Former President Joe Biden returned to the national spotlight to assail his successor for endangering the Social Security payments relied on by millions of Americans.
President Donald Trump’s administration is making people worried “for the first and only time in history that their Social Security benefits may be disrupted,” Biden told a disability-rights group on Tuesday in Chicago in his first major speech since leaving office in January.
“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction” he said. “They’ve taken a hatchet to the Social Security Administration.”
Social Security has been engulfed in turmoil since becoming a target of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency despite pledges by Trump to safeguard benefits. The $1.5 trillion-a-year program represents about a fifth of the federal budget, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“President Trump has consistently promised to protect Social Security, and this administration is committed to keeping that promise,” said Liz Huston, a spokeswoman for the White House. “Joe Biden had four years to strengthen Social Security — instead, he endangered the entire program by flooding our country with millions of illegal immigrants.”
Musk has deployed DOGE staffers to the agency in his effort to identify waste and abuse in the government, cutting jobs and making policy changes. The data doesn’t support claims of widespread fraud: from 2015 through 2022, Social Security estimated that it made almost $72 billion in improper payments — less than 1% of benefits paid, according to an inspector general report last year.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier Tuesday that Trump will sign a memorandum aimed at aimed at curbing fraud in Social Security programs. She said the directive would seek to restrict undocumented immigrants from accessing Social Security retirement benefits, something that is already prohibited by law.
Biden didn’t mention Trump or Musk by name in his remarks at the Chicago event, which was sponsored by ACRD, or Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled. But the 82-year-old former president referred to recent comments by Musk, the world’s richest man, who called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme.”
“A Ponzi scheme?” Biden asked. “What the hell are they talking about? People earned these benefits.”
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