Category: Fact Check

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In his first speech since leaving office, former President Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and other changes at the Social Security Administration, but he made several misleading claims in the process.

• Biden made the misleading claim that during his presidency some Republicans “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years … unless reauthorized by the Congress.” A 2022 proposal from Sen. Rick Scott called for sunsetting all federal programs after five years, unless Congress extended them. But Scott said he wanted to “fix,” not end, Social Security, and a later proposal specifically exempted Social Security.

• The former president claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age.” The conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed gradually raising the full retirement age for years, but that hasn’t gained enough support in Congress, even among Republicans.

• Biden said the Social Security Administration had its “lowest staffing levels in 50 years” when he took office as president. He failed to mention that staffing ended up even lower his last year in office.

• He said that staffing cuts and other changes under the Trump administration had caused concern that “Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” It’s true that experts have shared that concern over possible administrative errors. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

Biden spoke April 15 in Chicago at the Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled conference.

Old Chestnut on Letting Social Security Expire

Biden repeated a familiar talking point in misleadingly claiming that during his presidency some Republicans in Congress “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years. That was the proposal, let it expire every five years unless reauthorized by the Congress.”

That’s a reference to a 2022 policy proposal, called “An 11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” from Republican Sen. Rick Scott to sunset all federal programs after five years, unless Congress voted to extend them. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott’s plan said. But there was never any serious effort to implement that policy, especially as it pertains to Social Security.

Scott, who then was the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said at the time that he didn’t want to sunset those programs — and he didn’t know anyone who did — but rather he wanted to “review,” “fix” and “preserve” them so that they are financially solvent for the long term. Shortly after Scott introduced his plan, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that a bill sunsetting Social Security (and Medicare) in five years “will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.”

By the following year, Scott had revised the language in his plan to specifically exclude Social Security and Medicare, and other programs. “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services,” the 2023 version of Scott’s plan said.

Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of that proposal, particularly during the 2022 midterms, making false and misleading claims about Republicans wanting to “end” these popular programs, as we’ve written. In his remarks in Chicago, Biden said this five-year-expiration plan was part of the “constant threat” his administration faced from Republicans who wanted to “cut and gut Social Security.” But there was no threat of Social Security being terminated, as Scott has made clear.

Retirement Age

Biden misleadingly claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age as well. Now, that might not be a hardship for someone working in a comfortable job, but if you’re on your feet all day, you’re doing manual labor all day, you’re working with a disability, it’s a very different matter.”

As we wrote when Biden made a similar claim in his reelection announcement in 2023, the conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed budgets for years that have included gradually increasing the full retirement age, to either 69 or 70, and indexing it after that for life expectancy. The “full retirement age,” when a beneficiary can get full benefit payments, is age 66 to 67, depending on the beneficiary’s birth year. (Early retirement, with reduced Social Security benefit payments, is available starting at age 62.)

The most recent RSC proposal, for fiscal 2025, said it would “make modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy.”

But raising the retirement age has failed to attract enough support in Congress, even among Republicans. In late December, Sen. Rand Paul introduced an amendment to raise the full retirement age, and it garnered just three “yes” votes.

Legislators will need to take some action in the near future if they want the program to continue to pay all of its promised benefits, and it’s possible that raising the retirement age, or raising taxes, will be under discussion. The trust fund for retirees’ and survivors’ benefits is expected to be depleted in 2033, at which point SSA will only be able to pay 79% of benefits, according to the Social Security trustees’ latest estimate.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said he “will not raise the retirement age by one day” and wouldn’t cut “one penny” from Social Security. Since taking office, he has said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud,” Trump said in a February interview.

More to the Story on Staffing Level

The former president said: “When we came into office, the Social Security Administration had its lowest staffing. … Lowest staffing levels in 50 years. And demand was going through the roof because of my generation, the Baby Boomer generation, reaching the retirement age.” He didn’t say anything more about a change in SSA staffing during his administration, but it’s worth noting that the number of full-time staffers was even lower his last year in office.

Full-time staffing at the SSA was 58,952 in fiscal year 2021, which began nearly four months before Biden took office. That was the lowest dating back to at least 1995, the earliest year in an SSA table on staffing levels. A report from the Associated Press from last year indicates that it was also probably the lowest level since the early 1970s.

But the total full-time staff was 57,148 in fiscal 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, 2024. The peak under Biden was 60,026 in fiscal 2023.

Under Trump, the SSA announced in February it will cut 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and the Washington Post has reported that thousands more in reductions are planned.  

Misleading Claims on the Threat to Monthly Benefits

Biden criticized the Trump administration for staffing cuts, website crashes and computer glitches at the Social Security Administration that the former president said had left beneficiaries “genuinely concerned for the first time in history, for the first and only time in history, that Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” As we’ve written, experts are concerned about SSA reorganizations, rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to administrative problems with Social Security, including the delivery of benefits. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the Social Security system, people have always gotten their Social Security checks. They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during the pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now, for the first time ever, that might change. There’ll be calamity for millions of families, millions of people,” Biden said.

There is no plan to stop monthly benefits, but, as we said, experts are worried that abrupt changes at the SSA, in the name of cutting staffing or finding fraud, could lead to operational mistakes. “I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, told us for an earlier story on the issue. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

The former president also was largely accurate in citing comments by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, but one line by Biden could leave the wrong impression that there was a “possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month.”

Biden said of Lutnick: “But the current secretary of commerce doesn’t seem to get it, or based on his comments, he doesn’t seem to even care. … But when he talked about the possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month, he shrugged it off. Here’s what he said. He said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t complain. It wouldn’t bother her.”

Lutnick, in an interview on the All-In Podcast on March 20, raised the hypothetical of checks not going out that month, saying that a “fraudster” would be the one to complain about it.

Lutnick said: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing.”

Biden also said Lutnick, a billionaire, was “paying 8.5% in taxes.” We don’t know what rate Lutnick pays in federal taxes, but Biden’s figure refers to a White House calculation for the 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income, as we’ve explained.

Alan Jaffe contributed to this story.

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Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency he leads claim to have unearthed evidence to prove a longstanding conspiracy theory about Democrats orchestrating illegal voting by noncitizens on a scale large enough to swing national elections in their favor. But voting experts say the claims are highly dubious, and DOGE hasn’t released any evidence.

The allegation is pretty straightforward — but DOGE’s data may not be telling the whole story. Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is working with DOGE, said the DOGE team matched Social Security numbers given to noncitizens with work visas against voter registration rolls in four sample states, and found thousands of crossovers.

Gracias said “many” of those people actually voted. Moreover, he and Musk allege that it is all part of a Democratic plot to influence federal elections.

DOGE says it provided the data to federal prosecutors for criminal investigation, but nothing has been shared publicly.

Without DOGE’s data, we can’t determine how many cases of noncitizen votes may have been uncovered. But voting and data experts warn that when matching millions of numbers in databases, even a small percentage of errors can distort things. That’s not to say there aren’t any noncitizens who wrongly register to vote, and that there aren’t some who actually do vote. But states that have performed detailed audits of voting records have found such instances to be relatively rare.

In some cases, officials in those states have found hundreds of noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a fraction of whom also voted. But hardly enough to have come close to swinging a national election.

And, voting experts say, the conspiracy falls apart when you weigh the benefit of any single vote against the potential legal consequences faced by someone who votes illegally as a noncitizen — fines, jail time and deportation.

“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told us. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. Analysis of voting statistics in parts of the country in areas with large noncitizen populations do not find results consistent with Musk’s claims, and do find results consistent with near-zero attempts by this population to participate in elections. States have many ways to cross-check databases and simply presenting a Social Security card or number will not make you a voter. The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”

The DOGE Claims

In a town hall ahead of an April 1 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, Musk and Gracias drew attention to a dramatic rise during the Biden presidency in the number of people provided Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry system, a program that provides Social Security numbers and cards to noncitizens who are granted work authorization by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The EBE program, begun in 2017 under the Trump administration, provided an expedited process for immigrants who obtained work permits to be assigned Social Security numbers (and thereby allow the federal government to track their earnings for taxation). That includes immigrants granted humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status due to civil unrest, violence or natural disasters in their home countries and immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally but who initiated an asylum application and were granted a work permit pending their asylum hearing.

As the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General explained in 2019, the EBE program allowed SSA to quickly offer Social Security numbers to these immigrants “because the information needed to assign the SSN” had already been “collected and verified by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for conferring lawful status and work authorization.” (The Trump administration recently suspended the EBE program.)

Here’s a version of the data Gracias posted on X:

We reached out to the Social Security Administration to confirm those numbers, and did not get a response. But it’s not surprising they would have risen dramatically under Biden, who expanded protections for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela. The number of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. also soared during the Biden years.

“When we saw these numbers, we were like, ‘What is this?’ In ’21 you see 270,000 people goes all the way to 2.1 million in ’24,” Gracias said at the town hall. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers.”

“Yeah, this is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said.

“This is worth just reiterating,” Musk said. “People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep with the switch. They weren’t asleep with the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people, and make it a permanent deep blue one-party state from which there would be no escape.”

Gracias claimed DOGE found that many of the more than 5 million who had gotten Social Security numbers through the EBE program since its inception in 2017 were also getting various government benefits, including more than 1 million receiving Medicaid. He said he went a step further and decided to match the EBE list against voter records, and discovered many of those people had registered to vote.

“And who did vote,” Musk added.

“And we found some by sampling that actually did vote,” Gracias concurred. “And we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation service. Already. Already. That is already happening right now.” (We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to confirm an investigation but did not get a response.)

Musk said that once a noncitizen has obtained a Social Security number “from there you get on the voter rolls and then the basically Dem operatives will farm the vote.”

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on April 2, Gracias provided a bit more detail, saying that DOGE “found in a handful of cooperative states that they were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.” He noted that the search it performed was made possible by an executive order signed by Trump allowing inter-agency data-sharing.

“It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk to each other,” Gracias said. “That allowed us to connect all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”

Privacy activists told NPR that despite the executive order, the search may have violated privacy laws and a court order.

