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Trump Press Secretary Hit With Embarrassing Fact-Check on Fraud Claim
Karoline Leavitt claimed “tens of millions” of dead people were receiving social security payments.
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Donald Trump’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt boosted billionaire Elon Musk’s fantastical allegations of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration (SSA)—and got called out for it.
“President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” Leavitt said during an appearance on Fox News Monday.
Leavitt said DOGE was seeking to “identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living, and should no longer be receiving that money.”
She claimed she had spent the day battling with “fake news reporters” who had been “fearmongering” about Musk. Earlier that day, Michelle King, SSA’s acting commissioner, resigned due to a clash with the unelected bureaucrat, who recently gained access to the agency’s databases that contain troves of sensitive data belonging to American citizens.
For someone with mere “suspicions,” as Leavitt put it, Musk has been steadily ramping up his public claims about fraud at the Social Security Administration. Last week, he claimed that DOGE’s review of the SSA had uncovered people marked as 150 years old who had been receiving social security benefits.
“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.… So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead,” Musk said during an appearance in the Oval Office.
He repeated the claim on X Sunday, attaching a chart of how many people in different age brackets had received social security benefits, suggesting that more than 16 million people whose ages were marked between 110 and 370 years old were receiving social security benefits.
“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,” Musk wrote.
In total, the chart inexplicably alleged that 400 million people were receiving social security benefits, while the SSA’s website states that in 2024, there were only 68,455,973 social security recipients.
But that’s not the only part of Musk’s fraud claims that don’t quite pass the smell check.
DOGE didn’t discover fraud, but a filing error that was already made public in a 2023 report from the Inspector General’s Office. The office found that the Social Security databases, specifically the Death Master File (DMF) and the Numident, a file containing identifiable information for each person issued a Social Security number, were not always updated when someone died.
The Numident contained the names of more than 18 million people born before 1920 who had no death information. “Death information missing from the Numident and the DMF hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent and detect fraud and misuse,” the report authors said. This isn’t the first time that Musk has claimed DOGE discovered something that was actually publicly available.
Crucially, this so-called discovery doesn’t necessarily indicate fraud.
The 2023 report found that 98 percent of social security numberholders aged 100 years or older were not receiving benefits. Ultimately, the report determined that the system didn’t need to be updated because it was too expensive. Musk should like that kind of thing, right?
SSA has other means of combatting this issue. Since 2015, the SSA has had a policy of automatically terminating entitlement to beneficiaries who are “age 115, or older,” “in any current continuous suspense for seven years or more” or “entitled on a record where there are no other beneficiaries in a non-terminated status younger than the age of 115.”
Experts have suggested another possible explanation for the wide-ranging ages of beneficiaries is a quirk of COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language, which might use May 20, 1875, as a reference point in its coding. A COBOL system might indicate that anyone with a missing birthdate in the SSA’s database was 150 years old, which could explain Musk’s assertion about the droves of centenarians receiving social security benefits, according to Wired.
All of these holes render Leavitt’s desperate attempts to back up Musk’s outrageous claims all the more ridiculous.
“This is absurd, corrosive nonsense,” wrote journalist James Surowiecki in a post on X Tuesday. “There are not tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security checks, and the only reason Leavitt is out here making these hysterical claims is because Elon Musk misunderstood a table of numbers.”
Even one right-wing commentator was left questioning Musk’s math.
“Sounds like WH may have misinterpreted DOGE data on social security… it seems we are NOT PAYING these benefits… rather, these people (age 150 and whatever) are just on the rolls despite no checks going out,” Trish Regan wrote on X Tuesday.
“If that’s the case, this is not the huge find that people hoped for,” she said. “While social security records SHOULD be cleaned up, it appears this finding will have little savings effect since the checks weren’t going out. Looks like the team got out over its skis ????on this one. Sure—clean up the records, but it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY.”
In another post, she urged Musk and DOGE to “triple check the math.”
 has announced she will not support President Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to serve as director of the FBI, %23nato)
