As he moved to cut foreign aid, he and Elon Musk alleged widespread waste and abuse, although they offered little evidence to back up their claims and may simply disagree with how the money was being spent.
With that in mind, consider what the Trump administration is now doing to Social Security, seeding the idea, which is not backed up by known facts, that millions of dead people are collecting payments.
Add in the departure of Michelle King, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration after a run-in with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency over the agency’s recipient information, and it’s worth paying attention to what’s going on.
Trump promised throughout the presidential campaign that Social Security payments and Medicare coverage would not be cut. But as Musk looks to slash across the government, he can’t help but look at the money Americans spend on the social safety net, just like a long line of fiscally minded lawmakers worried about the national debt.
On X, Musk said he was “100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR.”
Musk also posted a photo of a chart – it’s not clear where it comes from – that appears to show that people hundreds of years old are drawing Social Security benefits.
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
Trump later seemed to read from that chart during an appearance at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday.
Appearing on Fox News Monday night, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt picked up the baton to suggest massive fraud that Trump has directed Musk to investigate.
“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 said.
Where is the evidence?
There was no response to a request for more information from the Social Security Administration to explain what Musk is referring to or where the chart he shared comes from.
Until they provide some evidence that there are tens of millions of fraudulent claims going to dead people, let’s look at the large amount of evidence that there are not tens of millions of such claims.
Less than 1% in improper payments. Still too much
This is not to say there is no fraud in Social Security. There is. And when an agency pays out more than $1 trillion in benefits each year to more than 70 million Americans, a rounding error is real money. Social Security acknowledges paying less than 1% of benefits improperly, most of it in overpayments. That’s according to a 2024 report by the Social Security Inspector General. Trump fired IGs at multiple agencies when he took office, including the person who at that time was the acting inspector general of the Social Security Administration.
In January, just before Trump took office, the Treasury Department announced it had recovered $31 million in payments to deceased individuals over five months, by using data from Social Security’s master file of hundreds of millions of deceased individuals, which is distinct from its payment information.
“These results are just the tip of the iceberg,” said then-Treasury official Assistant Secretary David Lebryk, who later resigned after his run-in with DOGE officials over access to the Treasury Department payment system.
How many 100-year-olds are getting Social Security? Fewer than 100,000
So there’s more to do here. Over the past 10 years, there have been multiple reports looking at the millions of Social Security numbers associated with birthdays that occurred more than 100 years ago. But there’s no evidence of tens of millions of people over the age of 100 being paid benefits.
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. But that’s in line with the 101,000 Americans who are 100 or older, according to Pew.
“There is not like a zombie apocalypse of people, you know, cadavers running around with social security checks coming out of their pockets,” the former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley said on CNN. More frequently, he said, the agency has to restart payments after they are erroneously shut off.
The facts are scary enough without inventing allegations of fraud
Trump has promised to exempt Social Security benefits from income taxes, which would cost the program $2.3 trillion over a decade. The program is already on shaky financial footing as the nation ages. Trump has not said how he would replace those lost revenues if he can enact that new tax cut.
Budget hawks would argue that Social Security is an untenable scheme since it requires more new people to keep paying into the system, a reality that runs counter to falling birthrates and Trump’s effort to restrict immigration. Americans have about 10 years to fix Social Security. Even before Trump’s tax cut proposal, the current guess is that Social Security won’t be able to pay full benefits as soon as 2035 without action by Congress.
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