Musk floats falsehoods about Social Security, immigrants as DOGE seeks changes

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Elon Musk presented the fact that some noncitizens have Social Security numbers as shocking. But that’s how it’s supposed to work. And it doesn’t let them vote.

By Justine McDaniel and Lisa Rein

Elon Musk has pushed false claims that millions of dead people are collecting Social Security benefits. Now he’s peddling another specious story about the program: that immigrants are being given Social Security cards too freely, then collecting benefits and voting.

At a town hall-style event in Wisconsin on Sunday night, Musk and close ally Antonio Gracias — whom Musk has tapped to help with the U.S. DOGE Service’s efforts to make cuts at the Social Security Administration — displayed a bar chart that Gracias said showed a large increase in noncitizens getting Social Security numbers.

“This is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said, as people in the audience lifted their phones to photograph the screen.

“This literally blew us away,” Gracias added.

Immigrants who are legally authorized to work in the United States do in fact receive Social Security numbers. That’s how the system is designed. The Social Security Act requires numbers be assigned promptly to immigrants who are legally in the country to work.

But Musk and Gracias presented the fact that some noncitizens have Social Security numbers as shocking, characterizing it as something they had stumbled upon and were exposing, with Gracias claiming federal employees who had shared the data had taken a “risk” to do so.

The numbers on Musk’s screen appeared to come from a government program that was set up to streamline the process through which immigrants get their Social Security numbers. A September 2023 government audit found that the Social Security Administration correctly processed noncitizens’ cases 99.8 percent of the time in that program and a related one.

“There’s no fraud here,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the conservative Cato Institute. The increase in the number of noncitizens entering the Social Security system, he said, had been predicted based on the increase in asylum seekers in the past few years.

The presentation by the two men appeared to be the latest step in Musk’s effort to undermine Americans’ confidence in Social Security by making unsupported claims of problems with the system.

Musk and Gracias claimed that undocumented immigrants are getting payments from Social Security, when in reality, they often help finance the system without being able to collect benefits of their own. Undocumented immigrants cannot collect Social Security, and those who pay into Social Security give billions annually — in 2022, an estimated $25 billion.

Undocumented immigrants who do not have legal work authorization do not get Social Security numbers. They must apply for an Individual Tax Identification Number, which they use to pay taxes while working without lawful status.

Musk and Gracias also inaccurately alleged some immigrants were receiving “max pay” in benefits, which is not a concept that exists in Social Security.

And they made claims of voter fraud by noncitizens that echo debunked theories from President Donald Trump and his allies.

In reality, having a Social Security card does not indicate anything about whether someone is receiving benefits, nor does it mean someone is registered to vote. Noncitizens’ Social Security cards are clearly labeled as valid for work only and cannot be used to register to vote.

“They have just done this over and over again on Social Security, just coming up with these wild claims that bear no resemblance to the truth,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The Wisconsin event Sunday was part of Musk’s effort to influence the state Supreme Court race there. But for more than 10 minutes, he and Gracias focused on the noncitizen Social Security issue.

“You may have heard that we found 20 million dead people marked as alive in the Social Security database,” Musk said, “... and then you’ll notice there’s a strange trend here, where how many Social Security numbers were issued” to noncitizens.

The numbers displayed by Musk and Gracias were attributed on the screen to a Social Security program called Enumeration Beyond Entry. They showed more than 590,000 noncitizens getting Social Security numbers in fiscal year 2022, more than 964,000 in 2023 and more than 2 million in 2024.

Most people in the United States are given Social Security numbers, or are enumerated, at birth. States automatically share birth information with the Social Security Administration, which then issues Social Security cards to newborns.

The Enumeration Beyond Entry process parallels that one: When an immigrant receives work authorization, a green card or naturalization — after going through the proper processes with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including proving their identity — USCIS shares their information with the Social Security Administration, which then issues a Social Security number and card by mail. Some 2.9 million applications for cards were processed that way in fiscal year 2024.

Musk and Gracias inaccurately suggested that the process delivers Social Security cards without proof of identity, despite the fact that USCIS verifies applicants.

They “completely misrepresent[ed]” the program, Romig said.

“There was a lot of chat in that conversation between Gracias and Musk about playing by the rules. This is how you play by the rules: You get work authorization and you get assigned a Social Security number so you can pay into the program,” she said.

Before Musk and Gracias publicly highlighted the Enumeration Beyond Entry program, the Trump administration had moved to dismantle it. Last week, the Social Security Administration rolled out an experimental new policy that jettisons the data exchange between USCIS and Social Security, at least temporarily.

The Trump administration and DOGE — which stands for Department of Government Efficiency — concluded that the data-sharing system ran the risk that the government would send cards to immigrants who are not authorized to receive them.

Noncitizens and newly naturalized citizens are now required to make an appointment with a local field office to obtain their cards. The administration plans to test this approach for 90 days, then revisit the policy.

Even the 90-day pause in data-sharing, however, poses “legal risks” that the agency could be in violation of the Social Security Act’s requirement to promptly assign numbers to working immigrants, according to a legal assessment conducted by Stephen Evangelista, a top lawyer for Social Security, that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Evangelista also wrote that the decision to direct immigrants and new citizens to field offices may be construed as “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, since the reasons are not documented with a “reasonable factual basis.”

The legal assessment also predicted that diverting immigrants and new citizens to field offices will cause “customer confusion” and additional burden on local workers who already are seeing a surge in foot traffic in response to other changes the agency is making to fight alleged fraud. The assessment estimates new costs as well — the administrative cost of a mailed Social Security card is $8 through the data-sharing agreement vs. $51,000 if it’s obtained at a field office.

There are other potential financial implications: If the noncitizens were not part of the system while working in the United States, it would be detrimental to Social Security’s finances, Bier said, because the immigrants pay into Social Security.

Musk and Gracias put forth other murky claims that painted a dark picture of the nation’s public benefit system. Gracias claimed that the Social Security system itself is creating an extraordinary “human tragedy” of human trafficking.

He argued that the system incentivizes immigrants to come to the United States and that they pay people whom Gracias characterized as human traffickers to help them cross the border.

“People don’t know and Americans need to know, that’s why I’m here,” Gracias said. “Human traffickers made $13 [billion] to $15 billion off of this.”

In fact, other factors such as leaving difficult circumstances in their home countries, seeking better work opportunities or reuniting with family members often compel immigration.

Social Security has “absolutely nothing to do with what’s motivating people,” Bier said.

And under the legal definition, intermediaries who take people across the border are taking part in human smuggling rather than human trafficking, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trafficking, as defined by U.S. law, is laboring under the conditions of force, fraud or coercion.

“These claims make no sense,” said Denise Brennan, a professor of anthropology at Georgetown University who has written on trafficking and border policing. “They are conflating or confusing smuggling with human trafficking.”

She said Gracias and Musk’s argument was rooted in misinformation and appeared to be part of the Trump administration’s broader strategy to argue against protections for migrants — in this case, by “using the panics around human trafficking” to reach their audience.

Musk also returned to a conspiracy theory that aligns with the right-wing extremist “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that liberals have a plan to “replace” native-born Americans with immigrants.

He has recently connected the idea to Social Security, claiming that Democrats are opposed to DOGE’s work because they don’t want the government to “turn off the payments to illegals.”

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