In Avram Davidson and Ward Moore’s novel Joyleg, some modern federal bureaucrats launch an investigation into a possible case of fraud: The titular character is still collecting an $11 a month veteran’s pension…from the Revolutionary War.
But according to DOGE’s audit of the Social Security database, there are over 15 million supercentenarians (those 110 years are older) for whom the death flag has been set to FALSE.
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
Elon Musk was expected to remain offline Sunday night into Monday morning as his xAI team prepared for the highly anticipated debut of “Grok 3,” scheduled for release Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST. However, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with streamlining the federal bureaucracy, returned very excited to his social media platform around midnight, unveiling what “might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Musk posted a spreadsheet of Social Security Administration data showing “numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”
The data shows that 20.789 million Americans are collecting social security benefits over the age of 100. Drilling down into the age buckets, benefits are still being paid out to folks over 140!
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk emphasized.
One X user pointed out that 2023 data showed the US population at around 334.9 million. However, Musk’s data (likely from DOGE’s ‘Big Balls’ analyst) shows 394 million names in the Social Security Administration database.
Musk responded: “Yes, there are FAR more “eligible” social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
This doesn't include the potential fraud from fake beneficiaries below age 100 (e.g., people in their 70s/80s/90s). By my math and adjusting for a normalized age distribution, this could bring the total amount of fraud to $793B per year. pic.twitter.com/Wqmab7mOW1
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) February 17, 2025
How corrupt is our government that no one looked into this fraud long ago?
At the very least, reporters should be quite keen to interview the one person in the 360-369 age bracket, to ask them about living through The French and Indian War and get their health and longevity tips…
Tags: Budget, Crime, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, Social Security, waste, Welfare State
Regarding the population numbers and Social Security, many citizens on Social Security retire in foreign countries and many people who are not citizens who worked here legally can get Social Security benefits. All of them have Social Security numbers. That does not mean there is no fraud, rather that it is less than the numbers show at first blush.
Democrats will start complaining later this afternoon that the unelected Musk and his merry band are violating the sacred privacy rights of these supercentenarians.
Democrats react to this latest revelation: “How dare Musk and his unelected child slaves violate the sacred privacy of our revered super-senior citizens”.
I don’t think those numbers reflect the number of people collecting Social Security benefits. I think they are just the number of people Social Security has flagged “not deceased” – and by default alive. (There are not 100,000 million people aged 30-49 collecting Social Security, for example, but there are likely that many on Social Security roles whose death flag is set to FALSE.)
I think we will find the number of supercentarians actually collecting SS far lower than the number flagged as alive.
Pardon my French, but I saw something on Reddit (I did try and find it again this a.m., but failed) that this is related COBOL’s default setting of, I think, 1875 for a birth year if it’s unknown. In other words, it sounds like the variable $BIRTHYEAR is initialized to 1875, and for a certain number of people it’s never changed because their birth year is unknown.
So, someone being 150 years old might not be a certain sign of fraud, if that Reddit comment (in a programmer subreddit, maybe) is correct.
And yes, apparently, COBOL is what Social Security uses and I don’t know if it’s still taught.
Follow up: Long story short, COBOL doesn’t have DATE types, but maybe Social Security has 1875 as a default DOB due to year it started. See: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31288/did-missing-corrupt-dates-in-cobol-default-to-1875-05-20
Robert Sterling: “If DOGE’s numbers are right, $522B—1/3 of ALL spending on Social Security each year—is fraudulent.”
How often have we been warned that Social Security will soon become insolvent? The only solution is to raise taxes or reduce benefits.
But this seems to be a false choice. A better approach would emphasize reducing the number of fraudulent beneficiaries. Otherwise, any tax increases would be like putting more coins into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
I’m willing to believe some of this is due to poor data entry or software glitches, but to believe the left’s spin that they are ALL legitimate recipients defies the imagination.
Even if that were the case, the 150-159 segment in Musk’s data only account for 1.3 million people. That means the vast majority of dubious supercentenarians still have no plausible explanation beyond incompetence and fraud.
Beyond the fact that the alleged COBOL problem, as Me. Person points out, doesn’t come anywhere near explaining the total number of bad records, OK, great, DOGE’s diligent labor has discovered a major error in the SS database that is costing billions a year and can be fixed! Contrary to what the lefty grifters are trying to tell you, this is not a BAD thing.
“Regarding the population numbers and Social Security, many citizens on Social Security retire in foreign countries and many people who are not citizens who worked here legally can get Social Security benefits. All of them have Social Security numbers. That does not mean there is no fraud, rather that it is less than the numbers show at first blush.”
The Census counts people, not citizens (which is another problem, but that’s a different post), so the second part of your objection is already accounted for.