President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, in their hunt for “fraud, waste and abuse” in the federal government, are falsely implying millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security benefits, experts told ABC News.
It started in the Oval Office last week when Musk — facing reporters for the first time since the Department of Government Efficiency began its aggressive overhaul of the federal government — said he found “crazy things” in the Social Security system, including, he said, people who are “150 years old.”
The billionaire has only built on that claim on social media, including screenshots of data he said shows millions of people marked as “alive” in the Social Security system when they clearly can’t be.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he wrote in one post.
Then, on Tuesday, Trump repeated many of the same numbers Musk put out as he read from an extensive list at a news conference in Mar-a-Lago.
“Now, the big thing is, how many of these people got paid? Where are they getting paid? Where are they getting paid? How many of them were getting paid Social Security, because that’s — if that’s the case, it’s a massive fraud,” Trump, indicating shock, told reporters.
Social Security policy experts and economists told ABC News that they are getting it wrong, contending Musk is misreading the agency’s records system.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has multiple databases, including one that gets sent to the Treasury Department each month outlining who is receiving payments.
According to agency statistics, of the 67 million people who receive Social Security benefits, only 0.1% are over the age of 100.
“So, when they’re throwing around numbers like tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, well there’s only 67 million total. What are they talking about? Half the people are actually dead? The numbers are so ridiculous. It’s not true,” said Kathleen Romig, the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
SSA does make some improper payments, but they are not widespread (roughly 1%) and most of the mistakes made are overpayments to living beneficiaries, according to a July 2024 inspector’s general report. That report found from 2015 through 2022, the SSA made $71.8 billion in improper payments. The agency issues $1 trillion in benefits every year.
Another database, experts said, is called Numident and contains a record of every person who has ever been assigned a Social Security number. There are people in the system, they said, who have died but don’t have a date of death recorded because they lived long before electronic records were established.
This data set, experts said, has nothing to do with monthly payments but appears to be very likely where Musk is getting information that there are millions of people ages 100 to 369 in the system.
Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said it is “transparently obvious that he’s misinterpreting or misrepresenting” the data but noted Musk is not “showing his work.”
Musk has not explicitly said where he is getting the data he is posting to social media.
Still, his insinuations that the presence of such information within SSA is nefarious or new is also misleading, experts said.
The government has known the Numident system is flawed in this way for years, according to audits. A 2023 inspector general’s report found nearly 19 million people born before 1920 who do not have death information in the record.
The SSA decided not to address discrepancies because of how much it would cost to fix (upwards of $9 million) and the “limited benefit” it would have on the agency, the report noted.
Romig, who previously worked in the Social Security Administration, also emphasized there are multiple checks in place to prevent deceased individuals from getting payments. The agency has a policy to automatically stop payments at the age of 115, and after a certain age they check to see that older beneficiaries are still using Medicare benefits.
This isn’t the first time Musk has spread false or misleading information. In the Oval Office last week, he backtracked on a claim spread prolifically by the Trump administration that USAID was sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza and Hamas. In fact, the condoms were sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza as part of an HIV prevention measure.
“Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
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