The number is 40%

Really great deep dive by the Times into Elon the Pig Junkie’s Merry Band of Incels Excellent Social Security Adventure:

Nonetheless, the Musk claim had been used to justify a policy change greenlit by Mr. Dudek: The public would no longer be allowed to file for benefits or change their bank account information over the phone, instead having to do so online or in person.

The proposed change, which was supposed to take effect on March 31, was met with resistance given the difficulties it was expected to impose on retirees and people with disabilities. Agency officials estimated it would have sent some four million customers to field offices that were already short-staffed, and confusion soon spread.

Lines at some locations snaked out the door. Among other concerns, many beneficiaries mistakenly believed they needed to prove their identity in person or risk losing their benefits.

Mr. Musk’s false claim about scammers making 40 percent of calls to Social Security’s customer service line appeared to be a distortion of a completely different statistic.

The DOGE leader was apparently referring to claims his deputies had been making about a far narrower subset of calls in which fraudsters were trying to steal money by changing bank account information. Agency analysts had estimated there were 66,000 such fraud cases a year, according to documents viewed by The Times. The customer service number receives roughly 80 million calls per year.

Within weeks, the proposal was significantly scaled back.

But the number of people visiting field offices to change their banking information still rose sharply compared with the previous year, according to internal agency statistics reviewed by The Times.

The higher traffic was poorly timed. At least three dozen field offices were estimated to be losing more than a quarter of their staff, agency data shows.

During one of his last weeks in charge, Mr. Dudek drove around the Midwest by himself visiting offices that had been hit especially hard by cuts.

At a Milwaukee field office, Mr. Dudek stopped a woman driving out of the parking lot, a moment witnessed by The Times.

“Were we able to take care of your needs today?” he asked.

“Not at all,” the woman replied.

Mr. Dudek apologized as she drove away.

The administration’s response to all this was that Oceana has always been at war with EastAsia:

Elon Musk stood before a giant American flag at a Wisconsin political rally in March and rolled out an eye-popping allegation of rampant fraud at the Social Security Administration. Scammers, he said, were making 40 percent of all calls to the agency’s customer service line.

Social Security employees knew the billionaire’s claim had no basis in fact. After journalists followed up, staff members began drafting a response correcting the record.

That’s when Leland Dudek — plucked from a midlevel job only six weeks earlier to run Social Security because of his willingness to cooperate with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — got an angry call from the White House, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

“The number is 40 percent,” insisted Katie Miller, a top administration aide who was working closely with Mr. Musk, according to one of the people familiar with the April 1 call. President Trump believed Mr. Musk, she said. “Do not contradict the president.”

The whole story is very much worth reading (gift link).

As always, it’s difficult to sort out the people who are just too stupid and lazy to understand statistics (Trump and all the swing voters who elected him), from the people who are too strung out (Musk), from the people who are just straight up Nazi liars (Katie Miller, aka Mrs Goebbels).