Latest news with #Gracias
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Elon Musk and His DOGE Bro Have Cashed In on Americans' Retirement Savings
In the lead up to the April 1 election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, a little-known private equity executive by the name of Antonio Gracias joined Tesla billionaire Elon Musk on stage as the latter launched into a tirade clearly inspired by the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory — the discredited canard that the Biden administration was letting in millions of 'illegals' to engage in mass voter fraud. On the dais, Gracias described how his foray into Social Security had revealed something already widely known to immigration policymakers: that the Biden administration had substantially expanded the Temporary Protected Status program, allowing millions of immigrants to enter and work in the country legally. These noncitizens were given Social Security numbers, as is completely standard — in fact, the process was automated during Trump's first term — but Gracias and Musk, the world's richest man, treated it like a scandal. 'We started at the top of the system mapping the whole system of Social Security to understand where the fraud was — this is what jumped out at us,' Gracias said. 'When we saw these numbers, we asked 'What is this?' In '21, you see 270,000 people, it goes all the way to 2.1 million in '24. These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers. … This literally blew us away. We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.' Noting that his parents and siblings, like Musk, are immigrants, Gracias added, 'I'm pro-legal immigration — this is about America and the future of America.' The crowd of conservatives gasped as the billionaires made it sound as if they and their team at Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency had finally found proof of the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Social Security Administration that Musk has repeatedly talked about — examples that might help justify the massive upheaval that DOGE has created within the agency that manages America's core retirement program. Under their watch, DOGE has moved to fire thousands of SSA workers, shutter dozens of field offices, and implement sweeping changes that are expected to make it more difficult for Social Security recipients to get their payments on time, if at all. The administration has reportedly declared millions of people dead within the Social Security program, making live people fight for their payments, and has started deliberately marking some immigrants as deceased. (A White House spokesperson says SSA's 'death data' is 'being reviewed by three separate teams,' and that the immigrants targeted were either 'on the terrorist watch list' or have 'FBI criminal records.') Meanwhile, Social Security beneficiaries may have to wait until November to receive the higher payments they were promised in a law passed last year. Despite all of Musk and Gracias' rhetoric about rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in Social Security, scant attention has been paid to how the pair has become phenomenally wealthy with support from Americans' retirement funds. It's well-known that Musk's space company, SpaceX, has long cashed in on federal contracts — a trend turbocharged by Trump's administration. Gracias, for his part, has relied on significant investments from public retirement systems to fund his firm's deals. In the past decade, Gracias' private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, has received at least $1.7 billion in investment commitments from state and local pension funds — which manage the retirement savings of unionized teachers, firefighters, social workers, bus drivers, and cops — according to a Rolling Stone review of public documents. Much of this money has come from Democratic states and locales. For its most recent fund, Valor received $800 million in investment commitments from a range of state and local pension funds. Investors include the California Public Employees' Retirement System; the California State Teachers' Retirement System; the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund; the New York State Teachers' Retirement System; a range of New York City pension funds; the Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirement; and the Hartford Municipal Employees Retirement Fund in Connecticut. Valor disclosed in a press release last August that this same fund has invested in Musk's SpaceX and his artificial intelligence company xAI. Musk recently used xAI to purchase his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) at a valuation of $33 billion, a 25-percent haircut from the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter. (The platform's ad revenues have cratered under Musk's stewardship.) With a typical management fee of two percent, Gracias' firm stands to accumulate tens of millions of dollars annually from the public funds no matter how its investments perform. While Gracias complains about 1.3 million immigrants being on Medicaid — numbers that have not been independently verified by Rolling Stone, but would mean these immigrants are getting access to preventive care and saving hospitals money on emergency room expenses — Gracias himself is accruing large profits from the management fees that his firm charges government retirement