In his State of the Union address Donald Trump said that "1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159, and over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.” You could call that true but only in the most narrow, misleading way possible. By any reasonable standard, it’s a flat out lie but, as we know, Donald Trump lies the way some people chew gum.
I don’t know why Trump doesn’t sign an executive order that Social Security must immediately cut off benefits to anyone 115 or more years old. Easily ordered. Easily implemented. Get on with it!
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Effort is already underway to mark the majority of these folks as dead. And the Doge kids themselves have said during internal meetings that they haven't found anyone on the list that are collecting SS benefits. Elon also slightly backtracked the statement on Rogan saying the concern was these SSNs being used to collect other benefits, not SS. Problem is SSAs mission is not to be the truth police if you are not collecting SSA benefits. Could SSA do it? Sure, but it was not tasked to do it nor is it funded to do it.
Money paid to millions over age 100: In an extended claim, Trump said 4.7 million people who are at least 100 years old are still listed in the Social Security Administration’s database and that “money is being paid to many of them.” However, this claim needs context.
The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database. But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits.
Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, who was elevated to that post by the current Trump administration, tried to set the record straight in a February statement.
“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.
These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said.
The State of the Union address by Donald Trump leaves no doubt that SSA is on the road to privatization.
I don't understand the obsession with that data. Okay, they aren't deceased according to the database. But they are almost certainly deceased and not getting any benefits. SSA cannot mark them deceased without a report of death, i.e. SSA doesn't know when they died (or where, or even how). So SSA has already identified those over 115 and placed them in a non-payment status, unless proven otherwise.
Does the administration want SSA to post an arbitrary or random date of death with no corroborating report or evidence? Or does it want to hire a small army of contractors to investigate each one of those millions who are not deceased to determine that they are in fact deceased and provide an exact or 'ballpark' date of death? That would seem grossly cost inefficient and a waste of time. Not sure what the end game plan is beyond what has already been accomplished to prevent benefit payments.
We vent about his talk, but still no plan on how to stop the storm troopers. We need a better defense.
Ssa already has a policy that they don’t pay people over 115…. So maybe their data download just misinterpreted dates again. 🤷♀️
O’Malley had asked for a budget increase in fiscal 2025 to add at least 3,000 workers to the customer-service ranks, but it wasn’t approved.
Make no mistake: The starving of Social Security’s administrative resources, which is currently taking place under the guise of ferreting out fraud and waste, is no accident. It’s part of a decades-long Republican project aimed at undermining public confidence in the program.
The Trump acolytes have already taken an ax to some Social Security operations, as announced by Dudek — a former mid-level agency worker who stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of several managers who had dustups with Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit and by a delay in Senate confirmation of Commissioner-designate Frank Bisagnano, a banking and Wall Street veteran.
But that’s an area where hands-on contact between applicants and the agency is indispensable. Academic researchers reported in 2019 that the closing of field offices dealing with disability applications led to “a persistent 16% decline in the number of disability recipients in surrounding areas, with the largest effects for applicants with moderately severe conditions and low education levels.
The GOP brain trust has accepted the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud without devoting a moment’s thought to it. House Speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claimed Sunday on “Meet the Press” that Musk’s “algorithms crawling through the data” are “finding enormous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.”
There’s absolutely zero evidence for that. Can we trust Musk to find it? This is the guy whose claim that “millions” of people aged 150 or older were receiving payments was decisively debunked — the notion that benefits were going to people that old was merely an artifact of the software program used by the agency. No payments are going to anyone in that category; Social Security automatically ceases payments to anyone who has reached the age of 115. The chief bug in the system is Musk’s ignorance.
It’s as if Trump and Musk are intent on staging a natural experiment on whether Republicans can tick off or terrify 69 million Americans at one fell swoop by taking away their sustenance in old age or disability — and still win election.
They’re bound to learn, to the contrary, that there isn’t a federal program that Americans value more than Social Security. Are they dumb enough to try killing it? We shall see.
President Trump on Tuesday called for an end to people hundreds of years old collecting Social Security benefits — a claim his own administration has debunked.
Why it matters: Trump and his cost-cutters, like Elon Musk's DOGE, frequently make the claim in an attempt to justify the prospect of huge cuts to the Social Security Administration, if not the actual program itself.