Gracias provided still more detail about the alleged illegal noncitizen voting in an interview on the All-In Podcast on April 4.

“I’m talking about four states,” Gracias said, though he did not name the four “friendly states” DOGE sampled. “We looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them, on the voter rolls. And we found many of those people had voted. In one state in particular well over a thousand voted. Yeah, I think this was a move to import voters.”

Asked in an April 1 interview about those DOGE findings, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds said, “My reaction is the disgust that every American has because we knew that what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the left were doing in the darkness of night was shoving illegal immigrants into every role possible, whether it be entitlements or voting rolls across the country. Now, we have the proof.”

The DOGE findings were also cited by Republican Rep. Aaron Bean in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a bill aimed at preventing voting by noncitizens. (Opponents of the legislation, including voting rights advocate groups, say it could prevent voter registration by U.S. citizens by instituting hurdles.)

On the floor of the House, Bean said: “We are here because this previous administration, the Biden administration, imported 10 to 15 million illegal aliens who have come here and we have evidence that they are participating in our elections. … It ends today when we vote on the SAVE Act.”

The bill passed the House on April 10 mostly along party lines, 220-208.

Experts Dubious

Voting experts, however, say the DOGE findings likely aren’t the smoking gun Musk and Gracias make it out to be.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Musk and Gracias cited “isn’t evidence, it’s garden-variety conspiracy theory, and a very old and overplayed one at that.”

“It is possible that a handful of noncitizens have been mistakenly registered to vote – and by a handful, I really mean tiny numbers,” Levitt said. “I don’t know what records DOGE is referring to when they say they ‘took a sample’ of noncitizen immigrants and looked at voter registration records to see if they had registered and voted, but every time I’ve seen claims like this with any specificity, the results vanish into smoke when people actually look at the results: either it’s bad data, or bad matching, or bad assumptions, or all three. But it’s impossible to really evaluate at this level of specificity, which they know full well.”

Indeed, states that have looked into noncitizens voting or registering to vote have found the issue to be relatively rare. 

• In March, the Iowa Secretary of State announced that an audit had found 277 noncitizens had registered to vote in the state. And 35 of those noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 election; five such ballots were rejected.

• In May 2024, the Ohio Secretary of State announced it had found 137 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who had twice confirmed their noncitizenship status to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The press release did not indicate how many, if any, had tried to actually vote. But a grand jury indicted six people who legally and permanently immigrated to the U.S. for voting illegally as noncitizens between 2008 and 2020.

• In 2022, Georgia conducted a citizenship review of state voter rolls and found that 1,634 people had attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 and could not be verified as citizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. None, however, voted. In October, the Associated Press reported that Georgia election officials said 20 out of the 8.2 million on the state’s voter registration rolls were not U.S. citizens, and that nine had voted in previous elections.

• In 2021, the Nevada Republican Party filed a complaint alleging that as many as 3,987 noncitizens had voted in the 2020 election. The allegation was based on people who presented an immigration document while obtaining a driver’s license over the previous five years. But a 13-page report issued by the Nevada Secretary of State concluded the allegation failed to account for a large number of noncitizens who were naturalized — and therefore became legal voters — in the time between obtaining their driver’s license and the election. “Without specific evidence to establish that identified individuals were foreign nationals when they voted in the November 3 election, there is nothing further that can be investigated,” the report stated. “In summary, the generalized information acquired from DMV cannot serve as a basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”

“Multiple credible sources have documented that there is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas have registered and voted in U.S. federal elections in significant numbers,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal in all states and, since 1996, has criminal penalties” that can include federal incarceration for even registering to vote, he said.

“There have been a small number of people who have wrongfully registered to vote, often by mistake, and far fewer actually casting ballots,” Ruiz Soto said, adding that “clearly more can be done to reduce the likelihood of immigrants erroneously registering to vote.” But, he said, “this is not a problem of millions of immigrants, and the scale is often blown out of proportion by critics. Musk’s and Gracias’ remarks oversimplify the process of migrants obtaining temporary status and work authorization, and they promote the inaccurate idea that most recent migrants would vote for the Democratic Party even if they were to lawfully become U.S. citizens in the future.”

A Brennan Center for Justice review found that of the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election in 42 jurisdictions in 12 states, there were “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” that were referred for further investigation or prosecution. “The absence of fraud reinforces a wide consensus among scholars, journalists and election administrators: voter fraud of any kind, including noncitizen voting, is rare.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed a database of fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and found “only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023,” the BPC said in a 2024 post on this issue. “Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Many states’ voter registration rolls do not even include Social Security numbers, and so matches in those cases — which would involve matching based on data such as names, addresses, birthdates or driver’s license numbers — can result in bad matches, experts said.

Experts: Risks Outweigh Rewards

The idea that large numbers of noncitizens are voting illegally is also highly dubious, experts told us, given the consequences faced by those immigrants for the payoff of a single vote.

Although it has long been illegal for noncitizens to vote, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 added some teeth to the prohibition against noncitizens registering to vote or voting in national elections. Violation can result in fines, up to a year in prison, deportation and revocation of legal status.

“Ockham’s razor says that noncitizens aren’t intentionally registering or voting, because it’s just not worth it,” Levitt told us, referring to the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the best. The conspiracy theory Musk and Gracias have “laid out for registering nets a noncitizen exactly one incremental vote. And in exchange, they’ve created a permanent paper record of a federal and state crime that’s an absolutely standard part of any record check for any change in immigration status, subjected themselves to deportation,” fines and potential prison time “and ensured that they’ll never get citizenship. The reason you don’t see actual evidence of noncitizen voting in any volume is that it doesn’t make any sense for any noncitizen to commit the crime.”

Olson, of the Cato Institute, said that while “Elon Musk has been spreading unverified and unverifiable claims about illegal voting by noncitizens for a year or more. … The actual political trends of recent years have been exactly the opposite of what Musk claims. As the share of foreign born persons resident in the U.S. has risen in recent years, the Republican share of the vote has risen, not fallen. Some of this is because new citizens who achieve naturalization have shifted in their voting propensity toward Republicans. But mostly it is because, by overwhelming majorities, those who lack citizenship neither attempt to vote nor succeed in voting.”

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President Donald Trump has added to his unsupported claim that the U.S. is making “$2 billion a day” from tariffs by saying that the country was losing $2 billion or $3 billion “a day” under President Joe Biden. Economists told us that Trump appears to be wrongly comparing a very high – and unlikely – estimate of potential daily revenue from his tariffs with a figure reflecting the average daily U.S. trade deficit during Biden’s last year in office.

“My best guess would be that Trump is probably conflating different concepts,” Robert C. Johnson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, told us. 

In an April 10 article about Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro’s disputed claim that Trump’s 2025 tariff policies will raise $6 trillion to $7 trillion over 10 years, we briefly addressed the president’s statement that the U.S. is already “making a fortune with tariffs — $2 billion a day.” But Trump has said it several times since he first uttered the claim on April 8.

He even claimed in an April 10 meeting with members of his Cabinet that “the number is probably $3.5 billion a day” from tariffs. In that same meeting, he said, “Look, we’re making $2 billion a day now. And during Biden, we were losing $3 billion a day.”

Then, in an April 14 meeting with the president of El Salvador, Trump said, “on trade and other things, we’re doing great. We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars.” That was followed by his claim that “we were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day.”

We asked the White House how Trump arrived at those figures, but we didn’t receive a response.

Trump’s Overstating Daily Tariff Revenues

Trump’s claim of $2 billion or more a day in tariff revenue is contradicted by figures released by multiple federal departments or agencies.

As we’ve written, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which collects tariffs, or customs duties, on imports of foreign goods at ports of entry, said in an April 8 statement that it has collected over $200 million per day in “additional associated revenue” from 13 of Trump’s tariff-related executive actions that have been implemented during the current administration.

Also, as of April 15, the U.S. had received more than $2.3 billion in customs duties and certain excise taxes for the month, according to a Treasury Department daily financial statement. If that total included just tariffs, since excise taxes are different from customs duties, it still would be roughly $156 million per day in revenue. (Treasury data for only custom duties paid in April won’t be available until May. In February, there was about $259 million a day in customs duties paid, and the March per-day total was roughly $264 million.)

Economists we consulted were also skeptical of the president’s claim of billions of dollars in daily tariff collections to date.

“No, there is absolutely no way we are collecting $2b per day in tariff revenue,” Gene M. Grossman, an economics and international affairs professor at Princeton University, told us.

“If you multiply all the announced tariffs by the volume of trade with each country, you could get close to $2b per day, mostly due to the tariffs on China,” he wrote in an email. “But that assumes that there will be no fall off in imports with China despite tariffs over 145%, which is a pretty ridiculous assumption.”

And Johnson, of Notre Dame, speculated that the administration calculated the figure by taking the total value of U.S. imports in 2024 ($3.3 trillion in goods) and multiplying it by 20%, “which is roughly what the average US tariff would have been after the initial announcement” of tariffs on April 2. Divided by 365 days, it’s about $1.6 billion each day.

But, like Grossman, Johnson said that Trump’s revenue estimate appears to implausibly assume that “jacking up tariffs” won’t reduce the amount of goods imported in the long run.

“I think the $2 billion a day is the absolute upper bound on what could be collected in revenue from tariffs, and certainly more than is likely,” Johnson wrote in an email.

After announcing a minimum 10% tariff on all imports of foreign foods and some higher country-by-country tariff rates on April 2, a week later Trump paused the higher rates for 90 days – except for tariffs on goods from China, which have since increased to 145%. Other previously announced tariffs still in effect include 25% tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum, automobiles and auto parts.

Biden Didn’t Lose Billions a Day

As for Trump’s claim that the U.S. lost “$2 billion a day” or “$3 billion a day” during the Biden administration, Grossman and Johnson both said that the president’s statement appears to be based on the U.S. international trade deficit – not revenue from tariffs.

