Wondering If Your Social Security Is Safe? Then Check This Out!

Social Security, and it's solvency, has been a consistent topic for the last 40+ years.  It was created as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal in 1935.  In 1937 Social Security began collecting tax dollars from employers and the checks of their employees.  The first checks rolled out in January of 1940 .

The Stuff We Know About

Concerns about the program began almost immediately as the first recipient, Ida May Fuller of Vermont, had a grand total of $24.75 taken from her paycheck over the course of three years of employment.  Ms. Fuller filed her benefits claim in November of 1939.  Her first check was for $22.54 and Ida May's total compensation from SSI was almost $23,000 at the time of her death in 1975.  Those concerns only grew over time.

Things didn't ease up in 1981 when Congress passed a law that permitted "borrowing" between three government trust funds, with Social Security one of those funds.  It was supposed to be temporary.  In 1983 Congress again stepped to the plate and lengthened the "borrowing" until 1987.  The reason why alarms continue to sound is the amount of money the government "owes" to the fund from all of the "borrowing" is estimated to be around $1.7 trillion.

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Is There Fraud Within Social Security?

One of Donald Trump's promises on the campaign trail was to root out instances of financial waste and fraud in the federal government.  To that end DOGE was created, and led by multi-faceted entrepreneur Elon Musk, to fulfill that promise.  Few agencies has been immune from scrutiny, and now Social Security has come under the DOGE microscope.

Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.

COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.

They also went on to say that some time ago the agency stopped sending checks to anyone over the age of 115.  It doesn't seem conclusive as to active fraud in Social Security.  Maybe there is and it hasn't been uncovered yet, and then again, maybe there isn't any at all.  The first step to restoring faith in the fund's solvency is for the government to address the money borrowed and the $4.1 trillion estimated shortfall over the next decade and $23 trillion in the next 75 years.