Catch up quick: During an address to Congress, Trump cited supposed statistics showing the Social Security rolls are full of people who've lived longer than any human in history.
"Over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are aged over 160 years old," Trump said.
Trump went on to claim the database shows one person on the rolls aged 360 years — not long after the Mayflower landed in what's now the United States.
Yes, but: There's no evidence of hundreds of thousands of super-elderly people actually collecting benefits.
An audit by the Social Security Administration's inspector general, released in July 2024, did find more overpayments in fiscal 2023 than in the prior eight years, some $4.9 billion in total. But many of those benefits were for programs not related to the elderly.
In 2021 the auditors reported that SSA had paid benefits to about 24,000 dead people in total.
The intrigue: The Trump administration's own acting Social Security commissioner said two weeks ago there was no actual epidemic of centenarians collecting benefits.
"I also want to acknowledge recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security," Lee Dudek said in a Feb. 19 statement.
"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. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.
Part of the problem, according to computer scientists — the agency uses an older programming language for its databases called COBOL that doesn't handle dates quite like other languages.
As a result, programmers use placeholders and other shortcuts, many of which automatically assign people birthdates in the 19th century.
Trump also made light of the situation, calling out Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed a "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
"We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby," Trump said.
Do you know how to fight crime? Fire the police force. Oh wait. Now on a serious note, is there fraud occurring? Sure. Is it to the scale the immigrant billionaire alleges? No. Do I trust this current administration really cares to address it? HELL NO! They just want the headline to blame the public servants who are doing what they can to keep checks going out to the most vulnerable of our population. Merica!
What he said about Social Security payments has been repeatedly debunked - so the question isn’t whether he’s lying about this, the question is why.
What is this a pretext for? He and the GOP have long shown interest in going after Social Security. What are they going to try?
Answer--No. It's clear that they're going all in for privatization.
As someone who has actually touched records from date of births in the 1800s (ssa in the 40s had old people living back then too) and was working as a clerk as part of a program to prevent earnings from going on those records years ago at SSA, he does not know what theyre talking about. That’s the point, they know, they just don’t care. Or elon think he’s the smartest guy in the room and thinks he knows how to interpret what I spent a career learning. I would correct these conclusions if they came from new hire trainees.
It would be helpful if someone would put out for sharing with the general public a very brief but clear explanation about these old SSN's with a null DOD field on the numident. The public deserves to understand the truth.
It was despicable behavior by Trump, what he said about Social Security last night. He went on and on about people who were impossibly old, being on the Social Security database.
The damage done to SSA's reputation was immeasurable. This agency and program, which has helped countless millions of elderly and disabled Americans.
The clear (and totally false) implication,, was that these deceased people were still being issued benefits, which someone else was fraudulently receiving. . Until Trump and Musk rode to the rescue, saving the taxpayer billions.
A numident not having a date of death, in no way, shape or form, means that person is being issues benefits. It is clear that Trump and Musk are using the big lie strategy, to mislead the public on this..
Leland, you’ve got to help us here. I know you guys in OPI and OAFP prevented this kind of fraud. We are getting hammered by the public in the field and on the phones with people making this claim, saying we don’t know how to do our jobs, that we let illegals and dead people get their benefits etc. It makes us all look bad. Please put out another press release explaining this isn’t true. We’re begging you.
I suspect that he doesn’t sign an EO because he knows it isn’t necessary.
“GN 02602.578 Termination of Entitlement for Title II Beneficiaries Who are Age 115 or Older
Citations: 20 CFR 404.705 Failure to give requested evidence and 404.721; Evidence to presume a person is dead; Social Security Ruling 99-1pPolicy Interpretation Ruling Title II: Termination of Entitlement Based on Presumed Death
A. Overview of the age 115 or older termination process
Effective September 2015, the Social Security Administration (SSA) implemented an automated process in which the Regular Transcript Attainment and Selection Pass (RETAP) application selects records for which the Title II beneficiary is:
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Age 115 or older;
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In any current continuous suspense for seven years or more; and
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Entitled on a record where there are no other beneficiaries in a non-terminated status younger than the age of 115.
The Title II Redesign (T2R) system automatically selects and terminates entitlement to beneficiaries meeting the criteria in this section on a monthly basis using Ledger Account File (LAF) T9 and Reason for Suspension or Termination (RFST) of AGETRM.