systems. Valor and DOGE did not respond to Rolling Stone's requests for comment. A 54-year-old University of Chicago Law School alum who has been associated with Musk since the PayPal days, Gracias has played a key role in helping prop up Musk's embattled yet sprawling business empire. He's a longtime investor in Musk's companies, a significant Tesla shareholder, and former Tesla board member. Gracias' longstanding friendship and business dealings with Musk have been lucrative for both men. Musk is worth an estimated $386 billion, in large part due to his Tesla holdings. Gracias has a net worth of $2.2 billion, much of it tied to his holdings of Tesla stock. Gracias lent Musk $1 million early in Musk's ownership of Tesla, and his firm has invested in nearly every Musk company, including SpaceX. The Trump administration has been good to them. SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars from government contracts, has raked in billions more under the Trump administration. Agencies across the federal government are increasingly using Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet business. SpaceX and defense contractor Anduril, another company that Gracias' firm has invested in, are the frontrunners to build Trump's proposed 'Golden Dome' missile shield, a proposal that experts estimate will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In late April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Gracias' lucrative side hustle — selling stakes in Musk's private companies like SpaceX. A White House spokesperson says, 'As for concerns regarding conflicts of interest between Elon Musk and DOGE, President Trump has stated he will not allow conflicts, and Elon himself has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.' As Trump and Musk have run roughshod over the law to pursue drastic cuts of the federal government through DOGE, they have been supported by an eclectic cast of characters. While 19-year olds or those with openly racist proclivities or nicknames like 'Big Balls' get the bulk of media attention, arguably nobody has been more important to implementing DOGE's slash-and-burn agenda than Gracias. With his entry into the heights of Washington policymaking, Gracias, like Musk, has brought an overall mentality to the Trump administration with well-defined origins in private equity. Core to the history of private equity is a conception that government is a vehicle for private profit, and that the point of business is to extract as much cash as possible from targets, no matter the impact. Private equity started in earnest thanks to a rule change by Jimmy Carter in 1979 that allowed private equity to fundraise from private sector pension funds. (Public pension cash began to flow shortly thereafter.) But with the critical benefits of millions of Americans at issue, along with basic principles like the rule of law and a government that functions, the stakes couldn't be higher. 'It does seem like Musk and DOGE are applying private equity tactics to the government,' says Brendan Ballou, a former attorney at the Department of Justice who wrote the 2023 book Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America. As an example, Ballou notes, 'They're exploring sale leasebacks to sell underlying government property and lease it back to itself,' a hallmark of the private equity model. 'They're pursuing the same type of cost-cutting techniques that private equity firms pursue when they take over a company, which end up costing you vastly more money in the long run. Slashing the IRS might save you money for one year, but it's devastating in the future. It's almost comical how similar it is to the takeover of a company by a private equity firm, what they are doing to the government.' As Gracias is primed to reap a windfall from the Golden (no, not Teapot) Dome, the DOGE-led Social Security cuts he has helped to oversee could send the program cratering down the road to privatization — another classic hobbyhorse of a Wall Street eager to profit from the nearly $3 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund that is currently invested in U.S. Treasuries. (BlackRock, whose CEO Larry Fink recently resuscitated the long-discredited idea of investing part of Social Security in Wall Street-controlled private accounts, did Musk a massive favor last year when the financial firm voted its investors' proxies in favor of Musk's record-setting $46 billion Tesla pay package.) Gracias began working with the Social Security Administration in early February. By the end of the month, the SSA had announced its intentions to cut 7,000 positions out of the agency's 57,000-person workforce. Dozens of Social Security offices are expected to close, while DOGE pushes major technological changes that could make more people need to visit those offices. A White House spokesperson says SSA has only lost 2,000 workers so far, with most departing voluntarily, and adds that 'the agency has not permanently closed or announced the permanent closure of any local field office.' 'President Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency to modernize government operations and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,' the spokesperson continues. 