FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk speaks as his son X ? A-12 and U.S. President Donald Trump listen in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
As Elon Musk continues to look for ways to cut federal spending through the Department of Government Efficiency, he has raised questions as to just how long some Social Security beneficiaries have been receiving payments.
With a “cursory examination” of Social Security, “we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old now,” Musk said during a Feb. 11 CNN interview.
In recent days, he re-upped those claims on social media platform X. “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk posted on Feb. 16.
Just because the Social Security Administration has millions of people in its database who are very elderly and not marked as deceased does not necessarily mean benefits are fraudulently being paid, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a public policy research organization.
“The amount of fraud is likely miniscule,” Nowrasteh said.
When asked for comment, the White House provided an email statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt citing a 2024 investigation that found the Social Security Administration made about $71.8 billion in improper payments out of almost $8.6 trillion in benefits paid from fiscal years 2015 to 2022.
Notably, deceased beneficiaries were one of multiple reasons that may prompt improper payments, according to the report from the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General.
“The Social Security Administration is now working to find even more waste, fraud and abuse in the Administration’s whole-of-government effort to protect American taxpayers,” Leavitt said in the emailed statement.
This week, acting Social Security commissioner Michelle King stepped down over reported concerns over DOGE access to sensitive data at the agency. In a new statement released Wednesday, Lee Dudek, who is now acting commissioner, said the agency plans to prioritize transparency and protect benefits and information.
“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,” Dudek said. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
The Social Security Administration did not respond to requests for further comment.
Data doesn’t influence benefit payments, expert says
In recent days, Musk has shared data on the numbers of Social Security beneficiaries by age on X. Experts say the data likely came from the Social Security Administration’s electronic file of personally identifiable information on everyone with a Social Security number, known formally as Numident.
Numident is an electronic file that has personally identifiable information — such as name, date of birth and other details — for every individual who has been issued a Social Security number, according to a 2023 Social Security Office of the Inspector General report focused on Social Security number holders ages 100 and up.
The Social Security Administration inputs death information it receives from various sources on Numident, according to the report. From there, the agency uses Numident to create a full file of death information, the Death Master File, that is shared with other agencies that pay benefits to help prevent and detect fraud.
In the 2023 report, the Office of the Inspector General found about 18.9 million Social Security number holders were born in 1920 or earlier and had no death information on their Numident records. However, Census Bureau data estimates at the time of the review showed only about 86,000 individuals living in the U.S. were age 100 or older.
If a death is not properly recorded, that can interfere with efforts to prevent and identify fraud by both federal and private entities, the OIG report said.
Just because Numident records are out of date doesn’t influence the Social Security Administration’s payments, according to a former Social Security Administration employee.
“The payment records that send 70 million checks payments a month aren’t driven by the Numident,” the former Social Security Administration employee said. “To correlate the two is just manipulative.”
For decades, the agency had reached out to beneficiaries who are over 100 years old, who have not recently used Medicare, to verify their identities, the former Social Security employee said.
“To say, ‘Oh, well, there’s 150-year-old people,’ that’s just silly,” the former Social Security Administration employee said. “That particular operation over the years did yield cases where there was fraud being committed, but not a lot of it.”
Undocumented immigrants pay into program
Individuals over age 100 are more susceptible to having their Social Security numbers fraudulently used by undocumented immigrants for work rather than having their benefits stolen, Nowrasteh said.
“A good number of these Social Security numbers are being used by illegal immigrants to work and pay taxes,” Nowrasteh said.
Importantly, that likely means more money coming into Social Security through payroll taxes than leaving the program through benefit payments, according to Nowrasteh.
In tax years 2016 to 2020, employers and individuals received about $8.5 billion in wages, tips and self-employment income from 139,211 Social Security numbers attributed to individuals ages 100 and up, according to the 2023 SSA OIG report that looked at number holders ages 100 and up.
“Probably zero of them are working,” Nowrasteh said of the data. Instead, that revenue into the program is likely coming from undocumented workers who won’t receive benefits, he said.
“Because they’re illegal immigrants, they don’t have access to the benefits on the back end when they retire,” Nowrasteh said.
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Immigrants consumed 21% less welfare and entitlement benefits than native born Americans per capita, or per person, as of 2022, according to new research Nowrasteh co-authored.
If the administration cracks down on payroll taxes coming into Social Security using false numbers, “then it might actually worsen the fiscal soundness of the program and make it insolvent sooner,” Nowrasteh said.
The Social Security Administration relies on ongoing payroll taxes to pay benefits. To supplement those payments, the agency also draws from money set aside in trust funds. Because those trust funds are running low, just 83% of both retirement and disability benefits may be payable starting in 2035, Social Security’s trustees projected last year.
It remains to be seen whether Congress will act sooner to prevent those changes.