For more information on this automated process, see SM 03020.380B.
NOTE:T2R does not issue a notice or payments for the T9 AGETRM termination action. In addition, T2R places Medicare for these beneficiaries in an inactive status.”
Etc.
I sheepishly admit when this misinformation first emerged, I initially thought some DOGE kid just didn’t understand the info s/he was looking at, thought it was a smoking gun, and ran with it.
However, by now, it’s been debunked by so many, including right-leaning outlets. A search engine and 10 minutes on the SSA website is all it took for me to find evidence that these statements are simply not true…and also that the lack of death info for people who are obviously no longer with us (and haven’t paid into or pulled from SS for decades) has been known for a decade. Once the DoGE website seemed to walk things back a smidge by saying they were “looking into” the claims, I thought they were trying bury it without expressly admitting they were wrong. (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.)
At this point, there’s zero chance that someone in the cabinet hasn’t figured out this is false and informed them. So, this misinformation has to be intentional. Perhaps they think painting SSA employees as “incompetent” or even criminal will lessen the backlash when they RIF a big chunk of us…?
Unfortunately, many people in this country seem to blindly believe anything that comes from their respective political parties, without doing their own research. It really sucks that so many hardworking people from SSA got thrown under the bus last night for a lie.
Amazing that Leland as part of the Office of Program Integrity did not catch all this earlier. What was he doing before Trump, Elon and the DOGE boys arrived. Guess he was sitting around for years wasting tax payer money on his salary and not doing his job.
"If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's Philosophy class is right down the hall." Indiana Jones Now stop for a moment. Okay, park the outrage and indignation just for a few. Hear me out.
We have maybe a month. One month to save SSA for ever. If the current pace of change is allowed to continue and deepen, SSA as we know it will cease to exist. So you need to focus before the damage is to great to recover from. They have removed staff and all opposition so they can do as they please with no pushback. They can and will eliminate the physical footprint, the institutional knowledge base will be lost and the changes to actual policy and payments will now start. Crippled and empty there will be nothing, absolutely nothing left to rebuild.
You are not going to be able to stop all this by playing fair and coloring inside the lines. You are going to have to fight fire with fire. My bet is that wont happen. My 27 year old son will not receive SSA, I may not even ever see a check, they may change it all to something else even before I retire. I started making plans for retirement when I worked for the agency and processed retirement claims in the DO. I saw then how little the payout was, I should survive okay, but it dont think others will. I am sorry folks but SSA is done as we have known it and likely is not going to survive.
It wouldn’t matter. Trump’s supporters are irrational cultists whose brainwashing can’t be deprogrammed without intensive individual mental health treatment and other interventions. These people are America’s equivalent of the old ladies who march in Leningrad waving USSR flags.
The convicted felon is running the same playbook.
A baseless claim that illegal immigrants from Haiti have been eating domestic pets in a small Ohio city has been repeated by Donald Trump.
During ABC's presidential debate, Trump said: "In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there."
But city officials have told BBC Verify there have been “no credible reports" that this has actually happened.
How could someone who was a leader in SSA’s fraud office be allowed to run the agency when that office let this massive fraud and millions of dead people get benefits. Even his Wikipedia page points this out that he isn’t denying this fraud exists but used to be the boss of anti fraud? Is one of the bureaucrats getting rich through fraud of my tax dollars?
You have a vivid imagination. Nothing said in the speech, expressed or implied, suggested privatization.
The game plan is to claim some ridiculous amount of fraud to justify further actions to degrade or eliminate Social Security.
His reply...silence...he's compliant in killing Social Security.
11:13am Interesting Leland. Then what is Antonio Gracias, CEO and chief investment officer of Valor Equity Partners (and also Musk’s close friend) doing at SSA with DOGE? Advising on the playbook for private equity investing?
Gracias and Musk are close friends and business associates with a decades-long relationship. Gracias has invested in startups founded by Musk's family members, and Musk and his brother have been limited partners in Valor funds.
Gracias has been described as a "major Musk loyalist" and has said, "I am 100 percent with you, Elon, to the mattresses no matter what.
Does he really believe that no one in the country is 100 years or older? Maybe he should have paid closer attention at Pres. Carter's funeral?
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