'At the Social Security Administration, the DOGE team has delivered — upgrading technology systems, implementing anti-fraud tools, improving the accuracy of death records, and stopping illegal aliens from collecting benefits. President Trump remains committed to always protecting Social Security.' Additionally, Gracias has reportedly led a DOGE task force working with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services to integrate sensitive personal data from Social Security, with the apparent goal of aiding Trump's deportation dragnet. Speaking about DOGE's efforts in the Social Security Administration, former SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley said in March, 'Most of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse of the Social Security Administration have been taken.' In late April, the Trump SSA pledged that they would seek to convert large swaths of SSA employees to 'Schedule F,' which would effectively eliminate longstanding civil service protections and serve to speed up firings at the agency. DOGE appears to have been able to circumvent a federal judge's March ruling barring its access to SSA data with Trump appointing one of DOGE's own as chief information officer of the Social Security Administration. That role is currently being held by Scott Coulter, who used to work for private equity giant Blackstone and Lone Pine Capital, a hedge fund, and has worked as a DOGE apparatchik. All of this is out of the private equity playbook, says Samir Sonti, a professor at the Murphy Institute at the City University of New York. 'Private equity has profited immensely in recent decades off of asset stripping — using public resources to plunder businesses and communities, leaving behind carcasses of enterprises in many cases,' he says. 'Fundamentally, private equity is really about devastating the public good for private gain. DOGE is executing something very similar at the federal level. But they're gutting not just a specific enterprise or community but the entire federal government, to advance a longer-term desire among corporate interests in this country to free themselves from any public or social oversight. In many ways, what we're seeing with DOGE is the private equity asset stripping model [taken] to its logical conclusion.' Private equity firms in the U.S. — anchored by big names Blackstone, Apollo, Carlyle, and KKR — manage over $3.1 trillion in assets, and control outright major firms like Medline, the largest medical supply firm in the U.S., and Allied Universal, the world's largest private security firm. Companies owned outright by private equity firms employ over 12 million people in the U.S., according to research by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Employees of private equity firms spent $236 million on campaign contributions in the 2024 election. The American Investment Council, a lobbying group for private equity, has estimated that about half of private equity's capital that is invested in America comes from U.S. public pension funds. Private equity is distinguished by its lack of regulation, limited transparency, high fees, and vulnerability to misconduct. A leaked 2020 report from the FBI found that private equity firms, along with their closely related siblings in asset management, hedge funds, are widely used to conduct illicit money laundering operations. 'Public pension funds are one of the biggest sources of capital for private equity firms,' says Oscar Valdés Viera, who analyzes private equity at Americans for Financial Reform. 'Workers indirectly fund private equity's predatory practices through their pension funds. The private equity billionaires benefit from tax loopholes and giveaways that the rest of us do not get,' he says, pointing out the carried interest tax deduction, which allows private equity managers to get much of their income taxed at the lower long-term capital gains tax rate than the ordinary income tax rate. 'They charge a lot of fees, like management fees, professional fees, director and officer fees, accounting fees, transfer agent fees, and most of these fees are coming directly from pension funds and similar investors,' he says. 'It's just insane the amount of fees that they charge from these pension funds.' Reflecting the broad secrecy of his industry, much of what Gracias is doing at DOGE remains closed off to the public eye. On April 21, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Social Security Administration for failing to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests related to its handling of the personal data of millions of Americans, stating: 'The American people have an urgent need to know if their private financial, medical, and personal records are being illegally accessed, analyzed, or weaponized by Trump's unaccountable team of unvetted outsiders.' Brett Christophers, a professor at Sweden's Uppsala University who has studied asset management, tells Rolling Stone that the actions of DOGE clearly resemble foundational principles of the private equity industry. 'When private equity investors go into operating companies, the most consistent theme across all their investments is cost cutting as a way in theory to maximize their investment and make companies lean and more valuable to other potential investors,' he says. 'It sounds like what's going on with DOGE is that Musk and the people working with him are trying to treat the government in the same way.' More from Rolling Stone Adidas Sambas Are up to $50 off Online as Footwear Brand Announces It May Raise Prices Soon Due to Tariffs Trump Leaves Major Cities Without Top Meteorologists Ahead of Hurricane Season Trump Suggests Republicans Start Expelling Dems From Congress Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Fox News
