Dead People Aren't Bankrupting Us

Plus: Democrat disruptions, Columbia University scrutinized by the feds, and more...

Last night, Trump held his State of the Union that was technically not the State of the Union (because the union purportedly hasn't been updated enough during a president's first term to qualify), but rather a joint address to Congress.

It was exactly what you'd expect. Trump emphasized border security and law enforcement, the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency—at one point questionably touting all the fraud that he implies is partially responsible for the Social Security program being in such dire fiscal straits—and the importance of ending the war in Ukraine. He repeatedly came back to his own popularity and his mandate to make sweeping changes. He talked up his executive orders, including the one emphasizing that there are two genders and that the Department of Education will slash funding for schools that go against that message. He brought out a girl who had been subjected to deepfake pornography. He very cutely gave DJ Daniel, a little boy who loves the police and is suffering from brain cancer, an honorary position in the Secret Service. He talked about the murders of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray at the hands of Tren de Aragua gang members and about how he had designated cartels as "foreign terrorist organizations."

Early in the speech, Texas Rep. Al Green, a Democrat, stood up and shouted, "You have no mandate to cut Medicaid," before being ejected from the chamber. Democrats protested with silly little Fogo de Chão paddles begging to be memed, and there was a fair amount of right-wing consternation at their seeming refusal to stand or clap during the sweet DJ Daniel moment.

Crazy, untrue stuff about Social Security fraud: "Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119. I don't know any of them. I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly," said Trump, before continuing: "3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.… 1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old. We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby," Trump concluded, letting the camera pan to head of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

OK, so that last line was funny. (Also, missed opportunity to mock Joe Biden for his age, but I digress.) But these stats just aren't true.

"Part of the confusion comes from Social Security's software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type," reported the Associated Press last month in response to DOGE reports about improper payments. "This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago." (The agency auto-stops payments to those older than 115.) The Social Security Administration's inspector general has admitted as much: The agency is really struggling to figure out how to "properly annotate death information in its database" per the A.P., and there are nearly 20 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 and earlier who haven't been marked as dead. But Trump is conflating "not marked as dead in a database" with "received benefits"—an absolutely wild leap we have no evidence to support. In fact, the July 2023 report from the inspector general notes that "almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments."

Technically, when Trump touts those numbers, he's saying that government databases list these people, which is true; he goes on to say "and money is being paid to many of them," which is not true. But the real problem here is that Trump (and DOGE head Elon Musk before him) overstating the scope of the fraud leads people to believe that Social Security reform won't involve hard tradeoffs, but that it's just a matter of stamping out rampant abuse and engaging in a thorough audit; that's not true.

TLDR: Dead people aren't bankrupting us; it's the living people who refuse to tackle entitlement reform who are the problem!

Anyway, the little Social Security chunk is representative of so much of the problem with DOGE: It's correct that there are numerous examples of government waste—fraud that never gets rooted out, government systems that are inefficient, government employees who barely do their jobs, programs that should have never been funded with taxpayer dollars in the first place, "national security" and "soft power" justifications being used for all manner of barely related priorities. But flubbing the specifics, and introducing untrue talking points into the discourse, just discredits those of us who advocate for excising the waste.

Lip service paid to balancing the budget: "In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget," Trump said later. "We are going to balance it. With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million, we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It's like the green card but better and more sophisticated." The fact that Trump pivoted so quickly to the gold card—something unlikely to make a dent in the budget—shows how seriously he takes his own purported goal.

"Trump's promise to balance the federal budget was a lie, and everyone in the room knew it," writes Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward in The New York Times. "In the coming days, the people in that room will probably pass a continuing resolution that utterly fails to take seriously the real drivers of the deficit: entitlements, military spending and debt service."

The hypocrisy of the rest of the room was on full display, too, notes Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), one of the only members of Congress with actual principles to which he adheres:

Congress just stood up and applauded DOGE for exposed wasteful and fraudulent programs that Congress itself funded… and plans to fund in the coming CR.

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 5, 2025

Still, Trump continued with things that are directionally correct, albeit with flubbed specifics. "For nearly 100 years, the federal bureaucracy has grown until it has crushed our freedoms, ballooned our deficits and held back America's potential in every possible way," said Trump at one point. "The nation founded by pioneers and risk-takers now drowns under millions and millions of pages of regulations and debt: Approvals that should take 10 days to get instead take 10 years, 15 years and even 20 years before you rejected." True! Good to hear from the president! Libertarians have been on this for a while. But he will need to devote time, man power, and precision to the specifics if he wants to make federal government reform lasting and substantial.

When he turned to the Ukraine war, more than 100 minutes through the speech, he asked: "Do you want to keep it going for another five years?" but framed it simplistically, as if it's merely a question of people dying or not, with no mention of security guarantees or whether Vladimir Putin will need to give anything up or face any consequences if the U.S. brokers a deal.

If only it were all so easy. If only entitlement reform were as easy as going into government databases and culling all the people born in 1860 who haven't been marked as dead yet. If only solving violent crime were as easy as designating cartels as terrorist organizations. If only balancing the budget was as easy as selling immigration rights to the high bidders. It's just not. Trump should be given some credit for understanding the issue, to some degree, but only partial credit since he hasn't demonstrated he actually has the follow-through to make meaningful, proper reform happen.

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Scenes from New York: The Trump administration announced Monday night that they will be conducting a comprehensive review of all the federal grants received by Columbia University, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration. This is necessary, the administration says, "given Columbia's ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students."

Columbia receives more than $5 billion in federal grants and $51.4 million in contracts with the federal government, which seems like…a poor use of taxpayer dollars. Given the size of its endowment, you could make the case that the university can stand on its own feet via private support.

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QUICK HITS

• It's Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I am abstaining from using naughty and foul language for the duration of the season. If Roundup appears notably absent of colorful language when something terrible happens, know that I am cursing in my head. Good mortality-posting from Tim Carney, if you want to get your head in the Lent game.
• "President Donald Trump will 'probably' announce a compromise with Canada and Mexico as early as Wednesday, which could scale back his new 25% tariffs on top U.S trading partners, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said," reports CNBC.
• Really important thread on how Trump is declaring national emergencies to circumvent usual legal processes that would be necessary to get approval for imposing tariffs:

To get around the normal legal process for imposing tariffs on Canada & Mexico, Trump declared national emergencies and invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Another day, another executive action, another abuse of power. 1/15

— Elizabeth Goitein (@LizaGoitein) March 4, 2025

• Honestly good advice:

So, I know I sound like I'm concern trolling, but I genuinely think it'd be better for Ds to act like totally normal people who can just listen to a speech and object to parts of it within normal limits.

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 5, 2025