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President Donald Trump incorrectly interpreted data shared by Elon Musk when he falsely claimed on Feb. 18 that “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receive improper benefits from Social Security. In fact, only about 89,000 people aged 99 or older received benefits from Social Security last year.
Improper payments are a legitimate concern for the Social Security Administration. Internal audits found that some deceased individuals were still listed as living, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security benefits being wrongly disbursed in the past. However, the number of dead recipients still being sent benefits is likely in the thousands, not the millions.
The Trump administration’s public scrutiny of improper Social Security payments began on Feb. 11, when Musk spoke during the signing of an executive order, “The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” During his remarks, Musk claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security” data conducted by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, identified “people in there that are 150 years old.”
“Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t, OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out. So, that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous — one of the two. And then there’s a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information,” said Musk, whom the White House has identified as a senior adviser to the president.
Musk followed these remarks with a series of posts on X, his social media platform. In one post on Feb. 16, he shared a screenshot of a spreadsheet that he said listed “the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!” The spreadsheet denotes that the Social Security database categorizes nearly 21 million people over the age of 99 as alive.
At a Feb. 18 press briefing, Trump claimed that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “If you take all those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off of Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90 but not 200.”
To evaluate Musk’s and Trump’s claims, we reviewed a series of reports published by the Office of Audit in the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General. Overall, while Musk is correct that tens of millions of dead Americans are still listed as alive in Social Security databases, only a tiny fraction of these mislabeled individuals still receive benefits. While inaccurate data maintenance and incorrect payments to dead individuals are problems for the SSA, Trump and Musk have vastly exaggerated the scale of improper benefit payouts.
Outdated Records in SSA Database
A July 2023 report published by the Office of Audit found that there were 18.9 million people with Social Security numbers born in 1920 or earlier with no record of their deaths. Of these, 13.3 million were born in 1906 or earlier. The vast majority of these records are clearly outdated.
The Pew Research Center estimated that there were 101,000 Americans who were 100 and older in 2024. (As of Jan. 5, the world’s oldest living person was believed to be a 117-year-old Brazilian nun.)
To explain the large-scale inaccuracy in the Social Security database, also known as the Numident, the Office of Audit report says, “We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago — before the use of electronic death reporting.”
According to the SSA’s website, the agency receives “death reports from many sources, including family members, funeral homes, financial institutions, postal authorities, States and other Federal agencies.” The website also says, “It is important to note our records are not a comprehensive record of all deaths in the country.”
However, very few of these dead individuals incorrectly labeled as alive still receive Social Security benefits. The internal audit report finds that of the 18.9 million people with Social Security numbers, “approximately 18.4 million (98 percent) numberholders are not currently receiving SSA payments and have not had earnings reported to SSA in the past 50 years.”
Among this group of 18.9 million, the report found that only 44,000, or 0.2%, were still receiving Social Security benefits. The report did not specify how many of these benefit payments were believed to be improper. A portion of the 44,000 recipients were likely living Americans over the age of 103 who continued to receive payments in July 2023. (It’s worth noting that the U.S. Census doesn’t track population data for individual age cohorts over the age of 100, so we’re not sure how many living Americans are age 103 and older.)
The Office of Audit provided a more specific estimate of improper payments to deceased individuals in a November 2021 report. That report concluded that the “SSA issued approximately $298 million in payments to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status.” The report also noted that while the SSA did recover some of the funds, $214 million of the improper payments remained unaccounted for.
A report published by the Office of Audit in July 2024 identified that the total rate of improper Social Security payments was 0.84%, constituting $71.8 billion between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. However, the report noted that the vast majority of these improper payments were overpayments to living people, not fraudulent payments to dead individuals.
Across all age groups, there were about 54 million total recipients of Social Security retirement benefits in 2024. Among those aged 99 and older, the SSA distributed payments to 89,106 individuals in December 2024. In total, that group of centenarians received more than $158 million in benefits in December 2024. As these internal audit reports show, a small portion of these payments were likely disbursed to dead Americans wrongly recorded as alive in the database.
In a statement published on Feb. 19, Lee Dudek, the newly appointed acting commissioner of the SSA, explained that the data reported by Musk does not reveal millions of dead individuals who continue to receive 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,” he 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. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Richard J. Pierce Jr., a law professor at George Washington University, told us that while Musk pointed out a legitimate concern, such issues aren’t as vast as Musk’s comments on Feb. 11 suggested. “I don’t have a doubt that there are dead people who are getting Social Security payments,” Pierce said. “When you’ve got an agency with such a massive task, with scores of millions of people that they’re sending money to all the time, they’re going to make mistakes. … So, it’s not like these circumstances are nonexistent. It’s just that they don’t add up to a trillion dollars.”
Addressing Problems in the System
In the 2021 report, the Office of Audit said that dead individuals continued to receive improper benefits either “because SSA (1) technicians did not follow existing policy; (2) had inadequate controls; and (3) policy does not consistently instruct technicians to search for, or recognize, all available sources of death information.”
The Office of Audit has also cautioned that improper death records in the Social Security database could expose the agency to fraud. In the 2023 report, the office cited the example of “a man [who] opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the Numident.”
To address these concerns, the Office of Audit’s 2021 report offered a series of recommendations to “develop additional enhancements to reduce the number and time deceased beneficiaries remain in suspended payment status.”
In response to the Office of Audit’s recommendations, the 2023 report noted that the “SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs.”
The federal government already possesses other countermeasures to inhibit improper Social Security payments to dead individuals.
As of September 2015, the Social Security database automatically designates individuals aged 115 and older as deceased. Additionally, a pilot program launched by the Treasury Department in 2023 has recovered $31 million in improper federal payments to deceased individuals, both from Social Security and from other government agencies. The program projects to recoup $215 million by December 2026.
Determining the Cause of Data Inaccuracies
In response to Musk’s claims, numerous media organizations speculated that the millions of individuals born in the 19th century but listed as alive in the Numident resulted from a coding error. This theory, first reported by WIRED, is based on the quirks of the decades-old coding language COBOL. As of 2016, the SSA’s database relied on millions of lines of code written in COBOL. Musk himself complained in a Feb. 12 post on X that “the government is literally still running COBOL code that was written before DOS 1.0.”
WIRED reporter David Gilbert said, “Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre. These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.” Gilbert concluded that Musk’s findings were “very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.”
Without access to the SSA database, we have no way of verifying whether the cause of the inaccurate data is a quirk in COBOL. However, from what we can gather from public data, it seems unlikely that this explanation accounts for most of the inaccuracies in the Numident. The Office of Audit’s 2023 report identifying nearly 19 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier mislabeled as alive does not mention coding errors or COBOL. Instead, the report concluded that the inaccuracies resulted from the SSA’s failure to “annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies.”
Furthermore, if COBOL coding quirks were the primary reason why DOGE’s audit identified millions of dead individuals incorrectly listed as alive, one would expect that Musk’s findings would report a large concentration of individuals with ages reported as 149 or 150 to reflect the 1875 reference date. However, in the data shared by Musk, only about 6.5% of the individuals listed as alive aged 100 and older belonged to the 150-159 age category, and only 17% belonged to the 140-149 age category.
The far more likely explanation for the inaccuracies in the Numident is the one offered by the Office of Audit, in which the SSA possessed inadequate controls to update the database with new deaths, and the agency determined that the benefits of fixing the error were not worth the costs.
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