Fox’s Steve Doocy and DOGE’s Antonio Gracias fearmonger over a program started by Trump in 2017, which granted non-citizens Social Security numbers.
Doocy opened the segment on this Wednesday’s Fox & Friends showing a portion of a presentation given by Elon Musk and Gracias in Wisconsin this past Sunday, where they displayed a supposedly “mind blowing” chart showing the number of immigrants who received Social Security numbers, but, as Rolling Stone reported, there were some very crucial details they omitted:
The chart showed that noncitizens have increasingly been granted Social Security numbers, not benefits, although Musk and Antonio Gracias, a staffer with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did not make that distinction. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security,” said Gracias, a Musk ally and head of a private equity firm.
Moreover, the program to expedite the issuing of Social Security numbers to legal immigrants — the program they were specifically decrying — began during the first Trump administration.
Musk and Gracias naturally didn’t mention that, either.
The federal program to automatically mail Social Security cards to legal immigrants — called Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE) — began while Donald Trump was in office in 2017, according to a 2019 Social Security Administration (SSA) inspector general’s report.
Steve Doocy and Antonio Gracias did their best to conflate immigrants receiving benefits such as Medicaid, which is legal, with people receiving Social Security, and also spread the already debunked lie that there are 150 year olds receiving Social Security benefits.
The pair also ranted about noncitizens being allowed to vote, even though, as Doocy acknowledged, in many states they’re allowed to vote in local elections, not federal elections, but that didn’t stop them both from pretending there are large numbers of immigrants who are not citizens voting in federal elections.
DOOCY: That’s a jaw dropping number. Where did all those people come from?
GRACIAS: Well, it made my drop drop too when I saw it. You know, we were in Social Security looking for fraud, waste and abuse and to do that, we actually looked at the enumeration system, the system by which people get numbers in America, and we found that there were just about 5 plus million of them that came to the country as illegals, were giving various forms of parole or allowed in the country, and they got through an automatic system, Social Security numbers, to get into our benefit systems.
And we tracked that through and found that they were on the benefit programs, and just because we were curious we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls and we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.
DOOCY: That’s, that’s crazy because you cannot vote in a federal election, but I think in certain local elections you can, but you know, once, once you get a Social Security number, that helps you do a lot of stuff.
I know Antonio, part of this started with a program from I think 2017 that got started, where if people came into the country and they were authorized to work, they would automatically give them a number, but you know, Elon was talking a little bit about how 400,000 Social Security numbers were stolen. It was one person. What can you tell us about that?
GRACIAS: You know that’s an ongoing investigation, so I don’t know how much I can tell you, but we did find as we looked through the programs and a particular employee that had actually sent themselves Social Security numbers through their email for reasons we don’t understand, but clearly nefarious.
DOOCY: Yeah, it does sound like it. So let me ask you this, Antonio. Have you figured out, you, you saw these millions of people, non-citizens, on the Social Security rolls. Did they get benefits?
GRACIAS: Yes, we actually tracked them through the benefit programs. We found them in virtually all the benefit programs, and one statistic for you is we found 1.3 million of them on Medicare.
DOOCY: Wow. So, so what’s going to happen to those people?
GRACIAS: Look, we referred people that were registered to vote, it’s a federal crime, and people that voted to ICE, to DHS and to the DOJ.
They’ve committed to prosecute, and I think it’s super important to point out here that none of this would have happened without President Trump.
I mean, President Trump had the courage to allow us to go across databases. He signed an executive order. It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk to each other. That allowed us to connect all this data, to find these people across the system across the benefit system all the way to the voting records, it really took a lot of courage.
DOOCY: Antonio, you know, you’re a big shot business guy. You know what you’re doing in your business. When you went in, I can’t think of the last time somebody essentially audited the Social Security Administration aside from the federal government.
But you know, they’ve got all these kind of antiquated crazy rules like I, I know you uncovered millions of people over the age of 120 and just recently kicked them off the rolls, right?
GRACIAS: Yes, that’s correct. We did an audit of the entire system, enumeration system, for security. And look, the reality is the people in the government know this. There are many, very good people that are helping us. We couldn’t have found this stuff without them. We need them to point us in the right direction and then we looked at the data. So you know, if you ask people the right questions, they will give you the answers and they want to help.
DOOCY: Yeah, Antonio, exit question for you. Given all of the abuses you’ve already found and these people who are getting federal benefits who should not, do you have a price tag on how much you guys are saving the American taxpayer just from Social Security?
GRACIAS: I mean, it’s in the billions, you know, you, you, you saw the, the fraud on the phone lines itself. That was about $1.5 and I would guess it’s so secure already we’re north of 10 billion dollars.
DOOCY: OK, well, the meter’s running.
TNR has more on the fuzzy accounting DOGE has been using to make it harder to track all of their savings lies.