Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) dug into Elon Musk on Monday over the billionaire’s attempts to undermine benefit programs like Social Security with his talks of wasteful spending in the federal government.
“Why do you make it look like it’s a broken, dysfunctional system? The reason is to get people to lose faith in the system and then you can give it over to Wall Street,” said Sanders in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
His criticism comes after Musk, in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow, entertained cuts to government “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The billionaire told Kudlow that there’s been “waste and fraud in entitlement spending” and referred to it as the “big one to eliminate” in the federal budget.
Sanders, in his interview with Cooper, turned to plans to cut up to half of the Social Security Administration’s workforce amid Musk’s cost-cutting crusade with the nonofficial Department of Government Efficiency.
“That would be a disaster,” said Sanders, who added that millions of people will call to ask about their benefits only to not “get an answer.”
“So if you ask me, I think this is a prelude not only to cutting benefits but to privatizing Social Security itself. I think that’s in the back of their mind, if you make the system dysfunctional, why would anybody want to support it?”
Musk, elsewhere in his Fox Business Network appearance, that Democrats use government entitlements as a “mechanism” to “attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them” to become voters.
President Donald Trump has recently vowed — and repeatedly promised on the campaign trail — that he wouldn’t touch benefits like Social Security or Medicare amid spending cuts.
Musk and Trump have pushed the false, debunked claim that millions of dead people are benefiting from Social Security.
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Sanders, earlier in his interview with Cooper, noted that the world’s richest man has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and that the SSA is currently understaffed, sparking calls from constituents as tens of thousands of Americans are estimated to have died while waiting for a decision on benefits.