Frank Bisignano, President Trump's nominee to run the Social Security Administration, testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday about his plans for the agency.
Yahoo Finance Washington Correspondent Ben Werschkul and Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Kerry Hannon join Wealth host Brad Smith to discuss President Trump's mixed messages on Social Security.
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Ben, let's start with the policy. What are some of Trump's priorities for Social Security?
Thanks for having me. Good to be with you. So, on the campaign trail, Trump offered a bit of a mixed message on Social Security. He was the candidate who was not going to touch Social Security, but he was also the candidate who's going to save it. So that's, we can get into kind of why that's a contradiction. Since the election, as everyone knows, he's very much touched it. Elon Musk, in particular, and his Dojo efforts have really integrated themselves into the Social Security system and made a lot of changes on things like phone service, field offices. They're trying to, in the name of government efficiency. The current acting commissioner is a guy named Leland Dudek, who has said that he's talked about even shutting down some agency functions as he stands off with judges on a bunch of legal issues. Frank, as you know, as the clip you played there, has tried to offer a kind of more calming message so far today here in front of the Senate Finance Committee. He's presented himself as an efficiency expert, but also a customer service expert. His background is in payments. So he's trying to kind of offer a message that he doesn't want, he wants the phone services to continue, which is a major issue for Social Security recipients, even as we're sort of seeing all these changes there. The hearing is ongoing, so that's what his message has been so far.
And Carrie, Dojo head Elon Musk has repeatedly accused Social Security of widespread fraud. So what are the source of those concerns?
Yeah, you know, Brad, he has been obsessed with this idea that dead people are getting social security payments, which is simply, all of the experts I have spoken to say this is absolutely untrue. There's absolutely no, uh, any facts to back this up. There's a very tiny percentage of Americans who are over 100 who do get Social Security payments, maybe 0.1%. It's a very tiny percentage. And he seems to have, what I'm hearing is that he's completely misread the data systems and his team in social security. There's several different computer systems that work there that they're reading numbers from one database that is just not, these are numbers that they're pulling from people who had social security accounts from the beginning of time. So there are like 500 million people have had unique social security numbers. And because of when they passed away, when they died, their record of death was not recorded because there weren't electronic records back then. So there's a confusion over the data that they're misreading these. And in fact, that's not where there is obviously some things, some missteps that do happen, but the majority of those are people who are overpaid based on inaccurate work records and so forth. And that has been being taken care of. But this material is reviewed and over and over again, and the experts I speak to say that this is completely outlandish what he says.