In 2024, Biden’s final year as president, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services was more than $918 billion, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade deficit in goods alone was about $1.2 trillion. Divide either by 365 days, and you get an average per-day deficit of between $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion.

“My guess is that’s what Trump is mentally doing — since trade deficits mean you’re ‘losing’ in his vocabulary,” Johnson said.

However, Grossman said “it’s ridiculous to think of that as a loss,” since the U.S. got the goods. He also said it’s ridiculous “to equate [the average daily trade deficit] in some way to tariff revenue.”

In an April 8 post for Boston University’s “Expert Take” series, Tarek Alexander Hassan, a BU professor of economics, explained why trade deficits shouldn’t be seen as money lost.

“A trade deficit sounds bad, but it is neither good nor bad,” he wrote. “It doesn’t mean the US is losing money. It simply means foreigners are sending the US more goods than the US is sending them.”

For the record, there was more than $216 million per day in customs duties paid to the federal government under Biden in 2024.

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While presenting a series of executive orders conceived to increase electricity generation from coal, President Donald Trump misleadingly suggested that environmental regulations were to blame for the industry’s decline, wrongly said that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany,” and misleadingly, and repeatedly, referred to coal as “clean.”

Experts agree the main culprit for the decrease in coal-fired power in recent decades was the surge of more cost-effective and cleaner kinds of energy, especially natural gas. In Germany, a handful of old plants were fired back up in 2022, but were closed again in 2024. Germany plans to end coal-fired power generation by 2038. Also, coal combustion emits more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, not to mention other pollutants.

“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best — it is certainly the best in terms of power,” Trump, who promised and failed to revive the coal industry during his first term, said on April 8, surrounded by coal miners. “Today we’re taking historic action to help American workers, miners, families and consumers — we’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.” 

Coal consumption and production in the U.S. have declined over the last two decades, according to the Energy Information Administration. Although coal fueled most of the country’s power plants until a decade ago, in 2023 only 16% of the electricity produced in the U.S. was generated by coal-fired plants. The coal workforce went from nearly 90,000 in 2012 to about 40,000 this year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump’s new plan to boost the industry includes a series of actions that, as a Department of Interior press release details, include reopening federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal leasing, removing “regulatory burdens” for mines, and lowering the amount coal producers pay the government for extracting coal on federal lands. The plan also grants coal power plants a two-year reprieve from regulations that limit mercury and other toxic emissions. The administration said there was a need for an increase in electricity generated by coal to satisfy a growing demand for electricity for domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence data processing centers.

During his speech, the president praised coal’s reliability and durability but also called it “clean,” “cheap” and “incredibly efficient,” adding that people have bemoaned and decimated the industry “for absolutely no reason.” He also criticized “the green new scam,” a phrase he used to refer to “restrictions” and climate change policies generally, and he blamed former President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers for trying “to abolish the American coal industry” and “destroying” the lives, and jobs, of “thousands and thousands of coal miners.” 

(During Biden’s presidency, however, the number of coal mining jobs increased slightly, by 3,400, to 41,300. In January, employment was 4,700 below the pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Coal mining jobs decreased by 13,100 over the entirety of Trump’s first term. Job losses were exacerbated by the pandemic, but even prior to the pandemic, there was a loss of 5,000 coal mining jobs under Trump.)  

“We will end the government bias against coal and we’re going to unlock the sweeping authorities of … the Defense Production Act to turbocharge coal mining in America,” he said, referring to a law first enacted in 1950 during the Korean War to give the president broad authority to “influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense,” as explained by the Library of Congress. 

But several experts told us blaming environmental regulations and claiming coal is cleaner, cheaper or more efficient than its alternatives is misleading. 

“The coal industry’s decline is due first and foremost to cheaper alternatives, namely natural gas but also renewable energy,” Sanya Carley, faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told us in an email. “It is more economically efficient and less carbon intensive to build gas units or renewable energy such as wind and solar than it is to build a coal plant.” 

Environmental Regulations Didn’t Kill Coal

Trump’s comments about “bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” ending “government bias” and “slashing unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal,” leave a misleading impression about why coal production has decreased.

Studies analyzing the factors that led to the decline of the coal industry have concluded that although environmental regulations have played a role, it hasn’t been a significant one. 

As we reported in 2017, after Trump’s claims on reviving coal then, a Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy study found the main culprit for the collapse of the industry was cheaper natural gas production driven by the shale revolution, followed by lower-than-expected demand and the growth in renewable energy. 

Similarly, a 2017 policy brief by Charles D. Kolstad, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, concluded that “environmental regulations did not kill coal”; progress did. 

Kolstad explained that the main environmental law affecting coal combustion is the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed by President Richard Nixon. Strong demand and a lack of competition fueled a boom in new coal-fired plants in the 1970s and 80s, despite the regulations, which resulted in an expansion of coal production. Plants met the limits on sulfur emissions by burning low-sulfur coal and then, after a requirement of a 1977 Clean Air Act amendment, by adding devices, known as scrubbers, that remove sulfur from smokestacks.

But coal-fired plants built before 1970 were exempt from sulfur regulations, which, as Kolstad explained, provided an incentive to keep them operating for longer rather than retire them. The eventual retirement of these old plants is what marked the decline of coal in electricity generation starting in 2015, he explained, not the additional environmental rules set to limit the pollution coming from them. 

At the same time, Kolstad explained, productivity in the coal industry increased due to innovations, which led to a reduction in the workforce. And the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the development of shale deposits led to a revolution in the oil and gas industry that resulted in a big drop in the price of natural gas. 

Kolstad told us his analysis still stands today. 

“While coal might be beautiful to some, the main reason production is down is that demand is down, mostly because of cheap gas,” he said in an email. “Employment is down further because of productivity gains (coal output per miner).”

Christine Shearer, project manager of the global coal plant tracker at the nongovernmental organization Global Energy Monitor, which compiles and analyzes energy data, agreed. “[T]he main thing that killed coal in the U.S. was gas,” she told us in an email.

“Low natural gas prices, capital costs, and build times of combined cycle gas-fired power plants in the 1990s led to a large expansion in U.S. gas-fired capacity in the beginning of this century. As new gas plants were built, aging coal plants were shut down,” she told us. Fracking further lowered the price and increased the use of natural gas to produce electricity, she added. 

Shearer shared a report co-authored by Global Energy Monitor that shows more coal power capacity was retired under Trump in his first term than under Presidents Barack Obama or Biden. That’s “because coal plants closing has primarily been a function of economics, and it is hard to reverse,” she said. 

Globally, coal power plants in the world have retired on average when they’re 37 years old, Shearer told us. Coal plants in the U.S. are now, on average, 43 years old, she added. 

“Not enforcing existing environmental regulations and further delaying pending regulations on carbon dioxide emissions,” she added, “might squeeze a few extra years of life out of these old coal plants, but it won’t bring back a coal renaissance.”

Germany Is Not Going ‘Back to Coal’

In his remarks on April 8, Trump referred to two other countries’ use of coal in recent years. While he correctly noted China’s continued reliance on coal and its construction of new plants, the president wrongly claimed that Germany is “back to coal” and that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany.”

Germany brought four previously closed coal plants back online in 2022, likely due to concerns about energy availability after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those plants were closed again in 2024, and Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020, according to Global Energy Monitor. Germany is planning to end coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 or earlier.

But at the opening of his remarks at the signing of his executive orders, Trump said, “Other countries went to beautiful, clean coal, and they’ve stayed there for many years like China. China is opening two plants every week. Germany went green, very green. They went so green they almost went out of business. Germany was finished; they went to wind. The wind wasn’t blowing too much, and they went to all sorts of other things.”

Trump continued: “You know, the green new scam hit Germany too and guess what? Now they’re back to coal. They’re opening up coal plants all over Germany.”

It is true that China began construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal power projects and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in that country in 10 years, according to a collaborative report issued in February by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. That’s likely not “two plants every week,” as Trump said, since an average coal plant generates 1 GW but it takes a couple of years for a plant to be built and come online in China, Shearer, of Global Energy Monitor, told us in an email.

“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” Flora Champenois, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the report’s co-authors, told NPR.

But Trump misrepresented Germany’s current and future plans for the use of coal.

Shearer explained that in recent years the U.S. has been replacing old coal plants with lower-cost natural gas, as well as solar and wind power. Germany, however, did not have “a big expansion in gas power like the US, and on top of that Germany has been phasing out its nuclear power. So what has been replacing coal (and nuclear) in Germany is solar and wind power.”

Germany did reopen four mothballed coal plants in 2022 to operate through 2023, “most likely to fill in for high gas prices following [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Shearer said. But those coal plants “were all retired in 2024. The year 2024 was actually a record year for coal power retirements in Germany, totaling 6.7 GW – 2 GW above U.S. retirements” under Biden.

Asked about Trump’s claim that coal plants are opening throughout Germany, Shearer said, “No, Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020.”

“Germany’s July 2020 Coal Power Exit Law established an end to coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 at the latest, and possibly by 2035,” Shearer said. “A follow-up analysis expressed ambition to phase out coal ‘ideally’ by 2030.”

A spokesperson for the German economy ministry, responding to Trump’s remarks, said, “No new coal-fired power plants will be built” in Germany, the Associated Press reported.

We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements about Germany’s coal plants, but we didn’t receive a response.

‘Clean Coal’? Not Really 

On top of incorrectly suggesting that environmental regulations caused the downfall of the coal industry, Trump insisted on calling coal “clean.”  

“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” he said during his speech on April 8. “I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.” 

But the reality is that coal is not clean. As the Energy Information Administration explains, producing and using coal has several negative effects on people’s health and the environment. When coal is burned to produce electricity, it emits pollutants, including gases and particulates. Coal mining sometimes requires removing mountain tops with explosives or altering valleys and waterways. Streams can be polluted by runoff from the mines.  

Coal combustion puts out more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, the Environmental Protection Agency explains. Although carbon dioxide is naturally present in the atmosphere and is not directly harmful when breathed in normal concentrations, CO2 is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. In 2022, coal combustion accounted for 55% of carbon emissions from the electric power sector, while representing only 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. that year, according to the EPA. 

