Entitlement Fraud Is Now a Stated Aim of the Democrat Party
Democrats have finally said the quiet part out loud, as they have before on Socialism, open borders, and censorship: the fraud is exactly the part of the federal budget they do not want cut.
by Scott McKay
March 12, 2025
Al Green was removed from the House during last week’s joint session of Congress for his outburst against the President and Elon Musk. His refusal to yield (and ongoing violation of House rules) led to the nationally televised ouster he sought.
Green’s complaint, the one that motivated him to brandish his walking stick at the president of the United States, was, as he later said, that Donald Trump has “no mandate to cut Medicaid.”
But Trump isn’t trying to cut Medicaid — at least not in terms of cutting the volume or quality of the service it provides to its honest recipients. Nor is Trump trying to cut Social Security. He’s trying to cut fraud, something one would expect supporters of both programs to cheer.
In a recent column discussing the escalating Alinskyite war by the American Left against Elon Musk, I referenced an interview the industrialist, tech tycoon, and scourer of America’s broken federal fisc gave with Larry Kudlow at Fox Business on Monday. That interview is worth watching in full if you haven’t seen it:
It’s important to recognize that Musk’s discussion of DOGE’s efforts at stripping out all of the obvious waste are closely related to Green’s rather untoward moment from a week ago:
The White House did what it could in a press release Tuesday to make that clear…
The Trump Administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).
Elon Musk didn’t say that, either. Fake Sherman is lying again.
Here is Musk’s direct quote: “The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year.”
And he’s exactly right.
FACT: The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates taxpayers lose as much as $521 billion annually to fraud — and most of that is within entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
FACT: Over the past two decades, the federal government has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in “improper payments” — the majority of which come in the form of “payments to deceased individuals or those who no longer [are] eligible for government programs.”
FACT: The Social Security Administration made an estimated $72 billion in improper payments between 2015 and 2022.
FACT: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimated it made $140+ billion in improper payments in 2024 alone.
What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending that ultimately costs taxpayers more?
But don’t tell that to Elissa Slotkin, who “won” a close election over Mike Rogers in November for a Senate seat in Michigan and now is somehow a key Democrat spokeswoman.
And don’t tell it to Pete Buttigieg, who’ll apparently be running for Michigan’s other Senate seat (you might have thought he was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, before Joe Biden made him his make-believe transportation secretary, but geography is fungible for Democrats).
It’s quite interesting, don’t you think? All of a sudden, the Democrats have this narrative that Musk’s efforts to identify and stop the waste and fraud — not just in the administrative state but in the entitlement programs where most of the federal budget is spent — constitutes “cuts.”
On the surface, you’d see this and scratch your head. After all, the more waste, fraud, and abuse can be drained out of these programs, the easier it is to make them solvent, no? And given Social Security’s promise, which is that you pay into that program your whole working life and it guarantees you a retirement income so it’s more or less a forced savings regime for the American worker, you’d have to say that limiting payouts to cover only those people who legitimately belong in the system is a necessity.
Right?
Well, perhaps not.
Every time Medicaid is audited at the state or federal level, it’s the same story — billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Everybody knows Medicaid is a pinata for scam artists and crooks. It’s not for nothing that Al Green, from the slums of south Houston, was the guy carrying on about “Medicaid cuts” — constituencies like his are generally rife with Medicaid fraudsters who set up shop as medical providers and file scads of Medicaid reimbursement forms in search of mailbox money from Uncle Sam. In certain communities where Democrats get near-unanimous voting majorities, Medicaid fraud qualifies as one of the most lucrative industries around.
And as Musk notes, there are millions and millions of Social Security numbers that remain active despite the people those numbers were attached to having assumed room temperature years, decades, or even centuries ago, and those active SSN’s are the petri dish from which illegal aliens might feed in order to claim things like Social Security disability payments.
So while this might seem puzzling — trimming the fat from these programs is a means of shoring them up so that they won’t collapse, and how on earth could that possibly be politically divisive? On the surface, very little is what it seems among today’s Democrats.
And it’s hilarious to see Slotkin accusing Musk of saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe if politics doesn’t work out, she can get a job at the Cineplex because her skills at projection are top-flight.
It’s the Democrats who are saying the quiet part out loud. They’re all but admitting they draw no distinction between honest recipients of entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and the scammers and fraudsters and illegal aliens who are raking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the system.
The cost of which, by the way, turns out to be many times those hundreds of billions. The waste, fraud, and abuse, which Musk estimates is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of all the money the government spends, is all deficit spending, and that means we’re borrowing money to throw it out of helicopters to satisfy the clients of the Buttigiegs, Slotkins and Greens of the world. With the interest on the national debt now coming to a trillion dollars a year, you can see the accumulated cost of all this. (RELATED: From GDP to Reality: Putting the $35 Trillion Debt Into Perspective)
It’s ruinous.
And none of these people can even be bothered to show any concern for it.
Ironically, there’s a certain honesty — or clarity, if you prefer — in all of this. Today’s Democrat Party is a collection of people who believe that a parasitical existence at the government teat is an honorable and productive way of life. That’s something they’ve long sought to downplay. But clearly, that isn’t true anymore; now it’s out in the open. To them, no matter how you manage to get at government benefits, it’s fine.
This ought to make seniors on Social Security or Medicare utterly furious. But to people in their 40s or 50s or below, who have long figured we’d get screwed over by Social Security’s insolvency just in time to not see the checks we’ve been paying for, it’s even worse than that.
And this is a big reason why I say that the Democrats are a dead political party walking. You can’t be this contemptuous of the people you seek to govern and expect to be rewarded by us without a long, contemplative period in the wilderness.
— This essay originally appeared at The American Spectator.
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"He’s trying to cut fraud, something one would expect supporters of both programs to cheer."
Someone in government must think it matters, because everyone who works at a company dealing with Medicare or Medicaid is required to do annual training on Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.
Rod it is so frustrating that these Dems like Slotkin and Buttigieg actually believe the lies they’re spewing