In the years after 2020, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) found that tens of thousands of unemployment claims for people who were too old or too young were granted.
In an article on X, Elon Musk’s group said that their first look at jobless claims since 2020 showed that a lot of them were from people over 115 years old and between the ages of 1 and 5.
DOGE reported that “24.5k people over 115 years old claimed $59M in benefits” whereas “28k people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254 million in benefits” – “9.7k people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69M in benefits.” It said, “In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”
The Labour Department revealed that millions of dollars in unemployment benefits went to people who were not who they said they were, as found by DOGE.
Labour Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told FOX Business, “This is another amazing discovery by the DOGE team. They found nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment payments.” “The Labour Department is determined to get back the tax money that was stolen from Americans.” We are going to catch these thieves and keep working to get rid of big scams. Accountability is here.
DOGE has done similar things with Social Security to get rid of people with numbers who are listed as being 120 years old or older from records.
The group said it had marked as dead 9.9 million Social Security numberholders who were 120 years or older, with another 2 million still to go as of late March.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk said that Social Security benefits have been given to people well past the age of 100. In response, acting Social Security Commissioner Lee Dudek said, “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.” There’s no guarantee that these people are getting benefits.
People have said bad things about DOGE and the Social Security Administration (SSA) because of mistakes made when living recipients were mistakenly marked as dead, which stopped their benefits.
The SSA later said that even though they get millions of reports of deaths every year, “less than one-third of one percent are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected.”
“Instances when a person is erroneously reported as deceased to Social Security can be devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children,” SSA said. “Benefits are stopped in the short term which can cause financial hardship until fixed and benefits restored, and the process to prove an erroneous death will always seem too long and challenging.”
People whose Social Security number has been wrongly marked as dead should call their local Social Security office right away and “be prepared to bring at least one piece of current (not expired) original form of identification.”