The Trump administration says it’s working to reduce the amount of fraud in federal government programs. However, fiscal experts have said that those reductions alone won’t “save” the Social Security program or result in “a balanced budget,” as President Donald Trump has falsely suggested.
That’s because fraudulent overpayments in Social Security are a small fraction of that program’s total costs. Likewise, the most recent federal budget deficit was about 240% more than the highest federal estimate of annual spending due to fraud.
Yet during a May 27 meeting with members of his Cabinet, the president talked about his administration’s efforts to root out fraud and what it could mean for the future of Social Security and the government’s finances.
“Under the leadership of Vice President JD Vance — very proud of this — the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is waging war on waste, fraud, theft and abuse like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said at the White House. “And they’re finding billions and billions and billions of dollars.”
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“And if he does really great,” Trump said of Vance, “we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything. This is the kind of money they stole.” Later in his remarks, the president said, “And I think we have a chance to save Social Security without doing anything to it, by just the numbers of fraudulent people on Social Security — people that are 115 years old, 125 years old, getting payments.”
But even if all fraud in government spending was eliminated, it wouldn’t save nearly enough money to accomplish those two budget goals, experts say.
When we asked about the president’s claims, the White House didn’t provide supporting evidence. Instead, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said: “Every day, President Trump’s Fraud Task Force is uncovering levels of fraud across various federal programs that were previously inconceivable to government forecasters and working Americans alike. President Trump pledged to slash the pervasive waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending, and from cracking down on Medicaid fraudsters to right-sizing federal employment levels, the Administration is focused on delivering record results for American taxpayers.”
Social Security
Social Security is in jeopardy of running out of money to pay full benefits in less than 10 years.
In a 2025 report, the program’s trustees said that, together, the Social Security trust funds – one to pay retirees or their survivors, and the other for disabled individuals – are projected to become insolvent in 2034. At that point, money from the payroll taxes that fund Social Security would only be enough to cover 81% of scheduled benefits.
Without adjustments, the trust fund for retirees, specifically, will be depleted a year earlier, with the ability to pay just 77% of benefits, the report said. That trust fund has dwindled because its reserves have been tapped to help pay beneficiaries, since Social Security’s expenditures began to exceed its payroll tax revenue more than a decade ago.
Social Security paid out almost $1.5 trillion in 2024, both for the retirement and disability programs, which was more than the programs’ income of about $1.4 trillion.
The combined trust funds face an estimated shortfall of about $25 trillion over 75 years, through 2099, according to last year’s annual trustees report. (However, the disability insurance trust fund on its own won’t become depleted during the 75-year window.)
That imbalance can’t be fixed simply by going after fraud.
She noted that in a February 2025 report, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General reported that, between fiscal years 2020 and 2023, overpayments of retirement and disability benefits totaled roughly $13.6 billion, or about $3.4 billion per year on average. Most of the overpayments were attributed to beneficiaries not reporting information that affected their benefits.
The IG report said that 3% of the overpayments went to “beneficiaries who fraudulently obtained benefits or were noncitizens … who did not report to SSA they had been living outside the United States for longer than 6 months.” The report also said that 4% of the overpayments were attributed “to payments issued after a beneficiary’s death or from family members or representative payees who did not timely report the beneficiary’s death.”
But there shouldn’t be any such payments to anyone 115 or 125 years old, as Trump claimed. Since September 2015, the Social Security database has been set to automatically terminate benefits to individuals listed as 115 or older.
Last year, Trump claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 could be wrongly receiving Social Security. But as we reported in February 2025, the Social Security Administration distributed a total of $158 million in benefits to about 89,000 individuals aged 99 or older in December 2024. Internal audit reports indicated that only a small portion of the payments were likely disbursed to dead Americans wrongly recorded as alive in the Social Security database.
“Even if one were to wave a magic wand and eliminate SSA’s entire administrative cost budget while preventing all overpayments, the total ‘savings’ would amount to only about $10.2 billion per year — equal to just 2.5 days’ worth of benefits, or about 2.7% of the annual amount needed to close the 75-year actuarial deficit,” Goda said.
She said that the projected 75-year funding gap is the kind “that can only be closed through major policy changes — raising taxes, adjusting benefits, or some combination of both.”
In an August 2025 explainer answering common questions about Social Security, Emerson Sprick, director of retirement and labor policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said, “Minimizing fraud is a vital aspect of good governance, but eliminating fraud would not fix Social Security’s underlying fiscal challenges.”
Federal Budget
The same thing could be said of fraud and the federal budget in general.
“Looking beyond Social Security to government programs, there is actually a lot more fraud,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He told us in an email that, compared with Social Security, “it’s much easier” to defraud programs such as Medicare and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
“Nonetheless, there is nowhere close to enough fraud to balance the budget,” he said.
As we wrote in February — when Trump made a similar claim about balancing the budget by finding fraud — the Government Accountability Office estimated in a 2024 report that the federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” Meanwhile, the federal budget deficit was almost $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the deficit will approach $1.9 trillion in fiscal years 2026 and 2027 — before rising to more than $2 trillion in 2028 and subsequent fiscal years.
So, the annual imbalance between federal outlays and receipts is currently more than three times higher than the highest federal estimate of government money lost each year to fraud.
The CRFB is “very supportive” of efforts to address waste, fraud, errors and abuse, “but again, they are not gonna balance the budget,” Goldwein said.
-- By Andréa Mochida
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