Comment by roarcher

I'm a veteran and I know several fellow vets who openly admit to lying to the VA to get disability ratings for maladies they don't have. No, I don't have statistics about how many disabled veterans are lying (how would one gather that information, exactly?), but it is a regular occurrence that I meet guys who brag about their 100% ratings, ask me about mine, and look at me like I'm some kind of poor naive idiot when I tell them that I did not claim disability because I do not feel that I'm disabled.

I do not claim that everyone on VA disability or SSDI is a fraudster. I know veterans who are missing significant portions of their body. I dated a women on SSDI who absolutely needed and deserved it for a neurological disorder. But she knew a family where every single member went on it as soon as they turned 18. Scamming SSDI was essentially their family business.

I am not advocating for DOGE to take an axe to these systems. But just because you or I might find DOGE distasteful does not mean that significant fraud and abuse does not take place. I can only assume that you have not spent much time around these systems or people who use them. Anyone who does immediately hears about their misuse, often from the perpetrators themselves, who are proud of their own cleverness for doing so.