Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made an astonishing claim yesterday. At an Oval Office event during which President Trump signed an executive order establishing a task force to address fraud in federal programs, Miller said that improper benefits going to “people who don’t belong here” are the main cause of the national debt.
“I believe — and I know President Trump believes — that when this theft is exposed, we will see that if all of it were stopped it would be enough to balance the budget,” Miller said. “The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt, and this is the first ever effort to shut that down.”
Miller is widely credited with shaping the Trump administration’s immigration policy and its harsh crackdown in Minnesota and elsewhere. His claim regarding the national debt runs counter to the usual explanations given for the federal government’s fiscal shortfall — and is dispelled by basic math and previous analyses.
The Government Accountability Office, for example, estimated in 2024 that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion a year to fraud, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022. The Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year estimated $90.6 billion in improper overpayments by Medicare, Medicaid and certain other federal benefit programs for 2025. Those are all hefty numbers, to be sure, and White House officials have reportedly indicated that the new Trump task force could recover more funds than GAO’s estimate. Still, the annual fraud totals likely fall far short of the $1.78 trillion federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2025 let alone the total national debt, now approaching $39 trillion.
The main long-term drivers of the national debt are generally understood to be an aging population, rising healthcare costs and ballooning interest costs on existing debt, combined with a tax system that has seen repeated cuts in recent decades and extraordinary expenses for major wars, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic.
What’s more, a recent white paper by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that immigrants — including those who are undocumented — paid more in taxes to federal, state and local governments than they received in benefits every year over a 30-year period from 1994 to 2023. The report said that immigrants “did not create significantly higher costs” for any programs “and saved the government enormously in two areas: old-age benefits and education costs.” Immigrants also use a roughly average amount of “needs-based” assistance, such as welfare, food aid, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance, even though they are much more likely to be poor.
“The fiscal surplus from all immigrants from 1994 to 2023 was $14.5 trillion, compared with a deficit of $48 trillion without immigrants,” Cato’s David J. Bier wrote. “That means that immigrants cut deficits by nearly a third in real terms over the last three decades.”
Bier said that, overall, immigrants accounted for 14% of tax revenue and 7% of government spending from 1994 to 2023. His report also noted that immigrants in the country illegally likely lowered the deficit by at least $1.7 trillion.
“Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits,” Bier wrote. “For years, nativists in Congress and the administration have wrongly claimed that immigrants are behind the growth in debt and that the US immigration system allows foreigners to take advantage of Americans’ generosity. Our data completely repudiates this view. Immigrants are subsidizing the US government.”