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
DOGE exposed our immigration asylum disaster. That was the tip of the iceberg
Elon Musk, Antonio Gracias and the DOGE team recently exposed how rampant immigration fraud and government corruption became under the Biden administration. Specifically, they showed how aliens "getting" asylum can receive work authorization and, with it, an automatic Social Security number, which enables them to obtain driver's licenses, commit voter fraud and receive other benefits. This already sounds alarming. But the truth is even worse. Under current U.S. regulations, asylum applicants can apply for a work authorization document with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) five months after their asylum application is filed (rather than five months after it's granted). There's no filing fee for asylum applications – meaning there is literally no cost involved in applying. This creates a huge incentive for inadmissible aliens to file fraudulent asylum applications to gain U.S. work authorization. And while adjudicating the asylum application can take DHS or the Justice Department years to complete, the DHS prioritizes granting employment authorization applications, averaging mere months to complete such applications. In other words, individuals can fraudulently apply for asylum and then receive work authorization shortly after, safe in the knowledge that their asylum application may not be decided for years. Asylum was created to protect the persecuted. But this system means it's more prone to be exploited by inadmissible aliens as a way to get work authorizations, Social Security numbers, driver's licenses and other government benefits. As a result, the system is being flooded. Under the Biden administration, so many employment documents were issued to immigration parolees (without congressional authorization), asylum applicants and other temporary aliens that DHS could not keep up with renewing the authorizations. To "solve" the problem, Biden's DHS finalized a rule in December 2024 to permanently increase the automatic extension period for expiring employment authorization from six months to 18 months. That is, DHS chose to automatically extend work authorization without ever considering whether the aliens should continue to have it. According to one chart (shown by DOGE's Gracias at a recent Wisconsin town hall), 270,000 new aliens were issued Social Security numbers in FY2021. That number rose to 590,000 in FY22, 964,000 in FY23, and approximately 2.1 million in FY24. According to Gracias, the Social Security Administration automatically mails aliens Social Security numbers – without requiring them to prove their identity or complete an interview. Gracias says "The defaults in the system from Social Security to all the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, max pay for these people. And minimum collection." During its investigations, DOGE found 1.3 million aliens who were already receiving Medicaid. They also found among the millions a subset who were registered to vote – and some who did indeed vote. All this is the result of broad administrative state abuse of alien work authorization – something Congress needs to end by reclaiming its own constitutional authority and by returning asylum (our nation's second-most important immigration benefit, after U.S. citizenship) back to its intended role of protecting people from persecution. Specifically, Congress should legislate the principle that immigration benefit applicants (including those receiving asylum) may not receive work authorization until the underlying benefit (e.g., asylum) is granted, not just filed. While waiting for their applications to be adjudicated, applicants should fund their stay in the U.S. via a sponsor responsible for their financial well-being. Congress should also enact anti-fraud asylum measures, which would significantly decrease the number of fraudulent asylum applications – and, by extension, would decrease the years-long wait for DHS and DOJ to adjudicate legitimate asylum applications. DOGE can also step in and examine immigration benefit applications at DHS and DOJ to identify fraudulent applications and remove them from the 9.4 million and nearly 3.7 million respective agency backlogs. This would decrease the processing times for the remaining valid applications and restore integrity to our lawful immigration process. Finally, DOGE should set automatic notifications across the benefits lifecycle so that when a non-citizen is denied an immigration benefit, downstream systems and parties are likewise notified to terminate their respective benefits. Under this system, if an alien's asylum application or employment authorization application were denied or terminated, the alien's employer, ICE, SSA, the Internal Revenue Service, and the alien's state(s) of residence would be notified to ensure the alien was no longer working, receiving benefits or voting – and, ultimately, that he was removed from the country. By acting now, DOGE and Congress can decrease the deportable alien population, ensure U.S. taxpayer benefits go to Americans first, and incentivize better compliance with our generous immigration laws.