As the EIA explains, burning coal also emits toxic pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses and lung disease, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter — criteria air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act —  and other pollutants such as coal ash and mercury. 

“At the present time, coal is not cleaner than its alternatives,” Joost de Gouw, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us in an email, noting that most coal-fired plants already use systems to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. “Compared with natural gas power plants that use combined cycle technology (the industry standard), current coal-fired power plants emit roughly 10 times more nitrogen oxides and 100 times more sulfur dioxide per kWh of electricity produced,” referring to kilowatt-hours.

A study published in Science in 2023 showed that exposure to the fine particulate pollution from coal plants is associated with 2.1 times greater mortality risk than exposure to such pollution from other sources. Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor of environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University and one of the authors of the study, told us that although there are devices that can remove up to 99% of certain pollutants emitted during the combustion of coal, they don’t make coal “clean.”

Scrubbers, or flue gas desulfurization units, can remove about 95% of sulfur dioxide emissions from a coal plant before they’re released into the atmosphere. The installation of these devices, the closure of coal-fired plants and the decline of the industry have resulted in a significant decrease of pollution from coal-fired plants, as a separate study by Henneman and colleagues showed. 

But although these devices can reduce pollution from coal power plants “they do not eliminate them,” Henneman told us, adding that as his second study showed, “most of the exposure to power plant air pollution emissions after 2015 was from power plants with scrubbers.” 

The waste created from scrubbers, which needs to be stored near the power plants or placed in landfills, can also cause a problem when it spills and contaminates groundwater, he said. The trains used to transport coal also pollute, he added.

Trump said his administration will be “crushing Biden-era environmental restrictions” that target mercury and other toxic emissions because the regulations make it “impossible to do anything.” His plan includes a two-year delay (from July 2027 to July 2029) for coal plants to comply with a revision of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards finalized last year. Trump said that the technologies needed to control emissions are “not commercially viable.” 

At the same time, the president said he directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to use billions of federal dollars “to invest in the next generation of coal technology — which is an amazing technology in terms of getting the full potential of coal and also doing it in a very clean environmental way.”

We reached out to the White House to ask which technology Trump was referring to. In response, a press officer from the Department of Energy directed us to an April 8 CNBC interview in which Wright mentioned scrubbers. 

“Scrubbers do not do anything about carbon dioxide, so even a coal plant with a scrubber will still warm the planet,” Shearer, from Global Energy Monitor, told us.

Some carbon dioxide can be removed from coal power plants, but Shearer told us none of the techniques used globally result in coal being cheaper or cleaner than natural gas. 

“China now primarily builds ultra-supercritical coal plants that it calls ‘high efficiency, low emissions’ but at the end of the day they still emit more CO2 than a gas plant,” she wrote. “Japan and South Korea have also been pushing for ammonia co-firing at their coal plants, calling it ‘clean coal’, but again even 50% co-firing ammonia at a coal plant results in higher CO2 emissions than a gas plant, and it’s far more expensive.”

As we‘ve written previously, it’s possible to capture some carbon emissions and either store it or use it for another purpose. But experts told us that such carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCUS, technologies are very expensive, energy-intensive and haven’t been used on a large scale.  

“Coal without CCUS is already not competitive economically, so adding CCUS makes no sense economically,” Shearer added.

Despite his focus on the term “clean coal,” Trump also indicated in his remarks that climate change isn’t a problem.  

“You don’t have to worry about the air is getting warmer. The ocean will rise one-quarter of an inch within the next 500 to 600 years, giving you a little bit more waterfront property,” he said, repeating once again his absurdly low estimates of sea level rise. As we’ve explained, the current rate of sea level rise is already a bit more than one-eighth of an inch each year.

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In recent weeks, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that “very, very strong studies” link food dyes to cancer and ADHD. Experts are concerned about the impacts of unhealthy diets and obesity in the U.S., but some say Kennedy overstates the role of food dyes in chronic disease.

The dyes haven’t been shown to cause cancer in humans. Studies show a possible link to symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children.

Recently, Kennedy has taken his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign on the road, appearing in some states that have passed legislation to limit food dyes and other additives. So far, governors in California, Arizona, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia have signed laws disallowing certain food dyes from school meals, some beginning as soon as later this year, and West Virginia also enacted a law that will ban seven synthetic food dyes outright from sale in the state beginning in 2028. Lawmakers in two dozen additional states have introduced or passed bills that would restrict synthetic food dyes, which are present in a variety of foods, from soft drinks to cereal.

“So the loneliness, the dispossession, the crisis that we have in mental health, in suicide, in ADD, ADHD, all of these are linked — and particularly to the dyes,” Kennedy said in a March 28 speech in West Virginia, given alongside Gov. Patrick Morrisey. “It’s very clear the dyes that Gov. Morrisey is banning, all of them are linked in very, very strong studies to ADHD and to cancers. So we’re seeing an explosion in cancers in this country.”

Kennedy also spoke about food dyes in an April 8 interview on CBS News, following a stop in Arizona to celebrate legislation to ban food dyes and other additives in school lunches, as well as a law aiming to ban use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds to purchase sodas. “The food dyes are kind of the most egregious,” Kennedy told CBS. “They don’t use them in any other country. They’re clearly associated with a variety — a grim inventory — of diseases, including cancers and behavioral disease and neurological disease like ADHD, and it’s very, very well-documented.”

We reached out to HHS to ask about the research Kennedy was referring to, but we did not receive a reply.

The evidence linking food dyes and cancer comes from studies in animals and cells. There isn’t evidence food dyes are driving an increase in cancer in humans, Susan Mayne, who served as director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2015 and 2023, told us.

“We are seeing rising rates of the obesity-related cancers, and especially in young people, and that is concerning,” she said. “But focusing in on risk factors where there’s really no significant scientific evidence indicating that they are causing these cancers while omitting ones we know are is really undermining public health.” Mayne spent much of her career studying nutrition, epidemiology and cancer at Yale School of Public Health, where she is now an adjunct professor.

Some research suggests that food dyes lead to neurobehavioral changes in some children. But the literature is mixed and opinions vary on the strength of the evidence.

“The totality of scientific evidence indicates that most children have no adverse effects when consuming foods containing color additives, but some evidence suggests that certain children may be sensitive to them,” the FDA says on its website in the answer to a question about food dyes and child behavior.

Kennedy is also incorrect in categorically stating that food dyes aren’t used in any other country. Regulations on food dyes vary around the world, and companies have reformulated some foods to eliminate synthetic dyes for certain markets. The European Union, for example, requires that foods containing certain food colors have warning labels stating that they “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” However, synthetic food dyes are allowed outside the U.S.

Some researchers and advocacy groups have said the bar for evidence on food dyes’ harms should be low, based on their lack of benefits for consumers.

“These are entirely unnecessary when we are talking about nutrition and food safety,” Thomas Galligan, principal scientist for food additives and supplements at the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, told us, differentiating them from additives with some use, such as preservatives that keep food from going bad. “They are strictly a money-making tool for food companies, and so our tolerance for the risk, so to speak, is extremely low in the case of food dyes.” CSPI has advocated a ban on synthetic food dyes. 

The organization also has advocated the tightening of the GRAS, or generally recognized as safe, pathway — a way for food companies to add new ingredients to their foods without undergoing FDA review. Kennedy has told the FDA to explore revising the GRAS pathway.

“Colorants are unnecessary … so they should be out totally,” Dr. John O. Warner, a pediatrician and professor emeritus at Imperial College London who has studied the effects of synthetic food dyes and other additives on children’s behavior, told us. He said a switch to natural colors would be positive but that it is necessary to shift people’s diets overall to more natural foods and less ultraprocessed foods. “It’s not only the additives which are being shown to have the potential for adverse effects” in ultraprocessed foods, he said. “It’s the original food and the way it’s processed that could also be having an adverse effect.”

“I am all for getting rid of artificial colors and closing the GRAS loophole but neither of those is a major cause of obesity and its health consequences,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, wrote on April 2 on her blog, Food Politics.

Other researchers have expressed concern that an overly narrow focus on food dyes or other specific additives — combined with cuts to the federal workforce and programs, and the weakening of environmental regulations — will not meaningfully transform Americans’ health. 

“We’re hearing all this rhetoric from RFK Jr. about how he wants to fix the food system, but then he’s making massive cuts within HHS and FDA that will directly impede his ability to fix the food system,” Galligan said.

Food Dyes Not Established to Cause Human Cancers

Kennedy’s comments give the incorrect impression that FDA-approved synthetic food dyes are a well-established cause of cancer.

“The only food additives for which evidence has shown a link with cancer are nitrites and nitrates, which are used as preservatives in processed meat,” the American Institute for Cancer Research states on its website. “Eating processed meat is strongly associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer. There is currently no other strong evidence linking food additives to an increased cancer risk.”

“I think the evidence that the approved food colorings cause cancer is very slim,” Dr. Ronald Kleinman, a pediatrician who studies nutrition at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, told us.

Two studies whose results were published in 1987 indicated that Red 3 caused cancer in male laboratory rats. Based on this research and following a 2022 petition from consumer advocacy groups, the FDA on Jan. 15 announced a ban of Red 3 in food and drugs, which will take effect in 2027 for food and 2028 for drugs. But the agency said that it was banning the dye due to a requirement under law to ban any food additive that has been shown to cause cancer in animals — and not due to concern that the dye caused cancer in people. 

The dye caused cancer “due to a rat specific hormonal mechanism” that does not apply in humans, according to the agency, and people are not usually exposed to the levels of dye shown to cause cancer in male rats. Claims that the dye’s presence in food or drugs “puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information,” the FDA website says.

“I think there’s a good process in place to review whether the … dyes cause cancer,” Kleinman said. “For all of those that have been approved, we can be pretty certain at this point that there is no evidence that they cause cancer and move on.”

