People were surprised that the cost of federal civil service employees was only around 5% in the early DOGE discussions here. They were expecting 20+%. SSA which pays about 70 million people is just over 21% of the spending so far this year, and there are only 2.3 million civil service employees. For civil servants to cost as much in salaries as social security pays out would require them to be paid nearly $800k/year on average.

People are just bad at estimating, and apparently none of the ones making the absurd claims know (or their listeners/readers don't know) that all this data is publicly available.