Amid continued DOGE efforts, Musk turns focus to centenarians in Social Security

As part of his stated crusade to cut federal spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has turned his attention to Social Security recipients over the age of 100.

With millions of apparently bogus records of individuals at least a century old, Musk is raising questions on whether the Social Security Administration is issuing benefits to individuals who may no longer be alive.

As reported by CNBC, he sounded the alarm on fraud during an interview with CNN, saying a preliminary data probe revealed Guiness-level records of longevity across the system.

“We’ve got people in there that are 150 years old now,” he said. He reiterated those concerns in a February 16 post on X, saying “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

The "150 year old fraud" claim has been called into question. As noted by Wired, a quirk in COBOL, the legacy programming language used to build the SSA's system, causes some dates in the system to be defaulted to the year 1875 in records where the birth date is missing or incomplete.

Beyond that, policy experts say the presence of centenarians in Social Security records does not necessarily indicate fraudulent payments. Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, said any potential fraud related to deceased beneficiaries is not likely to be significant.

“The amount of fraud is likely minuscule,” he told CNBC.

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited a 2024 investigation that found the SSA had improperly paid out approximately $71.8 billion between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. But the report, issued by the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General, noted that deceased beneficiaries were only one of several factors contributing to those improper payments.

“The Social Security Administration is now working to find even more waste, fraud and abuse in the administration’s whole-of-government effort to protect American taxpayers,” Leavitt said.

DOGE's efforts have already reached the IRS and the CFPB, and it is reportedly poised to enter the SEC. President Donald Trump has pledged it won't touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Still, the efficiency unit's presence at the SSA has caused significant backlash and turbulence, with acting commissioner Michelle King stepping down this week following concerns over the extra-governmental unit's access to sensitive federal data. In a February 14 statement, new acting commissioner Lee Dudek addressed the issue of potentially outdated records.

“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record,” Dudek said. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”

In the meantime, Musk shared data on X regarding the number of Social Security recipients by age, which experts say likely came from the SSA's electronic database, known as Numident.

A 2023 report from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General found that 18.9 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier remained in Numident records without a recorded date of death. However, Census Bureau estimates at the time suggested only about 86,000 individuals over 100 years old were actually alive in the US.

Despite these discrepancies, a former Social Security Administration employee stated that Numident records do not drive the payment records the SSA uses to send out 70 million checks every month.

“To correlate the two is just manipulative,” the unnamed ex-employee told CNBC.