To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about some types of overpayments -- such as overpayments to Medicare Advantage providers. But at the individual level, it is mostly the administrative complexity of our system that creates the conditions for payment errors, rather than negligence or malfeasance on the part of the agencies or beneficiaries. The more complex the eligibility requirements, the more likely it is that someone will make a mistake on a form. In 2023, the payment error rate in the heavily means-tested SSI program (9.2 percent) was much higher than that of the relatively simpler SSDI and old-age Social Security programs (0.66 percent). A comprehensive solution would need to include simplifying our welfare state and making it more universal (cutting the red tape, if you will), but if I were to guess, Musk is probably not so amenable to that idea.

By design, then, the metric of improper payments primarily measures the errors in programs for poor Americans rather than any errors that benefit the rich, since our inefficient system of payments is subject to so much means testing. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a program with one of the highest rates of improper payments, but as the center-right Tax Foundation has noted, this is almost entirely due to program design rather than IRS inaction. By contrast, the improper payments total does not include the roughly $150 billion of evaded taxes that we give to the wealthy annually.

Unfortunately, implementing Musk's playbook on overpayments is something that the Trump administration could do without Congress, unlike the also-concerning cuts to Medicaid and SNAP floated by influential Republicans. The administration could also opt to crack down on waste by going after wealthy tax cheats, or not having the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dole out as many $1 fines as it did under the first Trump administration, but that seems unlikely. If Trump and Musk follow through on the half-baked idea to go after improper payments, we know who will actually suffer, and it won't be the billionaires.