With the Republican plan to increase the deficit by $4.5 trillion, they need a new argument to go after entitlements

For decades now, Republicans have demonstrated that one of their main goals has been to eliminate the social safety net. While they've used various arguments, the one they've depended on the most is to claim that we can't afford it by pointing to the federal deficit. 

But that argument is increasingly hard to make when the House budget proposal includes a $4.5 trillion addition to the deficit from tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy. So Republicans find themselves having to pivot to a new argument for doing away with the social safety net - especially when it comes to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new argument is that these programs are infected with waste, fraud and abuse. As I noted previously, that is the lie Speaker Johnson is spreading about Medicaid. On Sunday, he said the same thing about Social Security.

Mike Johnson on Elon Musk: "We meet late into the night in his office and we've looked at that. What he's finding with his algorithms crawling through the data of Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 2, 2025 at 11:54 AM

Of course, Johnson didn't provide any evidence for "enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse" in the Social Security system. And when Welker pointed out that the Social Security administration's internal watchdog found that less than 1 percent of benefit payments were improper, Johnson responded by simply saying "Don't believe it."

Call me crazy, but if Musk and Johnson want to use that chainsaw to go after Social Security, they're going to have to provide some actual evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse. We now know that their claims about millions of dead people getting Social Security checks was a lie. 

Overall, when it comes to Musk's claims of fraud, here's a good tracker:

To demonstrate how twisted this has all become, Musk recently told Joe Rogan that "entitlements fraud for illegal aliens is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here." Of course, that's all a lie. But Musk used it as a way to pivot to the great replacement theory, suggesting that Democrats are using entitlement fraud to "buy voters."

The bottom line is that, whether they're pearl-clutching about the deficit, lying about fraud, or blaming immigrants, the point of all of this is to dismantle programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. That's the end game. They know that these programs are not only popular, they are a lifeline for millions of Americans. So they keep searching for a convincing lie to justify their destruction.