller thinks Americans are idiots. That's the only explanation for this kind of contemptuous lie."
The numbers don't come close to supporting Miller's claim. Trump's own Office of Management and Budget calculated that all potentially erroneous individual payments totaled $186 billion in 2025 — about 10 percent of the current budget deficit, according to budget analyst Jessica Riedl. The deficit itself runs nearly $2 trillion.
"'Based on what I've heard' means 'according to my baseless fantasies,'" wrote financial journalist James Surowiecki. "The claim that there's $1.8 trillion in fraudulent payments is the same kind of delusion that explains why DOGE was such a failure."
Reason magazine's Billy Binion put it simply: "We will never balance the budget if powerful people keep peddling wild falsehoods like this."
Our deficit is roughly $2 trillion. The largest share of spending goes to entitlements for American citizens. It really isn't hard to understand. We will never balance the budget if powerful people keep peddling wild falsehoods like this. https://t.co/DeGgvuXzvZ
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) May 26, 2026