CBS News
04-04-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Elon Musk, DOGE use access to Social Security data to elevate claims against migrants
Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency say they're using their access to the Social Security Administration data not only to investigate claims of waste and fraud, but also to examine claims that immigrants are abusing the system — even though undocumented immigrants contribute more to Social Security than they take. During his rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last Sunday, Musk and Antonio Gracias, a longtime friend and DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration, displayed a chart that purported to show over 5 million non-citizens who were issued Social Security numbers between 2021 and 2025. Musk called it a "massive financial incentive" for people to come to the U.S. illegally and claimed it was a large-scale Democratic "program" intended "to import as many illegals as possible." Gracias claimed the number of immigrants with Social Security numbers was "totally uncontrolled" and blamed former President Joe Biden's immigration laws for this. The U.S. may grant parole to certain migrants for humanitarian or other reasons, allowing them to live and work in the U.S. on a temporary basis, usually for a year or two, but it's not a path to citizenship. The status allows some to obtain Social Security numbers, which makes it legal for them to find work, but they do not receive Social Security benefits. DOGE's chart represented immigrants with legal work authorizations who were given Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry program, known as EBE. Those here illegally, without any lawful immigration status, are not eligible for a Social Security number. But then Gracias conflated the two groups and talked broadly about violent acts by undocumented immigrants as he stood in front of a chart showing data about immigrants with legal work permits. The EBE program, created during President Trump's first term, automatically processes Social Security cards for immigrants with temporary or permanent legal status, including those with green cards or work authorization from the Department of Homeland Security. "A hundred percent of the people in the EBE program, all their paperwork and status has been validated by DHS. That's where SSA gets all that information from," said Kathleen Romig, a Director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Experts say the program, a partnership between SSA and DHS, was designed to improve efficiency and availability for the SSA's frontline staff. In mid-March, the EBE program was paused, according to an internal email shared with CBS News. No specific reason was given. CBS News has reached out to SSA to ask about the data in the DOGE chart, as well as why the program was paused. Asked Tuesday about DOGE's claims, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she wasn't familiar with the numbers but pointed to an inspector general's report that found $72 billion worth of improper payments in the program from 2015 to 2022. Most were overpayments and made up less than 1% of the total benefits paid during that period. "There are individuals who should not be receiving benefits on the Social Security rolls, and this administration is focused on cleaning out the waste, fraud and abuse in every agency, but particularly in Social Security," Leavitt said. Gracias said DOGE received "a lot" of help from employees at SSA and immigration agencies in accessing data on immigrants, from alleged benefits they receive to their voting records. DOGE's access to personal, sensitive data within agencies has been a fraught, highly litigated issue . Data sharing between agencies is subject to numerous privacy laws, though Mr. Trump issued an executive order on March 20 directing federal agency heads to grant "full and prompt access of unclassified" data to federal officials in order "to identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse." The Department of Justice said DOGE has been provided read-only access to the agency's data, according to a court filing . In a court battle looking to limit DOGE's access, DOGE has argued that anonymizing the data would make it "impractical for those employees to conduct their work." The administration contends DOGE employees at the agency had completed all required agreements and training to access this data. Gracias claimed Wednesday that DOGE has found immigrants who have Social Security numbers on state voter rolls. Non-citizens are barred from voting in federal and state elections, and if caught, the penalty is deportation . He said they referred these cases to immigration agencies and said "they've committed to prosecute." But he provided no evidence of this and did not say how many cases have been referred or how many would be prosecuted. "That allowed us to connect all this data, to find these people across the system, across the benefit system, all the way to the voting records," Gracias said of Mr. Trump's executive order. Some agency employees have raised alarms over the rush to provide DOGE employees with access to this data. