Dead people vote AND collect Social Security benefits

Mike Johnson: "What he's [Musk's] finding with his algorithms going through the data of the Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse."

Ted Cruz (who else?): "More than 13 million people on the records receiving benefits who are over 119 years old."

Leave it to Mike Johnson to incessantly insinuate falsehoods. And leave it to Ted Cruz to make the absurdity ("receiving benefits") explicit.

Actually, what "his" (Musk's) "algorithms" are finding is that "he" doesn't understand the data—which is a disturbing, recurring theme. The guy who's hacking up the government has no idea what he's doing.

So let me put all howling, hyperventilating, gullible right-wing minds at ease. A recent AP headline said, comfortingly, "Tens of millions of dead people are not getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims."

Sorry, Ted.

Trump, of course, disagrees with the AP, and not just about the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” Trump added. [my italics -mb]

No, we don't. And they're not.

“If you take all of those millions of people off 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 years old,” Trump said. He also said that there’s one person in the system listed as 360 years old. [my italics -mb]

Leave it to Trump to come up with a 360-year-old "listed" beneficiary. Bet that's a big hit in outraged yokeldom. (In a recent interview, David Brooks said our differences are "fundamentally about culture and respect." Sigh. How does one respect willful ignorance?)

Let's start with a high-level look. According to audits, Social Security's rate of "improper payments" (which would include paying dead people) from 2015 to 2022 was 0.83%. (That's $71.8 billion in improper payments divided by $8.6 trillion in total payments. If you don't do numbers, that's less than 1 percent.)

That rate is actually quite good. In the private sector, accounts payable errors tend to run a bit higher. 80% of companies that remit over 500 payments a month report an error rate of 1% or higher, and 44% of those had an error rate over 3%.

(And interestingly, especially if you think the private sector is the standard by which the government should be measured, life insurance fraud in the U.S. costs the insurance industry $10-20 billion annually. Fraud across all insurance sectors is estimated at $308 billion annually.)

Sure, Social Security's "improper payments" have a large (but not that large) absolute dollar value. How could they not? Social Security is the old-age social insurance program for the entire country with, as I said, $8.6 trillion in payments from 2015 to 2022. The "improper payments" (of every kind) annual average over that period was $7.2 billion—not quite chump change, but not earth shattering either, especially compared to the insurance industry figures I provided above. (If you want to go after real money, instead of gutting the IRS's enforcement arm, as is currently happening, empower it to pursue tax cheats as the previous administration was trying to do.)

According to a July 2024 inspector general's report, the vast majority of "improper payments" were not to deceased persons at all, but to living beneficiaries. But some minority were indeed dead. A November 2021 audit estimated that approximately $298 million (the horror!) in payments were issued to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries, and about $80 million of that was subsequently recovered.

If I may take editorial license at this point, it matters greatly which reality you live in, which is the fundamental theme in my epistemology. How can we properly govern ourselves if we don't know what's real?

Trump's reality is that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, whereas the actual number is 67,000. (Somehow Ted Cruz thinks there are 13 million alleged beneficiaries on the books who are over 119 years old and getting paid. Poor Ted.) 

According to demographers, there are approximately 101,000 centenarians living in the U.S. (Google says 90,000 as of 2021, but the number is growing rapidly.) So just two-thirds of persons age 100 or over are receiving Social Security benefits. I wonder: Why so few?

Trump said "if you take all of those millions of [dead] people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security." Translation: Because the fraud is so enormous, all you need to do to ensure Social Security's solvency is to quit paying dead people. It's as easy as that! Who knew? (To reiterate, the 2021 audit found 24,000 deceased beneficiaries at a cost of a couple of hundred million dollars in improper payments. Not quite enough dollars there to save Social Security, I'm afraid.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the president didn't spew ignorant nonsense? Alas, that's too much to ask.

As for Musk not understanding the data, he is multiply confused. Part of Musk's problem is that Social Security's ancient software is written in the COBOL programming language (which was on its way out when I took a course in it in 1984), which led to certain puzzling (to Musk) conventions in how the data is coded. Part of the problem is that Social Security doesn't have death records for a goodly number of people (which we shouldn't find surprising), but that doesn't mean they're receiving benefits, as Trump's acting commissioner recently noted. The system is coded in such a way that, when complete data is not available, it looks as if there are impossibly old (eg., 150-year-old) persons on the records, but in actuality nobody is sending "them" money. (Sorry, Ted.) Persons who know and work with the data understand what's going on. Musk doesn't. And by the way, the Social Security payment system is programmed to automatically stop sending payments to people when they reach 115 years old. (Sorry again, Ted.)

All this has been widely reported in recent weeks, with numerous debunkings of all the false claims. That didn't stop Trump from talking nonsense in his Tuesday night speech, or Mike Johnson disseminating disinformation as only he can.

Here's the thing. You have a choice of whether you live in a made-up reality, or the actual one. The persons running and ransacking our government live in a made-up reality. Which one do you live in?

 Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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