The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has marked approximately 3.2 million Social Security number-holders for people aged 120 and older as “deceased” as part of ongoing efforts to root out fraud.
DOGE, headed by tech mogul Elon Musk, announced the move on Tuesday after the Social Security Administration (SSA) spent the last two weeks working on a “major cleanup of their records”:
While the table posted by the department shows 3,261,057 number-holders being removed from the “living” count, millions of accounts belonging to people purporting to be up to 159 years old still remain, awaiting review.
“More work still to be done,” DOGE added in its post on X.
Musk called out the SSA for having impossibly old number-holders in its registry in a scathing February post, showing thousands of people supposedly in their 200s, and one even in their 300s:
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” the DOGE chief and X owner wrote. “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
He went on to say that the Social Security program “might be the biggest fraud in history” while replying to a commenter who pointed out that the system shows more “eligible” numbers than there are U.S. citizens:
A recent Rasmussen poll that asked people if they would “support or oppose having the Department of Government Efficiency do an audit of the Social Security system” found that 59 percent would strongly (41 percent) or somewhat (18 percent) approve of that audit, with only 35 percent opposed it.
Social security experts who spoke with PolitiFact offered two possible explanations for the staggering numbers of accounts that appear to belong to millions of super-centenarians:
Government databases may code someone as 150 years old for reasons peculiar to the large and complex Social Security database.
Improper payments are a longstanding concern for the agency, though they represent a small share of all payments.
According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a missing value for a date is coded as May 20, 1875 — the date that the international standards-setting conference, the “Convention du Mètre,” was held in Paris.
It is necessary to note that the SSA has been automatically stopping payments to account holders over 115 years of age since September 2015, so DOGE is not necessarily stating that the administration has been making payments to the aforementioned 3.2 million accounts.
A report from the SSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) states that the administration has not established a new system capable of properly logging death information, resulting in nearly 19 million Social Security numbers for people born in 1920 or earlier not being labeled as deceased.
After President Donald Trump brought up the suspicious database issue in February, SSA Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek thanked him and vowed to continue the investigation.
“I thank President Trump for highlighting these inconsistencies during his speech last night to a joint session of Congress,” Dudek said in a statement. “We are steadfast in our commitment to root out fraud, waste, and abuse in our programs, and actively correcting the inconsistencies with missing dates of death.”
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