The overall data also do not support Kennedy’s statement that there has been an “explosion” in cancers. Cancer mortality has been declining in the U.S. since the 1990s, in both men and women. Incidence also has declined in men since its peak in the 1990s, although it has risen gradually in women over this period. (A major factor driving a cancer spike in the 1990s in men was the rise of PSA testing, which can identify slow-growing prostate cancers that would have never gone on to cause harm.)

The mortality rates “went up very high some decades ago, and that was because of the huge impact of smoking on lung cancer in both men and women, and that dominated the entire mortality data because lung cancer was so common and so lethal,” Mayne explained. “And then with public health interventions to reduce smoking, we saw a decrease in cancer mortality. First it started in men, followed behind that in women.” The decline in cancer deaths has also been driven by improvements in cancer screening and treatment, according to the American Cancer Society.

Cancers have varied risk factors, Mayne said, and some cancers — such as adenocarcinoma of the esophagus and uterine cancer — have risen in recent decades. There is also a pattern of increased cancer risk emerging in younger generations, due to a rise in obesity and other known and unknown factors, according to the ACS.

“The wonderful public health gains we made with tobacco control have been eroded by the growing prevalence of obesity in this country,” Mayne said. 

What people eat and drink also can increase the risk for specific cancers independent of obesity. For instance, research “very consistently” shows that diets low in fiber-containing foods, such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains, are associated with a higher risk of colon cancer, Mayne said. Consuming more meat — and particularly processed meat — is associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer, she said. And drinking more alcohol is associated with increased risk of a variety of cancers.

To reduce risk of cancer overall, Mayne emphasized the importance of avoiding excess alcohol, avoiding tobacco, vaccinating against human papillomavirus for younger people, maintaining a healthy body weight and eating a high-quality diet.

Other researchers acknowledged the research on food dyes and cancer in humans is limited but expressed concern about possible risks.

Galligan of CSPI agreed that “we don’t have direct evidence Red 3 causes cancer in humans,” but he said that studies to investigate this in humans would be “hard to conduct” and argued that the available evidence supported banning the dye. His organization was among those that petitioned to ban Red 3 based on the rat data.

Lorne Hofseth, director of the Center for Colon Cancer Research at the University of South Carolina, expressed concern that approved dyes could cause inflammation and DNA damage, which are mechanisms for increasing the risk of cancer. The dyes “tickle the players involved in carcinogenesis,” he told us.

A Possible Link Between Food Dyes and ADHD Symptoms

Joel Nigg, a clinical psychologist at Oregon Health & Science University, told us in an email that ADHD has many causes working in concert. Perhaps the largest single contributing factor is genetics, he said, but there are also multiple environmental factors that either protect against or help cause ADHD, “especially early in development.”

Some studies have found a connection between consuming synthetic food dyes and ADHD symptoms, which include inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity.

“Thus, it is fair to say that food dyes are associated with ADHD and do make a modest contribution to it, but are not the major cause,” Nigg said.

These include challenge studies, in which children avoided food dyes and sometimes other additives for a period and then were randomly assigned at certain intervals to consume drinks or foods containing either these additives or a placebo.

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. in the early 2000s, for example, had around 1,800 3-year-old children from the general population stop consuming synthetic food colorings and a type of preservative for a week, before randomly assigning them to consume drinks either containing the substances or not. The children’s parents reported an increase in hyperactivity with both the placebo drinks and the additive-containing drinks, but the increase in hyperactivity was greater with the drinks containing the additives. Clinicians unrelated to the children did not detect a difference in behavior in children who did versus did not receive the additives.

Subsequently, the researchers did a similar study in around 300 additional 3-year-olds and 8- and 9-year-olds, using two mixtures of food dyes and additives. This study relied on parent and teacher reports, as well as results of a computerized test for the older children. One mix had a small but statistically significant influence on behavioral changes in both age groups. A different mix showed an influence in the older children, but not the younger ones.

Other studies, however, have not identified any effect of food dyes on behavior. Overall, the literature is mixed, with studies arriving at varying conclusions, perhaps because of differences in methodology, the populations studied and the additives included.

Some review studies have nevertheless found the link between food dyes and behavioral changes to be convincing.

“Overall, our review of human studies suggests that synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral effects, such as inattentiveness, hyperactivity and restlessness in sensitive children,” a 2021 report from California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment concluded.

Nigg in 2012 co-authored a meta-analysis that found that an “estimated 8% of children with ADHD may have symptoms related to synthetic food colors.” He told us he believed that eliminating synthetic food dyes in the U.S. “would have a small effect on reducing symptoms of inattention and cases of ADHD.” 

However, Nigg said that to “really reduce environmental contributors to ADHD, it would be important to also address other equally if not more important factors.” These include reducing exposure to lead in the environment, certain types of air pollution, other chemicals, and possibly pesticides and herbicides. 

And he emphasized the importance of preventing exposures in the womb, adding that low birthweight “is a major contributor to ADHD.”

“Overall, dietary factors are relevant, but are certainly not the whole story,” he said. “Given that some of these other contributors are hard to address, perhaps a case can be made for ‘doing what we can’ to reduce exposures.”

Other researchers pointed out weaknesses in the data showing a link between food dyes and children’s behavior.

Mayne said that key studies where children were randomly assigned to consume food dyes involved dosing children with multiple ingredients at the same time, which makes it difficult to determine which ingredients caused the reported behavioral changes.

Kleinman said that weaknesses of the research on food dyes and attention deficit include a lack of “rigorous criteria for defining attention deficit,” the small size of the studies, the brief period the children were followed and the difficulty of separating the effects of food colors from other factors that influence behavior, including when the children were observed and what other things they consumed.

“I think that taken as a whole, there really is very little convincing evidence that food coloring contributes to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and banning them for that reason seems to me to be out way ahead of where the evidence is right now,” Kleinman said.

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When President Donald Trump has talked about the need for higher tariffs on imports of foreign goods because of a decline in American manufacturing, he has often made the claim that “90,000 plants and factories” in the U.S. closed after the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico took effect in 1994. But that figure is questionable, and experts say other factors, such as automation, had more to do with the large decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs than trade.

Data from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics database show that there was a decrease of about 74,000 “manufacturing establishments” in the U.S. between 1995, the peak year for manufacturing after NAFTA went into effect, and 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Furthermore, about one-quarter of the decline during that nearly three-decade period was in establishments with four or fewer employees — so it’s unclear how many of those truly count as a manufacturing factory or plant. For example, some small-business manufacturers make products while working out of their own homes.

About 2% of the decline was in establishments with at least 500 workers. That’s a drop of 1,346 establishments.

However, over the last month, the president — as well as members of his administration — have used the 90,000 figure several times.

On April 7, when discussing new tariffs on imports that he announced days earlier, Trump said, “We’ve lost 90,000 plants and factories. Think of this, 90,000 — you wouldn’t think it’s possible, 90,000 plants and factories since NAFTA. Which was, by the way, the worst trade deal ever developed, ever had by any country, anywhere, NAFTA.”

A few days earlier, in an April 3 interview, Vice President JD Vance said, “Since NAFTA, in the early ’90s, 90,000 American factories have been closed down. That’s small towns that have been blighted.”

And while speaking with White House reporters on March 7 about an increase in U.S. manufacturing jobs in February, Trump said, “As you probably know, it’s a statistic that everyone talks about, but nobody seems to have done much about. Since the beginning of NAFTA, there’s been 90,000 plants and factories closed in this country.”

When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a similar claim about lost factories later in March, the White House told the Washington Post that the figure came from a nearly 5-year-old analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

In that August 2020 report, which was about how Trump hadn’t been successful at reshoring manufacturing jobs during his first presidential term, the EPI said that “the U.S. has suffered a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants” between 1997 and 2018, the year that the U.S., Canada and Mexico agreed on a new trade deal, known as the USMCA, which officially replaced their NAFTA deal in 2020. The EPI report’s primary source was Business Dynamics Statistics data published by the Census Bureau.

But that figure appears to be out of date. When we tried to confirm that tally using the BDS online tool, we got a smaller decrease — a drop of about 65,000 establishments between 1997 and 2018. Census defines an establishment as “a single physical location at which business is conducted or services or industrial operations are performed.”

Then, when we measured from 1995, which was the NAFTA era’s high point for the number of U.S. manufacturing establishments, and 2022, the most recent year in the BDS database, we came up with a decline of more than 74,000 establishments. (There was a significant decrease in manufacturing establishments in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

A statistician for the Census Bureau told us that the BDS series figures are updated annually with each new release, which probably explains, at least in part, why our calculations in 2025 were different from the EPI’s in 2020. For its report, the EPI said it also used a different Census dataset to estimate manufacturing losses in 2017 and 2018.

“The 2022 BDS that was released in September 2024 contains the most up-to-date information available,” said the Census official, who told us he also couldn’t reproduce the EPI’s total.

Moreover, thousands of those lost establishments aren’t what many people think of as a manufacturing factory or plant — certainly not the large production facilities that Trump talks about bringing back to the U.S.

The manufacturing sector, according to the North American Industry Classification System, “comprises establishments engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.” Those establishments, which use “power-driven machines and material handling equipment” in the manufacturing process, are often labeled as plants, factories or mills.

“However,” the NAICS says, “establishments that transform materials or substances into new products by hand or in the worker’s home and those engaged in selling to the general public products made on the same premises from which they are sold, such as bakeries, candy stores, and custom tailors, may also be included in this sector.”

Another Census official told us that the bureau doesn’t have a breakdown of how many manufacturing establishments are, or were, factories, plants, mills, home-based or something else.

But we do know from the BDS database that establishments with between one and four workers accounted for about a quarter of the decline from 1995 to 2022. Meanwhile, establishments that employed 500 or more people were less than 2% of the decrease.

As of 2022, about a third of the 268,182 manufacturing establishments in the U.S. had no more than four employees. At that time, a little more than 1% had at least 500 employees.

