When President-elect Donald Trump appointed Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), speculation has been rife about which programs might face cuts. The pair pledged to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, with Social Security emerging as a potential target. Some Republicans within the DOGE Caucus hinted that cuts to Social Security are likely.

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman explains why DOGE’s proposed cuts are unrealistic and breaks down what he describes as a familiar Republican strategy to exaggerate the problems with Social Security.

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

The way they do it with Social Security is they refuse to make the small tweaks that would really improve the health of Social Security, and then, by virtue of that, they point to it and they say it’s not working.

Now the classic is always: “The Social Security Trust Fund is going to run out.” The reality is that if nothing is done in a decade, Social Security would only be able to pay out roughly 80% of the benefits that it is targeting to pay out. That’s if you do absolutely nothing — not exactly the crisis they are making it out to be.

And we have some really easy fixes. One such fix is you raise the cap a little bit on Social Security earnings. Right now, if you make $160,000 a year, you pay into Social Security on all of your salary. If you make $1 million a year, you pay into Social Security only on your first $160,000 of salary. If you make $100 million a year, you pay into Social Security only on your first 160,000 of salary. You see where I’m going. We don’t have to uncap it. If we simply said, you’re now going to pay in on your first 250 [thousand] in earnings, that alone solves the problem.

So part of it is, it’s not really the problem that they claim it is. Part of it is they’re trying to make it a worse problem, and then what they come around with is, you know, how do we solve this? We privatize, we give fees to Wall Street. We take the money and put it in the stock market in a way that is far riskier for the people expecting and counting on these benefits.