My First Social Security Check

 My very first SS check is scheduled to arrive next Wednesday. I don't actually have any real concern that it will be interrupted. I'm pretty sure that's a bridge too far. That said, the conversation about SS and fraud and waste is absurd. It's just a little piece of the crazy puzzle we're trying to slog through right now.

One of the sources that I read had this to say about fraud in SS.

"As a percentage of all payments, improper payments account for 0.84% of the total, the inspector general has found. 

That’s "better than any private insurance company in the nation," and with a lower cost of administration, said Henry J. Aaron, a fellow with the Brookings Institution think tank and a former chair of the Social Security Advisory Board."

But when you put .84% to scale, the SS Payment total for 2025 is expected to be 1.6 trillion dollars. Waste of .84% means that over $13 billion dollars fall legitimately into this category of waste and fraud. That's a lot of money.

The problem is, right leaning media outlets like Fox, or the even The Hill, and certainly less credible sources could lead with a headline that reads, "SS Administration Losses to Waste and Fraud Exceed $13 Billion in 2025." It would generate clicks and increase readership among folks who assume, as many do, that govenment is rife with waste and corruption.

As a comparison, retail establishments accept an average of 1.4% inventory shrinkage from inefficiencies and theft. I'm pretty sure that if they could, they would reduce it. Getting that last 1% or 2% of waste eliminated from a program is a challenge, and expensive. Often, it seems, the cure is more costly than the underlying loss. That seems to be one of the reported circumstances for SS.

So, it seems like the situation is that, yes, we waste billions of dollars in the SS program every year, AND, eliminating that would be very difficult.

To be fair, estimates of government waste (by inspector generals who are now mostly fired) put it at 3%-7%, depending on the program. That is definitely higher than we would prefer. The question is how to best improve on that record. In many cases, I would expect that part of the problem is that congress is unwilling to allocate funding to programs that eliminate waste and fraud.

The DOGE program purports to be about eliminating waste and misappropriations, and I think everyone agrees that this is a worthwhile goal. That said, wouldn't you think it would have been more effective to start by working with the various existing Inspector General offices to see what they were doing and to see if their work could be improved? It is likely that the staff in those federal programs were working with due diligence to eliminate waste and fraud. 

Rather than firing those people, and eliminating their knowledge of opportunities to improve the federal system, DOGE could have worked with them to hold their feet to the fire to really be more agressive. 

But that isn't what happened. Those people are gone and we are starting from scratch reinventing the wheel and arbitrarily firing and canceling programs. 

It's a head scratcher. 

Some have suggested that this is because the actual agenda is not about waste and fraud, but about eliminating spending along ideological lines (not to mention oligarchical agendas.) This seems more likely. Not to be cynical, but...