When Elon Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” on Joe Rogan’s podcast on February 28, he was, wittingly or not, echoing a long line of conservative critics. Over the last fifteen years alone, a long line of Republican politicians—Mick Mulvaney, Ron Johnson, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul—have characterized it the same way.
Comparing a ninety-year-old federally backed social insurance system with a form of fraud that got its name in the 1920s—when Charles Ponzi was sent to prison for bilking investors out of millions of dollars—may seem bizarre. Senator Barry Goldwater obliquely conceded the oddity of the analogy when, in 1977, he called Social Security “the longest playing Ponzi scheme on record”—most Ponzi schemes being short-term gambits. In reality, of course, the Social Security system is almost the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: it uses funds collected from both employers and workers to pay small monthly benefit checks to retirees, disabled Americans, and others who qualify. (Self-employed people pay the full contribution.)
Inapt though such comparisons may be, they have been a persistent strand of conservative thought ever since 1935, when the Social Security Act became law. The initial conservative backlash—first to the act, then to the other gains of the New Deal era—laid the groundwork for the nine decades of attacks on public goods that have followed. Since then, the strategy has been refined, but the crusade still follows the same four-pronged process: demonize Social Security, claim that the essence of government is found in spending on absurd programs, use the state as a personal piggy bank, and assert that you and your fellow elites have been the real victims all along.
In 1937 a New London, Connecticut, newspaper, evaluating the new “social security scheme,” dismissed it as a “Ponzi-like plan” based upon a philosophy of “something from nothing.” The comparison stuck. In 1956, Clarence Manion, the former Dean of Notre Dame Law School, pioneering conservative radio broadcaster, and future member of the John Birch Society, said the federal government had “[adopted] the Ponzi “‘get rich easy’ scheme as its very own.” In 1981 conservative senator Jesse Helms called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme to buy political popularity at the risk of social security’s ultimate bankruptcy.”
When running for office, Republican presidential candidates—even those who, like Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, previously voiced similar criticisms of Social Security as a scam—tell a different story. Recognizing the overwhelming popularity of the system, they claim to be its defenders come election season. Goldwater, who said the system should be “voluntary” in 1963, backed off the next year when he was a presidential candidate, saying instead that he wanted a “strong, sound system.” Reagan cast doubt on the Social Security system from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, but when he achieved the presidential nomination he had been seeking for a dozen years in 1980, the Republican platform assured voters that “Social Security is one of this nation’s most vital commitments to our senior citizens” and called it the “fundamental contract between our government and its productive citizens.” At the start of his second term in 1985, Reagan went so far as to call it “one of the most successful and popular programs ever established by the American government.”
The one counterexample—the one time a Republican president sought to undermine the Social Security system—came during the presidency of George W. Bush. But it is the exception that proves the rule. Like Goldwater and Reagan, Bush supported Social Security reform in his pre-presidential years. Unlike his predecessors, he stuck to his guns: during his first presidential campaign in 2000, he said that “we should trust Americans by giving them the option of investing part of their Social Security contributions in private accounts.” Still, most were taken aback when Bush tried to use what he called the “political capital” he’d earned from re-election to build public support for a partial privatization plan, devoting his 2005 State of the Union address to what he called “saving Social Security for America’s future generations.” His proposal was wildly unpopular, and within a few months Bush acknowledged that his efforts had failed, accelerating his lame-duck status.
This year’s attack on Social Security is different. Although Trump had expressed an openness to cuts in Social Security in his first term and even at times on the campaign trail in 2024, he was widely seen, and often promoted himself, as a different kind of Republican, one who wanted to “keep Social Security intact.” The 2024 GOP platform was unambiguous on this matter. One of the twenty promises the President and the Republican party promised to “accomplish very quickly” if they won the White House and Congress was to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE.” As late as December, Trump insisted that “we’re not touching” Social Security.
But since January, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—nowhere mentioned in the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention—has been proposing, and apparently enacting, massive cuts to the Social Security system, which could lead to a “collapse,” according to Martin O’Malley, former commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Rather than denying this charge, Musk recently told Larry Kudlow that “10 percent of federal expenditures” consisted of Social Security fraud and that “entitlement spending” was a “big one to eliminate.” Already, the Social Security Administration is preparing to lay off at least 7,000 people. Republican elected officials have quickly closed ranks around the plan. Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that DOGE had found an “enormous amount of fraud, waste, and abuse” in the Social Security system, although he also incongruously promised that cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are “off the table.”
