Elon Musk and the racial politics of Social Security

He messes with a popular benefit at his peril

Mar 11, 2025

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DOGE seems to be coming for Social Security, the U.S. retirement benefits program which has existed since 1935 and which covers nearly all people in paid employment in the country.

In recent weeks, staff from DOGE have settled into the Social Security Administration. They’ve announced steep staff cuts and accessed sensitive data. They say they’re looking for fraud. They may also be trying to figure out ways to create apps and websites which help Americans better access their benefits, which apparently is their answer to the “PR crisis” that they perceive DOGE to be facing.

There are at least three big problems with what DOGE is doing to Social Security. The first is that the level of fraud in Social Security is not that high - certainly not high enough to justify critical damage to the agency’s systems to root it out. The second is that if you actually want to root out fraud and help Americans access their benefits in a more convenient fashion, it makes no sense to be cutting staff at the agencies you want to improve and replacing them with a bunch of 20-year-olds who know nothing about the systems.

The third problem is a much bigger one, which is that agency veterans are warning that job cuts and interference with computer networks may eventually cause a system crash and for people to fail to receive their benefits.

To understand just how catastrophic this would be, you have to understand something about the history of Social Security. The benefit is currently received by about 70 million people, and Social Security payments make up about 5% of U.S. GDP. The majority of seniors rely on it to make ends meet, and the majority of working-age Americans one day will.

All of this means that Social Security is a key economic pillar of the United States, providing retirees with security and boosting consumer spending throughout the economy. It has never missed a payment, but if its regular delivery started to be called into question, it could have a knock-on effect on economic confidence - if only because it would show that the U.S. government was no longer competent enough to execute its basic functions.

Social Security is also - and I hope you’re listening to this part, Elon - incredibly popular.

The politics of welfare in the United States is different to that in most other advanced democracies, with widespread public acceptance of a fairly stingy welfare state. The United States has exceptionally high levels of child poverty and many citizens without health insurance. Political support for redistribution remains low. As part of the pandemic economic stimulus of 2021, Congress created a temporary payments system which reduced child poverty by 75%, probably the greatest reduction in history. Yet just a few months later, with the economic emergency of the pandemic passing, Congress failed to make the system permanent - and it did so without much debate.

Historically, a great deal of opposition to expanding welfare has been tied to race. Since before Ronald Reagan popularized the term “welfare queen” in 1976, white Americans have perceived many welfare programs to represent unjust giveaways to racial minorities. Barack Obama’s healthcare reform of 2010 also starkly polarized Americans along racial lines, with conservative whites coming to see it as just another unfair piece of affirmative action. Research by the political scientist Michael Tesler has shown that racial resentment and holding anti-black stereotypes significantly increased the chances that a white person would oppose Obamacare, and this opposition in turn caused the reform to be watered down.

Social Security, on the other hand, has long been viewed differently. Rather than being a product of the civil rights era or more recent decades, it dates from the New Deal of the 1930s. In fact, Social Security initially excluded agricultural and domestic workers, meaning that most African-Americans were ineligible for it until the exclusion was repealed in the 1950s. It is hence a program solidly rooted in providing for the white majority. To this day, whites benefit disproportionately from it because they tend to live longer and marry at higher rates, both of which result in receiving greater benefits. The program remains overwhelmingly popular among all Americans.

The popularity of Social Security has been a key constraint on modern right-wing attempts to cut the federal budget. A Republican Party which relies on the votes of older Americans has found it predictably difficult to cut the benefits of older Americans. Even the Tea Party movement of the early 2010s (remember those guys?), whose main stated goal was to cut spending, mostly supported keeping Social Security in place. And no wonder - most of them lived in households which received it.

This hypocrisy in attitudes towards welfare can be explained by the difference people perceive between “deserving” and “undeserving” welfare recipients. Social Security, as a program that people pay into their whole life and which serves the white, middle-class majority. Its recipients are hence “deserving”, whereas those of other forms of welfare are “undeserving”.

On some level, Donald Trump understands this. When he took over the Republican Party in 2016, he banished talk of altering, privatizing or reducing Social Security payments. It was one of the things that allowed him to take over the party and then win two elections.

But does Elon Musk understand it? It appears that he might not, and as a result he is courting a political backlash unlike anything he has so far experienced. In fact, if DOGE messes too much with Social Security, it might be the last mistake that the office ever makes.