Trump and Musk Keep Spouting Bogus Numbers to Hide Their Real Agenda
Not only was that $8 billion complete bunk; turns out, so were the next three highest “savings” claimed on the site. DOGE professed to find another $1.9 billion in savings from terminating three contracts for USAID, each for $655 million. But these contracts were what are known as Indefinite Delivery Vehicles, or IDVs. Such contracts allow the government to set spending limits but do not require it to meet those limits, meaning that it can cancel the contract at will. So far, the government had spent only $55 million of that $1.9 billion.
It’s worth noting that spending on USAID—which Musk called “a criminal organization” and the Trump administration has unilaterally (and possibly illegally) shut down—is not wasted money, but brings tangible benefits, including providing HIV treatments in Africa, countering Russian propaganda, and aiding civilians devastated by war in Syria and Ukraine. It’s our best tool for soft power, burnishing America’s image around the world by providing material help where it’s need most. And despite Donald Trump’s claimthat “billions of dollars have been stolen” by the organization, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios told 60 Minutesthat it is “the most accountable aid agency in the world,” with 40 percent of the staff, he estimated, made up of lawyers and accountants tasked with watching every dollar.
The administration has also made the suspect claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. Musk saidit “might be the biggest fraud in history” even shared a graph on X purporting to show this, apparently believing that everyone at the Social Security Administration was so stupid as to not recognize that the agency was sending out more than 5 million checks to people past the age of 140. Yet the only fool in the equation was Musk. Neither he nor Trump, who repeated the claim, appear to understand that while there are millions of people still in the Social Security database because their deaths were never recorded, these people do not receive checks. A total of 89,000 people 99 years old and over receive checks, which, unsurprisingly, aligns remarkably well with the U.S. Census estimate that there are 85,000 people 100 and over in the country. Simply checking a list of Social Security check recipients would have cleared up the entire issue. Yet Musk was either too dumb or too lazy to do so. Or, perhaps more likely, he just didn’t care if it was true or not because it served his purposes.