Trump Administration Falsely Claims Millions of Dead People Receive Social Security Payments

Image credits: AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File

The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people are receiving Social Security payments, with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk citing overstated numbers and misrepresenting Social Security data. The claims, which have been made on social media and in press briefings, suggest that people who are 100, 200, and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits. However, it is true that improper payments have been made, including some to dead people. A July 2024 report from Social Security's inspector general states that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion — or less than 1% — in improper payments.

Most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people. In addition, in early January, the U.S. Treasury clawed back more than $31 million in a variety of federal payments— not just Social Security payments— that improperly went to dead people, a recovery that former Treasury official David Lebryk said was “just the tip of the iceberg.” The money was reclaimed as part of a five-month pilot program after Congress gave the Department of Treasury temporary access to the Social Security Administration’s “Full Death Master File” for three years as part of the omnibus appropriations bill in 2021. Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type, and some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago.

A series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits. The agency decided not to update the database because of the cost to do so, which would run upward of $9 million. A July 2023 Social Security OIG report states that “almost none of the number holders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.” Chuck Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said, “Two cheers for Elon Musk if he can root out and put a stop to improper payments,” but to pick the places in the federal government where error rates are high, “Social Security would be near the bottom of the list, not near the top,” and that Medicaid improper payment rates are quite substantial.

Sita Nataraj Slavov, a professor of public policy at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said the claims by Musk and Trump will make people think the solutions to the government’s financial problems are simpler than they appear. The real concern is that this claim may mislead people into thinking there’s an easy fix to Social Security’s financial problems — that we can somehow restore solvency without making sacrifices through higher taxes or lower benefits, which is simply not true. Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, referred back to the Social Security’s inspector general report, stating that a previous investigation revealed the SSA paid at least $71.8 billion in improper payments, and 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, using data and technology to improve the efficiency of the system.

In fact, the Social Security Administration does keep up to date on who it is paying, and according to the most recent data, the number of beneficiaries 99 or older was less than 90,000 in this country of more than 330 million. Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley laughed at the accusation of widespread fraud, saying that there is not like a zombie apocalypse of people, you know, cadavers running around with Social Security checks coming out of their pockets, and that more often, the agency has to restart payments after they are erroneously shut off. O’Malley criticized Musk for putting out claims that he "can never back up," and said that Musk should show the evidence of the alleged fraud, which he cannot do.