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said a former senior SSA official had written to him to report that DOGE employees and the nominee to lead the SSA, Frank Bisignano, worked to speed access to this data for DOGE employee Akash Bobba, a 22-year-old engineer at the agency. Tiffany Flick, a former SSA employee, wrote in an affidavit that Mike Russo, a DOGE senior adviser at SSA, did not give a "sufficiently detailed" reason why Bobba and DOGE employees needed access. Justice Department lawyers said in a later filing that DOGE employees were working on projects cleaning up the death records at SSA or finding ways to identify fraud in new claims and wage reporting. The Internal Revenue Service has also been working on an agreement with immigration agencies to share individual taxpayer data about undocumented migrants, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. DHS staff has been requesting access to data on individual taxpayer identification numbers, known as ITINs, which are given to non-citizens. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, one of the key architects of Trump's immigration policy, supports allowing DOGE to utilize the data to help immigration officials. In February, Miller said if Internal Revenue Service investigators find "illegal aliens stealing taxpayer money, of course they'll be referred to ICE. Of course they'll be referred to Homeland Security investigations." Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under former President Bill Clinton, said while agency data systems "do talk to each other" through systems like "E-Verify" for employees, the IRS has "always been completely hands off." "IRS information has never been made available to enforcement agencies. That is entirely new, and anybody working in this field for a long time would never imagine that could happen," Meissner said, noting that there have been "strong privacy protections" in law that are "carefully controlled." Gracias also claimed the "defaults" in the Social Security system are set to "max inclusion, max pay for these people." But experts say there is no "maximum" benefit setting for non-citizen workers. SSA guidance says those who entered the U.S. after Aug. 22, 1996, are not eligible for Supplemental Security Income such as disability payments from taxes they've paid within their first five to seven years in the U.S. There are cases where immigrants will make up a Social Security number on their employment forms, but this does not benefit the immigrants. It's hardly ever corrected by the employer, and their paid taxes are labeled as "unattributed funds" and added to the Social Security trust fund. Undocumented immigrants without work authorization play a sizable role in funding the Social Security system. Analysts estimate undocumented immigrants account for an additional $20 billion annually in payments into Social Security that they will never withdraw. Romig said Musk "got it backwards" by saying "immigrants are somehow a drain on Social Security's finances." "The more immigrants that we have coming into the United States, the stronger Social Security finances are because they contribute more to the trust funds than they take out," she said.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How many migrants are receiving Social Security numbers?
(NewsNation) — Tech billionaire Elon Musk is claiming that Social Security numbers were handed out last year to more than 2 million immigrants who entered the United States illegally and that those cards were subsequently used to collect benefits the migrants are not entitled to receive. Musk, speaking at a weekend town hall meeting in Wisconsin, displayed data from a Social Security program called Enumeration Beyond Entry, which indicated that nearly 2.1 million migrants were given Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2024 alone. That figure was a sharp increase from the 590,000 noncitizens who received Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2022 and the 964,000 who received them in 2023, EBE data showed. The Trump administration estimates that 11 million immigrants who crossed the border illegally are currently living in the U.S. Pew Research reported last year that about 8.3 million workers who held jobs in the nation in 2022 were migrants. How to get the most out of your Social Security benefits Musk and venture capitalist Antonio Gracias, who has been assisting the Department of Government Efficiency in examining the Social Security Administration, claim that the free-wheeling nature of how Social Security numbers are reportedly being given to migrants is an example of fraudulent activity within the SSA. 'This literally blew us away,' Gracias said at the town hall. 'We went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident.' The Social Security Administration reports that, in general, only noncitizens who are authorized by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to work in the United States are eligible to receive Social Security numbers. Once authorized to legally work in the U.S., migrants are eligible to apply for a Social Security card. However, the agency stipulates that for non-U.S. citizens to receive Supplemental Security Income, they must have been granted a certain classification by the Department of Homeland Security. Those classifications include being legally admitted into the country as a permanent resident, granted conditional entry or asylum, paroled into the United States or admitted as a refugee. However, Gracias alleged Sunday that migrants were given Social Security numbers automatically through the mail without being interviewed or being required to show identification after applying for and receiving a work permit. Social Security Administration probes origin of website portal outage The EBE program that distributes Social Security numbers to migrants with work authorizations began in 2017 during President Donald Trump's first