NAFTA’s Role in Job Losses

As for NAFTA’s role, some critics of free trade agreements have faulted the old trade pact for a decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But others disagree that NAFTA is to blame, as Trump has suggested.

“The decline in US manufacturing jobs — something that has been taking place since 1979 — is more a story of technology (robots, computers, and the like) and changing US consumer tastes than it is about trade,” Colin Grabow, associate director at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, wrote in a March 2024 commentary piece for the libertarian think tank. “We know this because while the number of manufacturing jobs has declined, output has risen.”

Grabow argued that automation and economic development have had more to do with lost manufacturing jobs than either Mexico or China, which joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Furthermore, in a 2017 report, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said that both proponents and opponents of NAFTA made inaccurate predictions about the trade agreement’s impact.

“In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters,” the CRS said, describing NAFTA’s overall effect on the U.S. economy as “relatively modest.”

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On four separate occasions, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services secretary, has suggested that the measles outbreak in Texas, which is now over 500 cases, is beginning to subside and grow more slowly. But a review of state data indicates there’s no decline yet in the pace of cases.

During a visit to West Texas to attend the funeral of an unvaccinated 8-year-old who died of measles, Kennedy said in an April 6 post on X that since the deployment of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team in early March, “the growth rates for new cases and hospitalizations have flattened.”

Two days later, in Phoenix, Arizona, Kennedy repeated the claim. “Our strategy has been very successful,” he said of dealing with the measles outbreak. “The number continues to grow by the day, but the growth rate … has diminished substantially.”

In an interview CBS News released on April 9, he said, “the rate of the increase has substantially decreased, so we are successfully controlling it.” And in an April 10 Cabinet meeting, Kennedy again said that measles cases “have now plateaued.”

Dr. Andrew T. Pavia, an expert in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah, told us that Kennedy is wrong. “I don’t think any epidemiologists believe there is evidence that the measles outbreak is subsiding,” he said in an email. “To the contrary, there are indicators that the outbreak is larger than the number of confirmed cases that have been reported.”

In most of his remarks, Kennedy also made an apples-to-oranges comparison with Europe, which he incorrectly claimed currently had 127,000 measles cases and 37 deaths. His attempts to minimize the U.S. outbreak through that comparison ignore that measles is endemic in parts of Europe.

Kennedy has previously downplayed the Texas measles outbreak. Prior to becoming health secretary, he was a well-known anti-vaccine advocate, and he has shared incorrect or misleading information about measles and the vaccine as the nation’s top health official. 

As of April 8, 505 measles cases have been reported in the West Texas outbreak, including 57 hospitalizations and two deaths, both in unvaccinated children without underlying health conditions, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. Almost all of the cases — 98% — have been in people who are unvaccinated or have an unknown vaccination status. The Texas outbreak also seeded or is thought to have seeded outbreaks in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Texas Outbreak Poised for Further Growth

It’s unclear what information Kennedy might have been using to make his claim that the Texas outbreak is not growing as rapidly as it once was. HHS did not respond to our question asking about how he had calculated his growth rates.

Once there are fewer susceptible people to sustain the outbreak at its current clip — either from people gaining immunity by getting vaccinated or falling ill — the outbreak will begin to slow. But there isn’t evidence of a decline in cases yet.

We plotted the cumulative reported measles cases in the Texas outbreak over time, both by rash onset and by the dates when case and hospitalizations were announced by state health officials. Both graphs show a steady, linear rise of cases since early in the outbreak. Hospitalizations show a similar trend. There is no evident decrease in the rate of either cases or hospitalizations. (We also plotted the CDC’s national measles case numbers, announced weekly, but we didn’t see a decline in those figures, either.)

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Between March 21 and April 4, measles cases announced by the state grew by 56%. In the prior two weeks, the case growth rate was the same — 56%.

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“The graphs clearly don’t show flattening,” Pavia said.

The Texas health department did not comment specifically on Kennedy’s claim, but told us in an email that to “make it easier for people to understand the course of the outbreak,” the department had included “an epidemic curve” on its dashboard and added information about the change in case counts for each of its updates. 

The state’s epidemic curve, which is organized by rash onset and is what we used to create the second graph, notes that additional cases may still be reported for dates three weeks prior and that people with measles “are contagious from four days before rash onset to four days after.”

Pavia said it takes about 12 to 14 days after an exposure for a rash to appear, which is usually when testing occurs. Those results can take another one to two days to come back, with more time to update the numbers. “We always see smaller numbers in the current 1-2 weeks because of diagnostic and reporting delays,” he said.

Other experts have also objected to Kennedy’s characterization of the outbreak growth rate and the general notion that the Texas outbreak is under control. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases and infects around 90% of people who are exposed and lack immunity, according to the CDC.

“I don’t know, a 26% increase in a week … that’s not flattening,” Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s former top vaccine regulator, told STAT News, after Kennedy made the first of his statements. “It’s a way of trying to decrease concern that could potentially keep this outbreak going.” Marks has said he was recently forced to resign from his position after pressure from Kennedy.

“This outbreak is far from under control — even if the curve begins to flatten, we still face major risks in under-vaccinated communities across the country,” John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and ABC News contributor, told the news outlet. “With so many pockets of low vaccination, we’re still on the brink of widespread, sustained transmission unless urgent action is taken.”

One concern is that the Texas outbreak may be much larger than it appears, due to a lack of testing. Measles has also begun to circulate in the city of Lubbock, a more densely populated area of West Texas, concerning health officials.

On April 8, Lubbock’s public health director, Katherine Wells, cautioned in a press conference that cases could expand as there are more opportunities for the virus to spread. “It just gets much bigger, much quicker in these urban areas,” she said, according to STAT.

Public health officials anticipate that spring break travel could increase cases and have previously said the Texas outbreak could last for a year, as the Texas Tribune reported. If continued transmission lasts more than a year, the U.S. will lose its measles elimination status.

On April 7, the Texas health department updated its list of counties it designates as part of the outbreak area. The list now includes 10 counties — five new ones, including Lubbock, with one removed, since early March — that the state says “have ongoing transmission of measles.”

In those areas, children are recommended to receive a dose of the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR vaccine, earlier, starting at 6 months old rather than 12 months, with a second dose also moved up if a child has not yet turned 4, when a second dose is usually first recommended. Two doses are 97% effective in preventing measles, while one is 93% effective, according to the CDC.

Misleading Comparison with Europe

Kennedy also repeatedly made a misleading comparison with Europe.

“I would compare it to what’s happening in Europe now,” he said in Arizona, just after saying that the Texas outbreak growth rate has “diminished substantially.” He continued: “We’ve had 640 cases here. They’ve had 127,000 cases and 37 deaths. And so what we’re doing here in the United States is a model for the rest of the world.”

In the CBS interview, which was recorded on April 8, but not released until the next day, Kennedy recited the same figures, adding that there will always be measles cases “because the vaccine wanes very quickly.” (As we’ve written, vaccine waning is not a key reason why outbreaks occur — it’s because not enough people are vaccinated.)

“The CDC has done an amazing job at getting the measles outbreak under control,” Kennedy also said in the Cabinet meeting. “We have about 680 cases now in 22 states, compared to the same outbreak in Europe, which is 127,000 cases and 37 deaths.”

In mid-March, the WHO issued a press release with similar figures (127,350 cases and 38 deaths). But the numbers are actually for all of last year, and apply to the WHO’s European region, which is composed of 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia. It’s a vast area that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans and includes places such as Kyrgyzstan and Romania, where measles is especially common, as well as nine other nations where measles is endemic.

“It is a bit like saying we are doing well compared to measles in Africa,” Pavia said.

The WHO release notes that the 2024 measles cases were the highest in more than 25 years, and attributed the increase to lowered vaccination rates. In that respect, the situation is similar, as lowered vaccine coverage in the U.S. is what allows for sustained outbreaks to occur. But the primary reason why there are so many fewer measles cases in the U.S. is because the country already successfully eliminated the disease through widespread vaccination.

Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has at times noted some benefits of vaccination. In the same X post in which he first made his claim about the outbreak slowing, Kennedy wrote, “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” And in the CBS interview, Kennedy made his clearest endorsement to date, saying, “We encourage people to get the measles vaccine,” after being pressed to do so.

Despite Kennedy’s use of the words “we encourage,” parts of the interview were devoted to Kennedy’s claims of inadequate safety testing of vaccines and the unsupported idea that the most recent child to die of the measles didn’t die of the disease. He still has not said the MMR vaccine is safe and did not mention the recommendation that children in outbreak areas get vaccinated early to protect themselves.

Hours after his April 6 X post, he praised two Texas physicians in another post for using unsupported treatments for measles, calling them “two extraordinary healers … who have treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children using aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin.”

Pointing to his first April 6 X post and his Fox News editorial, Vianca N. Rodriguez Feliciano, HHS press secretary, told us that Kennedy “has advocated for the use of the MMR vaccine” and “has responded with clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles.”

She also said that Dr. James Campbell, “a notable pediatric infectious disease professor,” told CBS News that budesonide and clarithromycin “can be used to help treat respiratory illnesses and bacterial coinfections, respectively, which would be considered symptomatic management.”

Similar to what we explained when we first addressed Kennedy’s claims about those drugs, Campbell did say that the medicines might be used in certain circumstances once someone has a measles infection. But he emphasized that there was no evidence supporting their routine use in children with measles.

“These choices should be made on an individual basis by the doctors, not as sweeping recommendations for all children with measles,” he said in the cited story.

“In 2025, we should not have to treat measles in the US because it is completely preventable,” Campbell also said, adding that “for those who do get measles, rigorous studies, and not anecdotal reports, will help us to better treat them.”

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Before President Donald Trump paused some new tariffs that he unveiled on April 2, several economic groups estimated that tariffs he has announced this year could raise between roughly $2 trillion and more than $4 billion in federal revenue over a 10-year period. But that’s well short of the $6 trillion or $7 trillion that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed the tariffs would raise to help pay for tax cuts, including an extension of the 2017 tax law.

