Social Security’s Insolvency Is Driven by Benefits for the Living, Not Fraud by the Dead
Elon Musk claims that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered “the biggest fraud in history” within the Social Security Administration: Payments to millions of Americans who have likely been dead for a long time.
That claim seems to be based on a faulty understanding of Social Security data on Musk’s part. More to the point: Social Security’s fiscal problems aren’t the result of fraudulent payments to people who are already dead. It is not benefits for the dead, but rather payments to the living that are driving the program toward insolvency.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE,” Musk posted to X earlier this week, along with a chart that purports to show that millions of people over age 100 are still in the program’s database. “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk suggested.
Maybe. But other explanations seem more plausible—and none of them involve the government paying Social Security benefits to people well over 100 years old.
For starters, this is not newly uncovered information. In July 2023, the Social Security Administration’s inspector general released a report showing that 18.9 million individuals born in 1920 or before did not have a date of death in the program’s database. That total included 10.9 million people born in 1899 or earlier.
The person believed to be the oldest living American today is Naomi Whitehead, a Georgia woman born in 1910. It is a very safe bet that everyone who lived during the year 1899 is now dead. So it goes.
The crucial question, however, is whether Social Security’s lack of “death information” about those people means they are still receiving benefits.
The vast majority are not. According to the inspector general’s report, 98 percent of them (18.4 million) “are not currently receiving” Social Security payments. That’s because those 18.4 million people “have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years,” the inspector general notes. “The fact that
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