Social Security has spent weeks clearing out bad data from its records, sifting out millions of cases where Social Security number holders were over the age of 120.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced the ongoing records cleanup on social media, saying the process has taken weeks.
“For the past 3 weeks, Social Security has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 7 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased. Another ~5 million to go,” DOGE announced on social media.
The effort comes after billionaire Elon Musk, the face of DOGE, highlighted the huge number of Social Security numbers assigned to Americans with unlikely or impossible ages.
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“The logic flow diagram for the Social Security system looks INSANE. No one person actually knows how it works. The payment files that move between Social Security and Treasury have significant inconsistencies that are not reconciled. It’s wild,” Musk declared in February.
“There are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history,” he added.
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Musk and DOGE have not stated that Social Security payments were going out to every “eligible” numberholder, but Musk has argued that the inaccurate data may have caused more indirect government waste.
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Acting Social Security Commissioner Lee Dudek responded to scrutiny from Musk last month by saying, “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. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Critics of Musk’s effort have pointed to instances where the Social Security Administration incorrectly classified someone as deceased, cutting off their payments while a person was still alive.
The SSA addressed such cases in its own statement last week, explaining that while the agency receives millions of death reports each year, “less than one-third of 1 percent are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected.”
Fox Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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