White House term. The initiative was established as a partnership between the SSA and DHS to assist the SSA in efficiently issuing Social Security numbers to migrants who were deemed eligible. The SSA's inspector general wrote in 2019 that the program allowed Homeland Security to vet the legal status of migrants who were eligible to work and then automatically issue them with Social Security numbers. As part of the process, migrants seeking Social Security numbers were required to provide proof of their legal status. A SSA spokesperson did not immediately respond to an email from NewsNation seeking comment about the claims or the EBE data Thursday. Musk said Sunday the issuance of the Social Security numbers was part of a 'massive large-scale program' by the Biden administration to 'import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one-party system from which there would be no escape.' Gracias added that migrants who received Social Security numbers were receiving 'max benefits' and that the noncitizens who were issued the Social Security numbers were using them to register to vote. The claims came after Musk previously alleged that Social Security benefits had been paid to tens of millions of people who had died. However, despite the growth in recent years of migrants who were provided with Social Security numbers, a 2023 government audit cited by The Washington Post stated that the SSA correctly processed cases for noncitizens to be issued Social Security numbers 99.8% of the time. Appeals court blocks DOGE effort to access Social Security data Experts, such as former SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley, told Rolling Stone that the increase in Social Security numbers being issued to migrants was 'inevitable' due to former President Joe Biden's policies regarding lawfully admitted immigrants at the U.S. southern border. A 2024 analysis conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy showed that migrants paid $96.7 billion into federal, state and local taxes in 2022. The migrant employees who have been issued work permits also paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes during the same year, although, in most cases, they are not eligible to receive benefits from federal agencies. As Trump has vowed to stop the flow of migrants entering the country illegally, ITEP found that providing access to work authorizations to all migrants would increase their tax contributions from $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion. More than $33 billion of the difference would go to the federal government, the study found, Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
DOGE volunteer credits Trump for unprecedented effort to curb 'jaw-dropping' Social Security fraud
A U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) volunteer credited President Donald Trump for the agency's success in curbing government waste after the Elon Musk-led team uncovered "jaw-dropping" fraud in the Social Security system. "None of this would have happened without President Trump," Antonio Gracias told Steve Doocy during "Fox & Friends" Wednesday. "President Trump had the courage to allow us to go across databases. He signed an executive order. It's never been done before, where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk with each other." "That allowed us to connect all this data, to find these people across the system, across the benefit system, all the way to the voting records. It really took a lot of courage," he continued. Expert Turns Tables On Dem Critics After Musk Accuses Social Security Of Being 'Ponzi Scheme' Musk and Gracias revealed over the weekend during a get-out-the-vote rally in Wisconsin that millions of noncitizens received Social Security numbers during former President Joe Biden's tenure. The pair shared a chart showing a steady year-over-year increase, reaching more than 2 million in FY 2024, which ended on Sept. 30. FY23 saw roughly 1 million noncitizens issued Social Security numbers, as did FY25, which began in October and will end in September of this year. Read On The Fox News App "We found that there were just about five-plus million of them that came to the country as illegals, were given various forms of parole or allowing [in] the country, and they got through an automatic system, Social Security numbers, so they could get into our benefit systems," Gracias said. "And we tracked that through and found that they were on benefit programs," he noted. "And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls, and we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted." Gracias said that DOGE confirmed 1.3 million individuals who secured a fraudulent Social Security number received Medicare benefits, too. Doocy asked Gracias about the amount of money the agency has saved American taxpayers as it pertains to Social Security fraud alone. "It's in the billions," he responded. "You saw the fraud on the phone lines itself. That was about $1.5 billion, and I would guess with Social Security already, we're north of $10 billion." Meanwhile, DOGE said last week it had removed approximately 7 million Social Security accounts belonging to people listed as being over 120 years old. The agency has also found through its audits that the Social Security database included 20 million dead people marked as alive, Musk said at the Wisconsin town hall Sunday. Fox News' Alec Schemmel contributed to this report. Original article source: DOGE volunteer credits Trump for unprecedented effort to curb 'jaw-dropping' Social Security fraud
