White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News Monday night to try to assuage its elder viewers that the unconstitutional havoc Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are unleashing won’t affect their Social Security benefits.
“President [Donald] Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration,” Leavitt told Sean Hannity, which is strange because the Trump administration is also claiming that Musk isn’t directly responsible for hobbling the government through spending cuts. “They haven't dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” she added.
“Their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things,” Trump’s lie machine continued. “No. 1, to identify duplicate payments and to end them. No. 2, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money. And No. 3, to protect the integrity of this system for hard-working Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives.”
The claim that “tens of millions” of dead people are receiving benefits is madness. In 2010, a study by the anti-fraud firm ID Analytics found that 40 million Social Security numbers—or “tens of millions”—have been attached to multiple names. The idea that running a search of duplicate numbers will do anything other than jam up the works and potentially stall millions of Americans’ benefits from being processed.
Musk and his DOGE squad of bigots and misogynists seem to have dug enough for the billionaire to outrageously claim there are 150-year-olds receiving benefits. But that misunderstanding of the system has forced experts to explain many reasons why the Social Security database could have someone’s age listed as 150, including a data convention that codes dates with missing values to May 20, 1875, the date of a coding-standards conference in Paris. 1875 is 150 years ago.
On Sunday, the Social Security Administration’s top official resigned. Michelle King reportedly left the agency after she refused to give Musk’s DOGE team access to millions of Americans’ sensitive data.
More than 65 million Americans receive Social Security. Another 4 million receive Supplemental Security Income, which provides monthly benefits to disabled or elderly people who have minimal or no other resources.
Last July, the Office of the Inspector General released an audit of the Social Security Administration between the fiscal years 2015 and 2022, and found that less than 1% of the nearly $8.6 trillion paid to Americans were deemed “improper.” Most of those were beneficiaries receiving more money than they were supposed to receive. The total loss for those seven years was $71.8 billion—roughly $10 billion a year. Meanwhile, in November, the Pentagon, and its more than $800 billion yearly budget failed its seventh audit in a row.
As of the writing of this story, Musk is worth over $392 billion, according to Forbes. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the fourth-richest person in the world, with nearly $221 billion, saw his wealth increase by more than $4 billion since 5 PM ET on Monday.
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