Social Security sending out checks to millions of dead people? It’s not just false. It’s absurd

Social Security has been considered among the most efficient, cleanest government programs in the country. For instance, a study by the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration, published in July, found that from 2015-2022, the government had made $25 billion in Social Security overpayments—typically payments that went out after someone had already died.

But a good chunk of those payments was recouped, so the total amount lost to improper Social Security payments over those eight years was around $2 billion a year, a minuscule sum relative to the Social Security Administration (SSA)’s budget (which is now well over a trillion dollars).

Yet, to hear Elon Musk and President Trump tell it, Social Security may well be the site of what Musk called “the biggest fraud in history.” While Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was rummaging around in the SSA’s various databases, it found one in which more than 19 million people who are 100 years old or older had no official death date recorded. In other words, as far as the database was concerned, they were still alive.

Musk posted a table of the “living” centenarians, broken up by age, and then suggested that these people might be getting Social Security payments, joking, “Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

Over the next couple of days, the Trump administration amplified this idea. First, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a TV appearance that Musk and DOGE “suspect there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.” Then, last night, Trump himself said that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” in Social Security, and that if we took them all off the payment rolls, “all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security.”

If these claims were true, they would, of course, be an absolutely staggering revelation. And fixing them would, as Trump suggested, put Social Security’s finances back on a healthy trajectory.

However, the claims are false and are, in fact, absurd.

Social Security is not sending out checks to tens of millions, or hundreds of thousands, of dead people, and there was never any reason to suspect that this was the case. What happened here was pretty simple: Elon Musk didn’t understand what the table he was looking at represented, and apparently, rather than ask someone who might know (or even just google the subject), he leapt to the conclusion that he and DOGE might have uncovered the biggest fraud in history.

Ghosts in the machine

What Musk was looking at was data from what’s called the Numident database, or “Numerical Identification System,” which is a database of every Social Security number issued. And it’s true: There are millions of people in that database who are dead, and not receiving fraudulent checks, but for whom the SSA has no official death date.

In most cases, that’s because these people died before the SSA had systematized the collection of death dates (which is trickier than you might think since death certificates are recorded on the state level, not the federal). In other cases, it’s because the death date was entered in the payment-records database (which is separate), but not in Numident.

The important point, though, is that the Numident database is not the database of people who are getting Social Security checks—as Musk and now Trump erroneously seem to think. That’s a separate database, and all those “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” that Trump referred to are not on the active database of people receiving Social Security checks.

We know this because we can check the correct database of how many people ages 99 and older received their regular Social Security checks in December (the last month for which data is available): 89,106 people ages 99+ collected Social Security benefits. That’s a long way from tens of millions, and it’s also fewer than the estimated number of centenarians in the U.S.

In other words, there is no evidence of fraud at all.

Even beyond the question of the very elderly, there’s no reason to think Social Security fraud is a meaningful problem. Some 51.8 million people over the age of 61 collected retired-worker Social Security benefits (what we think of as traditional Social Security) in December—out of a population of well over 60 million people ages 62 and older. If the SSA were paying loads of dead people, the number of old people collecting benefits would not be smaller than the number of old people overall.

One other part of the story that’s worth noting: The issue of having a database with all these dead people without recorded official death dates is one that the SSA has, obviously, been aware of for a long time.

In 2023, in fact, the Inspector General did a report on the subject, recommending that the SSA take steps to fix it as much as possible. The challenge is that would take millions of dollars and lots of work hours to track down death dates from all over the country, most of them from between 50 and 80 years ago.

The question is whether it’s worth doing, given that the actual costs of not having the death-date info are trivial, since these people are not getting checks. The point, in any case: This is not a new issue that DOGE has uncovered, but one that’s been discussed for many years.

More important, the way Musk’s misunderstanding of a table of numbers quickly turned into the president of the United States making baseless insinuations of fraud about the Social Security Administration is no way to run a government, or any kind of business, for that matter. But now having that erroneous information and baseless claims of fraud out there, courtesy of the misinformed Musk and Trump, can understandably erode people’s confidence in this reliable and most valuable federal program, creating a climate of unnecessary, and inadvertent, anxiety and distrust.

Musk and DOGE have been given a tremendous amount of power in this administration. They need to use that power responsibly.