On April 6, during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Navarro talked about the revenue-generating potential of Trump’s tariffs on imports. Trump announced on April 9 that he was suspending some of his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days. (We’ve written about how the tariffs aren’t really reciprocal.)

“These tariff revenues, by the way, Jackie, $600, $700 billion they are going to raise a year, $6 trillion to $7 trillion over the 10-year period,” Navarro told Jackie DeAngelis, who hosted the Fox News show that day. “They’re going to help pay for the tax cuts. I’ll tell you this, Jackie. Every single dollar that comes in, in tariff revenues that we take from the foreigners who have been cheating us, are going to go right to the American public in terms of tax cuts and debt reduction.”

Navarro is wrong to suggest that the tariffs would be paid by “foreigners,” though foreign businesses could decide to “lower their prices to absorb some of the tariffs,” as the Tax Foundation explains. He also ignored the fact that tariffs, also known as customs duties, are a tax increase on the U.S. importers who pay the tariffs – not foreign countries. And because those importers often pass at least some of those costs on to U.S. consumers through price hikes, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes that affect lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

“If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in a late March piece.

Multiple economic analyses project that Trump’s tariffs will reduce the after-tax income of households by potentially thousands of dollars a year, on average.

Independent analyses also show that Navarro may be exaggerating the amount of money that the government may collect from the tariffs.

We asked the White House to explain Navarro’s revenue projection, but we did not receive a reply. We also inquired if Navarro’s estimate was the basis for the president’s April 8 claim that his tariffs are bringing in “$2 billion per day” to the U.S., which would add up to more than $7 trillion over 10 years, but the White House didn’t tell us that, either. (So far, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said that it has collected about $200 million per day in “additional associated revenue” from 13 of the president’s tariff-related executive actions this year.)

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow for the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, guessed that Navarro’s claim was based on “some simple math.” In an April 8 blog post, he said that the senior trade official may have taken the $3.3 trillion in U.S. imports of goods in 2024 and multiplied it by a tariff rate of 20%, “a rough estimate of all the Trump tariffs,” producing a revenue total of over $600 billion annually, or more than $6 trillion over 10 years.

“Simple. But wrong,” wrote Gleckman. He said that “Trump’s tariffs are likely to fall far short of Navarro’s prediction,” making it highly doubtful that there would be enough revenue to cover the cost of parts of Trump’s economic agenda, specifically an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as other tax-cutting proposals, such as the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.

Indefinitely extending tax cuts for individuals in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act alone would cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In fact, the Tax Policy Center has estimated that all tariffs Trump announced through April 2, including a tariff of at least 10% on all U.S. imports of foreign goods and higher tariff rates on specific countries, would raise about $3.5 trillion – $189.5 billion in 2025 and then $3.3 trillion from 2026 to 2035. That estimate, Gleckman said, doesn’t include the economic impact of any retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, which some countries have already announced, nor does it account for an anticipated decline in corporate profits and wages because U.S. firms have to pay the tariffs.

“If it did, tariff revenues would be even lower,” Gleckman noted.

And the TPC isn’t the only organization with tariff revenue estimates lower than Navarro’s.

• In an analysis updated on April 9, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s 2025 tariffs, altogether, “will raise $2.2 trillion in revenue over the next decade on a conventional basis ($1.6 trillion on a dynamic basis) and reduce US GDP by 0.8 percent, all before foreign retaliation.” Projected revenue is lower on a dynamic basis, the Tax Foundation said, because that estimate reflects “the negative effect tariffs have on US economic output, reducing incomes and resulting tax revenues.”

• Meanwhile, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said on April 7 that all of Trump’s announced tariffs, if made permanent, could raise $3 trillion from 2025 to 2034. Because the tariffs could reduce real gross domestic product by 0.6%, CRFB said its revenue estimate would decline to $2.7 trillion once those macro-dynamic economic effects are factored in.

• Likewise, the Budget Lab at Yale University said on April 2, “All tariffs to date in 2025,” if they remain in place, “raise $3.1 trillion [from 2026 to 2035], including the effect of retaliation to date.” That estimate falls to about $2.5 trillion when factoring in “$582 billion in negative dynamic revenue effects,” the Budget Lab said.

• And the Penn Wharton Budget Model, based on all tariffs announced prior to Trump’s April 9 pause, said it “estimates that the Combined Trump Tariffs will generate $4.6 trillion in revenue over 10 years, using recent time-varying demand elasticity estimates.” That’s based on imports declining by 29%. On the other hand, “If baseline import demand in the United States across all goods and services further stagnates over the next decade due to lower economic growth, total new tariff revenue will decrease to $4.13 trillion.” Those estimates include “partially dynamic” economic effects, Kent Smetters, a University of Pennsylvania economics and public policy professor, and the university’s PWBM faculty director, told us in an interview.

None of those analyses predicts as much as $6 trillion to $7 trillion in federal revenue, as Navarro claimed.

We don’t know exactly what tariffs will be put into place by the Trump administration after the 90-day pause on the April 2 tariffs. For now, goods imported from China will face a 125% tariff, and there’s a universal 10% tariff on all imported goods from other countries.

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Q: Is it true the rumor that all Social Security beneficiaries will have to go to a location to verify their identity to receive their monthly check?

A: If you are already receiving Social Security benefits and you don’t need to change your direct deposit information, you don’t need to do anything. But starting April 14, if you are applying for retirement or survivor benefits for the first time, or you want to change direct deposit information for any benefits, you’ll need to verify your identity online or in person at a field office. Phone verification will no longer be an option.

Full Answer

Changes at the Social Security Administration in how and when people verify their identity have prompted questions from several readers who have asked us if they need to do anything to keep receiving their monthly benefits.

As we said in the short answer, if you already get benefits and don’t need to change your direct deposit, you don’t need to verify your identity at all. But new beneficiaries who are applying for retirement or survivor benefits for the first time, or those setting up or changing direct deposit information for any type of benefits, will need to either verify their identity online through a “my Social Security” account or schedule an appointment to go to a field office to do so in person — starting April 14. The change eliminates identity verification services over the phone for those beneficiaries.

The SSA announced those details on March 26, saying these changes would “further safeguard Social Security records and benefits for millions of Americans against fraudulent activity.”

The agency backed off an earlier plan announced in March to also require people applying for non-retirement benefits — Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare or Supplemental Security Income — to verify their identity either online or in person only. SSA announced that those applicants “can complete their claim entirely over the telephone without the need to come into an office.”

Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of SSA, said in the March 26 press release that those beneficiaries don’t have to verify their identity in person “because multiple opportunities exist during the decision process to verify a person’s identity,” saying that the updated policy was instituted because the agency “listened to our customers, Congress, advocates, and others.”

Also, the agency said it wouldn’t enforce the requirement for online or in-person only verification for people applying for retirement-program benefits if they are “in extreme dire-need situations, such as terminal cases or prisoner pre-release scenarios.” SSA is “developing a process that will require documentation and management approval” for such cases, it said.

Beneficiaries should be aware that there are reports that scammers have taken advantage of the procedural changes and have sent phishing emails asking beneficiaries to click on a link to verify their identity. Such emails or text messages are not coming from the SSA.

The concessions for the disabled and some other beneficiaries — and a two-week delay in enacting the plan overall — came after advocacy groups argued that the changes could disrupt benefits for those who couldn’t use the online system and would have trouble traveling to a field office because of mobility issues or long distances.

AARP called the delay “a good first step.” But Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer, said the agency needed “a deliberate approach” to customer service changes and “a reasonable timeframe” to implement them.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, published a report on April 8 saying that the end of phone services for those applying for retirement and survivor benefits would still create hardships for millions of people. It determined that going to a field office would be “a 45-mile trip for some 6 million seniors nationwide” and noted that many people lack the technological tools or know-how to use the online verification system.

“Eliminating most applications by phone will close off an important mode of service for millions of people,” Kathleen Romig, CBPP’s director of Social Security and disability policy, wrote. “Some 5.2 million people began to receive Social Security retirement, survivors, and dependent benefits in 2023. More than 4 in 10 retirees apply for their Social Security benefits by phone, as do most spouses who are eligible for benefits.”

As we wrote in another story, some claims by Democrats about this and other changes at the SSA, including staffing reductions, could leave the wrong impression that Social Security benefits are being cut. That’s not the case, though experts are concerned that the changes could lead to delays or issues for those applying for benefits, particularly disability benefits, which already take a long time before approval.

Meanwhile, claims about widespread fraud in Social Security, such as claims by the Trump administration about payments fraudulently going to people over 100 years old, have been exaggerated.

The Washington Post Fact Checker also debunked a false claim by Vice President JD Vance, who claimed that “40 percent of the people who are calling [Social Security] are actually committing fraud.” The Post wrote that the SSA had instead said: “Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information.”

A February report from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General on overpayments in the retirement and disability programs for fiscal 2020 to 2023 found that 3% of overpayments, or nearly $102 million a year on average, were due to fraud. The bulk of the overpayments, 72%, were due to “beneficiaries who did not report or timely report information to SSA that negatively affected their benefits,” the report said. Billions of overpayments are recovered by the agency each year.

Dudek also told reporters in March that the SSA “is losing over $100 million a year in direct deposit fraud.”

These fraud estimates are small compared with the $1.5 trillion Social Security paid in benefits in fiscal 2024.

In April, the SSA issued more than 68 million benefit payments, the vast majority through direct deposit. Only about 500,000 payments were made by check. An executive order from Trump calls for the elimination of paper checks throughout the federal government by Sept. 30.

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Abrupt changes in staffing and some procedures at the Social Security Administration, coupled with false and misleading claims about widespread fraud, have prompted heated criticism from Democrats, with some statements leaving the wrong impression that benefits are being cut. Experts share a concern that disorderly actions by the Trump administration could cause administrative errors and disruptions, but there has been no proposed change to benefits mandated by law.