In his address to Congress last week, Trump did nothing to assuage public concern about the cuts. Unlike Johnson, he did not put forward even a perfunctory promise to protect the program, although he did say he was seeking “no tax on Social Security benefits for our great seniors.” Instead, he treated Social Security as the paradigmatic site of government waste, claiming that DOGE had identified “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud.” He then spent three paragraphs repeating discredited claims that millions of long-dead people are receiving payments. “Believe it or not,” he said, “almost 5 million people between the ages of 100 and 109 were on Social Security.” He even claimed that DOGE had found “1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age.”
For the leaders of the new administration, the great Social Security racket is only the tip of the iceberg. As Musk put it to Rogan, “The government is one big Ponzi scheme, if you ask me.” Rooting out the scam, in this view, requires doing away with not just individual programs but any and all form of government in the public interest. Social Security is just one symptom of a far greater sickness. In his address to Congress, Trump echoed Musk, highlighting a host of government programs as wastes of taxpayer money:
Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified. $22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens. $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma. $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is. $8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. $60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America—$60 million. $8 million for making mice transgender.
Government, Trump continued, was not only wasteful: it was plagued by censorship, tyrannical DEI policies, and “weaponization,” all of which he bragged about ending. The only state action he praised came when he thanked the government of Pakistan for apprehending a terrorist.
Trump’s excoriations of supposedly outrageous public spending, like the Social-Security-as-Ponzi-scheme line, are nothing new. In “A Time for Choosing,” a speech delivered by Reagan on behalf of Goldwater shortly before the 1964 presidential election, the new Republican convert highlighted “deception” in the Social Security program as a prelude to a broader discussion of waste. In addition to targeting welfare fraud, Reagan described “a million-and-a-half dollar building [in Cleveland] completed only three years ago” that “was destroyed to make way for what government officials call ‘a more compatible use of the land.’ Like Trump, Reagan also emphasized dubious stories about wasteful foreign aid to non-Western countries, with extra scorn reserved for African nations. The United States government, he told his listeners, had “bought a $2 million yacht for Haile Selassie” as well as “extra wives for Kenyan government officials” and “a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.”
If Reagan’s narrative of absurd government spending was one origin point of Trump’s narrative, it was not the first. Like the critique of Social Security, it comes straight out of the anti–New Deal playbook. In a speech to the United Retail Merchants Association shortly after he received the 1936 Republican Vice Presidential nomination, Frank Knox condemned the New Deal government as constituted by arrogant spendthrifts. He did so by highlighting what he took to be grandiose and wasteful projects, including a federally funded “dog pound in Memphis with marble shower baths” and a “$6,000 product in White Plains to remove ‘efflorescence’ from some bridges.” (It is worth noting that the Acting Mayor of Memphis decried Knox’s description of the dog pound as false; it had, he noted, “no showers of any kind, much less marble showers.”) Government, in Knox’s view, was full of “unnecessary public officials” who too readily greenlighted “useless projects.”
Knox connected all this wasteful spending with the “dubious Social Security measure” passed the previous year, which he saw as far more dangerous than the examples of ridiculous one-off spending he had flagged because it was permanent. In a Trumpian turn of phrase, he claimed to have been “informed that there are now in Washington three separate and independent commissions working at taxpayer’s expense to find out why there are so many unnecessary commissions.” For Knox, these examples of “government extravagance” crystallized the essence of the New Deal: excessive spending on frivolous endeavors, funded by coercive mechanisms. The stories told by Trump and Musk follow the same pattern.
Meanwhile, while emptying the pockets of working people, the DOGE crew are lining their own. Even as Musk claimed that DOGE was slashing government spending, his own firms received billions in government contracts. The State Department plan to purchase armored Teslas may have been rescinded but Musk’s untransparent—and likely unconstitutional—efforts leave open the possibility of self-dealing for himself and other plutocrats. As Dean Baker has observed, “Elon’s chainsaw doesn’t seem to work very well when it might affect the money going to rich people.” Such actions evoke the 1951 charge made by the Union for Democratic Socialism that free enterprise, whose advocates often demanded government austerity, is “all too often is a euphemism for the rights of powerful economic interests to loot the public treasury and the citizens’ pocketbook.”
