During a town hall on Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) was asked about alleged fraudulent spending of Social Security in the Trump Administration.
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00:00Come over here, and I'm going to reiterate because we are running out of time.
00:03Quick questions, quick answers from you guys, if we can.
00:07Hello. So a report by the Social Security Administration Inspector General's office last August found that over $72 billion between fiscal years 2015 and 2022 had been issued in money that was not supposed to go out to Social Security Administration.
00:28The report also stated that there were dozens of suggestions, but none were implemented.
00:36An additional report in 2021 found that 24,000 recipients received nearly $300 million, and they were already deceased.
00:47So, which is a terrible thing. So my question is, with nearly 30 years of—it's a terrible thing. People need their social security.
00:56So, therefore, with nearly 30 years of collective public service, why have none of you ever looked at waste, fraud, and abuse, or policies that would ensure social security benefits get to actual living people who need it most?
01:10I think I would dispute the facts that you asserted.
01:18I did a virtual town hall recently with Martin O'Malley, who ran social security and brought a lot of initiative and smarts to looking at social security to make it more efficient, to get phone calls answered more quickly.
01:40I think, frankly, fraud in social security is less than 1%. It's really not a thing.
01:46And people looked at why this situation that President Trump described when he came over to speak to Congress about people living to be as old as Methuselah and still getting benefits.
02:04It turns out that wasn't true. It turns out that there is a default date that they sometimes put in in social security when they don't know the actual date, and it's the default date that's the trigger, so you can go and find them when you need to correct the record.
02:26And so these people who were 300 years old weren't 300 years old. It was the default date that was being used.
02:32I trust Martin O'Malley on this, former governor of Maryland, very respected individual, ran the social administration very well, and so I just, I'm afraid I dispute your premise, sir.