 "A Social Security card is displayed October 12, 2021, in Tigard, Oregon, US. File Image/AP")
Billionaire entrepreneur and United States special government employee Elon Musk has once again turned heads with claims that his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has uncovered massive fraud within the US Social Security Administration (SSA).
Musk alleges that millions of payments are being made to individuals over 150 years old, calling it “the biggest fraud in history.” However, experts and existing government audits suggest that the reality is far more nuanced.
Musk first made these claims during an Oval Office press conference, stating a “cursory examination of Social Security” revealed “crazy things.”
“We’ve got people in there that are 150 years old,” Musk said on February 11. “Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t, OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. … I think they’re probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous, one of the two.”
While the remarks gained traction on social media — especially on Musk’s platform X — they have been widely challenged by experts.
The role of COBOL & the SSA’s outdated systems
Computer programmers have pointed out that Musk’s claim may be rooted in a misunderstanding of how Social Security’s antiquated coding system, COBOL, functions. This decades-old language lacks a built-in date type, leading to an unusual default reference date of May 20, 1875, reports WIRED.
As a result, any missing or incomplete birthdate in SSA records may be assigned this reference point, making individuals appear to be over 150 years old.
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The Social Security Administration (SSA) itself has acknowledged that its database contains millions of records for deceased individuals, but an official report from its inspector general in 2023 clarified that “almost none” of these individuals actually receive benefits.
Additionally, since 2015, SSA policy mandates that benefits automatically stop when a recipient reaches 115 years of age.
The reality of Social Security fraud
Despite Musk’s sweeping allegations, the SSA’s own audits provide a clearer picture of the extent of fraudulent or improper payments. Between 2015 and 2022, SSA issued $71.8 billion in improper payments — amounting to less than 1 per cent of the total benefits disbursed over that period.
The vast majority of these improper payments were overpayments to living individuals rather than fraudulent claims by the deceased.
A July 2024 inspector general report estimated that while some payments were made to deceased individuals, most resulted from outdated or incomplete records rather than systemic fraud.
Furthermore, a Treasury pilot programme in early 2024 recovered more than $31 million in improper federal payments — including, but not limited to, Social Security benefits.
During a press briefing in Florida, US President Donald Trump echoed Musk’s concerns, stating, “We have millions and millions of people over 100 years old receiving Social Security benefits. They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent.”
He also claimed, without evidence, that one person in the system was listed as 360 years old.
Is Musk’s “biggest fraud in history” claim justified?
Musk’s post on X, showing a database listing over 20 million people aged 100 or older, has been criticised for misinterpreting the data. The SSA maintains extensive records of individuals who have died, but that does not mean these individuals are actively receiving benefits.
For instance, an SSA audit in 2023 revealed that approximately 18.9 million Social Security numbers belonged to individuals born before 1920 but were not marked as deceased.
However, nearly all of them had not received benefits or reported income in over 50 years, indicating that they were, in all likelihood, long deceased.
In response to Musk’s claims, economist Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute explained that many Social Security numbers of individuals over 100 were being used by undocumented immigrants to contribute to, rather than withdraw from, the system.
“By all means, clean up SSA and mark those people as deceased. But the cost of doing so is less revenue going into Social Security,” Nowrasteh said, quoted by New York Post.
The SSA has stated that updating and maintaining a fully accurate death record would cost upwards of $9 million — a sum that Congress has not allocated to the agency. Given these challenges, experts argue that SSA’s current error rate of 0.84 per cent is among the lowest of any government or private insurance programme.
The bigger picture: Government waste & mismanagement
Beyond Social Security, the issue of government waste and inefficiencies has been a longstanding concern. Musk’s Doge initiative aims to identify and eliminate unnecessary spending across federal agencies.
However, critics argue that the initiative has been reckless, potentially jeopardising sensitive data and making misleading claims without fully understanding the complexity of government systems.
Former National Security Agency executive-turned-whistleblower Thomas Drake warned of the risks associated with Doge’s approach, telling WIRED, “Doge going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records.”
Despite these warnings, Musk has continued to double down on his claims, stating on X that “there are FAR more ‘eligible’ Social Security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
The SSA’s outdated technology and database quirks have contributed to misunderstandings about the true nature of its records, leading to misinformation about how benefits are distributed.
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With inputs from agencies