The final leg of the attack has been to invert the pyramid: to insist that you are not the beneficiary of the cuts to government but its victim. Again, this language has a long history. In December 1947, the New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had risen to prominence atop the publication of his 1940 book, The Case Against the New Deal, addressed a banquet of the Foremost Fifty, an annual gathering of the nation’s top business leaders at a fancy New York hotel. Dewey, who had been the Republican presidential nominee in 1944, and would be again in 1948, greeted the attendees by referring to them as “fellow victims of the New Deal.”
The idea that the wealthy and powerful were victims of the New Deal government—which had saved American capitalism and helped defeat fascism in World War II—was widely mocked. As President Harry S. Truman pointed out following Dewey’s speech, wealthy people had “fared very well under the New Deal,” and in fact had far less reason to complain than ordinary Americans. Today’s self-styled martyrs, though, have managed to make a potent force of their victimhood. Trump, who frequently calls himself a victim, has built a politics around the idea that retribution for the unfair treatment he has received is in the national interest. Musk, as of late, has turned to self-pity. “I have to be careful that I don’t push too hard on the corruption stuff,” he told Rogan. “It’s going to get me killed.” In this story, the people suffering most from DOGE’s actions are not the thousands whose lives have been upended by the cuts—the seniors waiting for hours on the phone with understaffed Social Security offices, the suddenly jobless federal employees, the patients at gutted VA hospitals—but the people wielding the hatchets.
If Trump’s delegitimation of government has its roots in the New Deal, we might look to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who presided over it, for some direction on how to respond. Confident that “no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program,” FDR also recognized, as he explained in a fireside chat to the American people, that critics would demonize it as “Communism,” “regimentation,” and “socialism.” But, as he told a group of Young Democrats in a radio address a few weeks after he signed the Social Security Act into law in August 1935, “the reforms that now cause such concern to the reactionaries of 1935” would soon be accepted “as a matter of course.” Roosevelt was prescient: a recent National Academy of Social Insurance poll found that “Americans are united in support of Social Security.”
In accepting the Democratic nomination for the second time in 1936, Roosevelt gave a masterclass in how to counter the likes of DOGE. He called the kind of people whom Dewey addressed “economic royalists” sparing them no mercy in connecting their greed to the undermining of democracy and the diminution of liberty for ordinary Americans: “The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.” Such people, Roosevelt declared, were “new mercenaries” who “sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.” For a time, that view enjoyed wide endorsement. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower could write, as he did in a letter to his brother, that “should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” The people who supported this, Ike continued, were nothing but “a tiny splinter group.”
Today, as decades of sustained attacks have diminished faith in government, that common sense has been increasingly rolled back. Reflexive opposition to public goods has become conventional wisdom even for some Democratic politicians—a position that leaves them unable to counter the logic at the heart of the DOGE project. On March 9, Meet the Press journalist Kristen Welker interviewed Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin about the Trump-Musk project, asking, “Where are you willing to work with this administration, senator, to find those cuts, to make the government more efficient?” She followed with, “Why didn’t Democrats do more to cut government spending when they were in charge?”—as if austerity should have been the common-sense response to a global pandemic, climate crisis, and huge weaknesses in the nation’s infrastructure. Rather than exposing the ideological assumptions of these questions with a robust defense of government in the public interest, Slotkin answered with a bumbling reply about the need to “live within our means” that largely conceded the premise of Welker’s questions.
As the opposition to MAGA struggles to find its footing—especially, it seems, within the leadership of the Democratic Party—recalling FDR’s description of the danger posed by these “new mercenaries” might help guide the way. To him, the best way to combat that danger was simple: a popular politics of public goods, social insurance, and life-saving regulation, one in accordance with the overwhelming support for Social Security. Then as now, such a politics not only challenges the view, articulated most recently by Trump and Musk, that government expenditures—except those that enrich elites—are a racket. It also underlines how the kind of public goods that only government can provide are not only morally just and enriching, but, as FDR argued, essential in the “war for the survival of democracy.”
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