Democrats have cited several concerning actions taken by the Trump administration with regard to the Social Security Administration. In late February, the SSA announced it would cut 7,000 jobs (out of 57,000) as part of “massive reorganizations” that included reducing the number of regional offices from 10 to four. Meanwhile, White House adviser Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump have made exaggerated claims about people over 100 years old fraudulently getting Social Security benefits, suggesting there are significant savings to be had by going after waste, fraud and abuse in the system. And this month, changes in identify verification procedures that end some phone-based services could create burdens for some beneficiaries.

“They’re setting the groundwork to ‘eliminate’ Americans’ hard-earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare all to fund tax breaks for their ultra-wealthy backers,” the Democratic National Committee claimed in a March 17 statement that came after news of the identity verification changes.

A link on the word “eliminate” went to a story about an interview of Musk making unfounded claims about fraud and saying that eliminating “waste” from “entitlement spending,” including Social Security and Medicare, could yield $500 billion to $700 billion a year.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a March 21 rally in Colorado, referred to Musk in saying: “We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington making cuts to the Social Security Administration.” But he then went further, charging that the administration is “prepared to destroy Social Security,” along with Medicaid, Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs “in order to make themselves even richer.”

Several Democrats have speculated that the goal of the administration is to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 20: “The plan, unlike previous plans to privatize Social Security, is to scuttle the agencies themselves.” Larson said the Republicans wanted to “make it appear that it’s not working and not answering people’s concerns” and then privatize it.

Senate Democrats have made similar claims. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote in a March 23 letter to Frank Bisignano, the nominee to head the SSA, that they were “deeply concerned that DOGE and the Trump Administration are setting up the SSA for failure—a failure that could cut off Social Security benefits for millions of Americans—and that will then be used to justify a ‘private sector fix.’”

In a March 25 statement, Sen. Chuck Schumer said: “DOGE has claimed these efforts are to get rid of fraud and abuse but it is clear after a few months that their actions are little more than smoke and mirrors designed to rip away benefits from hardworking Americans.”

Most of these comments are speculative, and as other news organizations have reported, and as experts told us, there is reason to be concerned about rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to problems with Social Security. But despite those concerns, the administration hasn’t put forth any plan to privatize the SSA, nor any plan to change the amount of benefits now promised to retirees, as many of these claims suggest.

Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us that concern is “warranted” that some of the administrative changes could affect people’s ability to apply for benefits, especially for disability benefits, which already face very long delays, sometimes years, before eligibility is approved. But that’s different from rules set in law that determine eligibility and the size of someone’s benefits. The administrative changes that are happening “won’t affect the statutory eligibility of people,” she said. That would have to go through Congress.

“A lot of the writing on the left on this is intentionally conflating these two issues to engage in fearmongering,” Boccia said. She said it was “dishonest” to imply there had been cuts to benefits.

At the same time, experts say there may be good reason to fear the actions taken by the Trump administration could harm the operations of the Social Security program.

“I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” said Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, in an interview. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

Herd cited the agency’s tasks of managing retiree and disability benefits (for more than 68 million Americans), issuing Social Security numbers to newborns, and keeping track of workers’ earnings, calling it an “enormous” amount of work. “And we’ve seen a fairly careless, and I think that’s generous, treatment of that agency over the past six weeks,” she said.

Cuts, Changes and Concerns at Social Security

In the interview of Musk cited by the DNC — which aired on Fox News on March 10 — Musk made unsupported claims about Democrats using Social Security and Medicare to “attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here.” He also repeated an incorrect suggestion that Social Security payments could be going to millions of people listed as deceased, and he claimed that hundreds of billions of waste per year — up to $700 billion — could be cut from the programs.

“The waste report in entitlement spending, you know, which is … most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk said. “So that’s like the big one to eliminate, that’s the sort of half trillion maybe $600, $700 billion a year.”

In response to those comments, the White House pointed to a Government Accountability Office report that estimated the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

Reports from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General have estimated significantly smaller amounts of Social Security improper spending — which includes mistakes, not only fraud. A July 2024 report from the IG’s Office of Audit said the rate of improper Social Security payments was 0.84% over fiscal years 2015 to 2022, which added up to $71.8 billion — or about $9 billion per year. Billions of overpayments were also recovered by the agency.

In February, the IG released a report on overpayments in the retirement and disability programs, finding that 3% of them, or nearly $102 million a year on average, were due to fraud. The report covered fiscal 2020 to 2023.

These reports indicate that while SSA could find some savings from fraud or abuse, the amount is relatively small. Social Security benefit payments in fiscal 2024 totaled $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the federal budget that year.

“I think a lot of the statements of fraud that Elon Musk has put forth are exaggerated as well,” Boccia told us. While there are opportunities to streamline the SSA, she said, the question is whether DOGE was thinking of the long-term impact or “almost randomly slashing and cutting where they can.”

“It’s not clear to me that the DOGE team implementing these changes is talking to experts that understand how the Social Security system works,” Boccia said, and whether the changes will be effective. This “chaotic approach to cuts” could lead to mistakes and “undermine the bigger reform effort that will be necessary to ensure that vulnerable seniors don’t face automatic benefit cuts” when the Social Security trust fund is depleted.

The trust fund for retirees’ and survivors’ benefits is expected to be depleted in 2033, at which point SSA will only be able to pay 79% of benefits, according to the Social Security trustees’ latest estimate.

Spokespeople at Sanders’ and Larson’s offices pointed to more reports about changes at the SSA when we inquired about the lawmakers’ claims.

For instance, the reduction of 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and a reorganization were announced in February. The SSA said the changes were being made to “prioritize customer service by streamlining redundant layers of management” and “reducing non-mission critical work.” It said, “SSA is committed to ensure this plan has a positive effect on the delivery of Social Security services.” The Washington Post reported on April 4 that there are plans in the works for additional layoffs of potentially thousands of staffers. (The SSA press office hasn’t responded to our inquiry about that report and other questions about Democrats’ claims.)

The Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity was closed in late February, though Lee Dudek, the acting SSA commissioner, said that the office’s legally required tasks would be reassigned. The Office of Transformation, whose work included initiatives on the SSA website, was also closed.

There have been news reports of upcoming field office closures, but those remain unconfirmed. The Associated Press analyzed a DOGE list of federal real estate leases it wanted to cancel, finding the list included 47 SSA field offices, with 26 of them expected to be closed in 2025. But on March 27, the SSA said it hadn’t closed or announced the closure of any field offices, adding that it “works closely with local congressional delegations before closing any office permanently.” The SSA said it had provided a list of “underutilized office space,” mostly “small hearing rooms with no assigned employees,” to the General Services Administration for closure.

New ID Verification Procedures

There’s also a change to identity verification practices for some beneficiaries, starting April 14. Those applying for retirement and survivors’ benefits for the first time, and anyone wanting to set up or change their direct deposit information, will have to do so through a “my Social Security” account online or in person at a field office, rather than over the phone, which has been an option.

The SSA has said the ID verification changes are part of an effort to combat fraud. But advocates for beneficiaries have argued it could hurt those who can’t use the online system and have trouble traveling to a field office, which for rural beneficiaries could be far away.

Herd, at the University of Michigan, told us that a lot of people struggle with the online system and there’s evidence that it doesn’t prevent fraud.

The SSA’s Office of Audit reported in 2019 that $33.5 million in benefits for nearly 21,000 beneficiaries was diverted over about a five-year period because of unauthorized changes made to their direct deposit information through the online “my Social Security” system.

The ID verification changes, for those who can’t use the online system, will mean having to go to field offices, which “are already overwhelmed,” Herd said.

Dudek told reporters in March that the SSA “is losing over $100 million a year in direct deposit fraud,” which would be a fraud rate of about 0.007% of benefits paid. All but about 500,000 monthly benefit payments now go through direct deposit, and an executive order from Trump calls for the elimination of paper checks throughout the federal government by Sept. 30.

Herd said that a lot of the changes at the SSA, which have happened in a short period of time, “are further weakening an agency that was already operating on a kind of barebones administrative budget.” She pointed to SSA data showing the agency’s overhead is 0.5% of the combined trust fund cost.

The SSA could “effectively fail to deliver on promises” made to deliver benefits through administrative changes, she said. “The promise of Social Security benefits is only as good as the ability to deliver them.”

But, again, the Trump administration hasn’t proposed cutting legally required benefits, as some claims by Democrats imply.

Press reports have noted that the SSA website has been crashing, and beneficiaries have faced long wait times on customer service phone lines.

Boccia told us that fearmongering on the part of Democrats was contributing to the large call volumes. She noted a “political incentive to exaggerate the effect of the changes” at the SSA to increase support for Democrats.

Privatization

As for speculation by some Democratic lawmakers that the administrative changes at SSA are part of an effort to “privatize Social Security,” Boccia said she has seen no evidence for that at all. She said the claims were “not based in reality.”

Bisignano, the nominee for SSA commissioner who is the CEO of Fiserv, a financial technology services company, was asked about this at a March 25 confirmation hearing. “I’ve never thought about privatizing. It’s not a word that anybody’s ever talked to me about. And I don’t see this institution as anything other than a government agency that gets run for the benefit of the American public,” he said.

He later said, “I don’t believe anybody’s thinking about that,” when asked again about privatization.

And during questioning from Warren about beneficiaries potentially having trouble getting benefits they were entitled to, Bisignano said, “I will commit to have the right staffing to get the job done.”

Larson’s office pointed us to a March 23 article by MarketWatch in which some experts voiced concern about a path to privatization. Staffing cuts and other changes at the SSA “could erode customer service, impact benefits and — eventually, experts say — diminish consumer confidence to the point the federal government chooses to hand the program off to the private sector,” MarketWatch reported, quoting, among others, Jason Fichtner, who was an acting deputy commissioner at the SSA under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. However, the article said other experts didn’t agree with the privatization speculation.

Herd told us it was “not unreasonable that some folks in Congress are sort of questioning the end game here about Social Security.”

We can’t predict the future, but there has been no plan put forth by the administration to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency.

The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something we’re going to find. It’s going to be strengthened,” Trump said in a February interview on Fox News.

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