As the Department of Government Efficiency has pursued access to sensitive personal information held by the Social Security Administration, Elon Musk and President Trump have said they suspect tens of millions of dead people may be receiving fraudulent payments from the government.
The claim, which would presumably require living people to ultimately cash those checks, is rooted in an arcane problem: Among the more than 500 million unique Social Security numbers the agency has ever issued, there are millions of people in its records who were born more than a century ago but who have no recorded deaths.
That nettlesome issue, however, is largely unrelated to the question of who receives Social Security checks today. The agency publishes public data about those beneficiaries, including by age. And there simply aren’t tens of millions of people receiving retirement checks who appear over the age of 100. There are at most 90,000 of them:
And according to the Census Bureau, there are about 85,000 people in America 100 or older.
The above chart covers nearly 52 million Americans receiving retired worker benefits in December 2024. These are the people who paid into the Social Security system over their working lives, and who now collect what most people think of as “Social Security.” The Social Security Administration makes a smaller number of payments to dependents and widowed survivors of those retirees, and to disabled workers and their dependents under a different trust fund. The total number of people receiving benefits last year was about 68 million.
The table Mr. Musk shared on social media over the weekend showed about 20 million people in the agency’s database over the age of 100 and with no known death, including 3.5 million people in their 120s, and 1.3 million people in their 150s. The numbers he mentioned appeared to be from a system called the Numident, the Rosetta Stone-like computer database that contains basic information on every Social Security number ever issued. It covers a far larger universe of people than all Americans currently receiving Social Security checks.
The S.S.A. has also already concluded that the group of Americans receiving payments contains few people who should probably be considered dead.
The agency’s inspector general found in a 2023 report that nearly 19 million people in the Numident appeared over 100 years old and did not have a recorded death. The S.S.A. concluded that “almost none” of them were receiving payments from the agency — in fact, that was part of why the agency argued it wasn’t worth the expense to try to clean up information about people who largely died before the advent of electronic records.
“Elon Musk did not discover this problem in the Numident,” said Kathleen Romig, the director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a former adviser at the S.S.A. “Even to call it a problem is exaggerating. It’s an issue. As the I.G. report makes clear, it’s not a problem,” she added, in the sense that people are not receiving benefits.
“This is a propagandist looking for something out of the ordinary,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
There are other potential issues of fraud stemming from people who have never been recorded as dead. It might be easier, for one, to use their stolen Social Security numbers (to ends other than collecting Social Security checks). The data discrepancies can also cause erroneous payments in other federal benefits systems that depend on the Social Security database to ferret out inaccurate or unreported deaths.
The S.S.A. also has other problems with improper payments, including overpaying real-life beneficiaries who don’t accurately report their income or work status. While those improper payments add up to billions of dollars annually, they amount to less than 1 percent of what the agency spends on benefits every year.
Mr. Musk has suggested he can find something much larger. And on Tuesday, Mr. Trump ran with that idea. During a news conference at the White House, he took out a piece of paper that appeared to contain the numbers Mr. Musk posted on social media over the weekend and started rattling them off.
“Wow, I wonder if people are getting paid with all this,” he said.
The White House did not respond to questions asking how to reconcile Mr. Musk’s numbers with the S.S.A.’s own public data.
