WASHINGTON — The new leader of the Social Security Administration (SSA) clarified on Wednesday that deceased centenarians aren’t necessarily recipients of benefits, countering claims suggesting that millions of centenarians are receiving payments from the agency.
Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of the SSA, appointed by President Donald Trump, provided this clarification following assertions made by Trump and billionaire influencer Elon Musk. Both had claimed through various social media channels that individuals aged 100, 200, or even up to 300 years were improperly collecting benefits from Social Security.
While there have been instances of erroneous payments, including some to deceased individuals, the figures presented by Trump and Musk are significantly inflated and do not accurately reflect the situation with Social Security.
During a press briefing in Florida, Trump stated on Tuesday that there are “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits and termed these payments as either fraudulent or indicative of incompetence. He suggested that eliminating these payments could strengthen the solvency of the program. Trump’s comments even included an outrageous claim regarding a person allegedly listed in the system as being 360 years old.
Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency aiming to identify fraud and misuse, made several whimsical posts on his platform X on Monday, referring to possibilities of vampires collecting Social Security and proposing that the presence of numerous deceased individuals in the Social Security records is a significant issue.
However, it’s crucial to clarify that there are not tens of millions of people over 100 receiving such benefits. The confusion primarily arises from the SSA’s outdated software system, which is rooted in the COBOL programming language—a technology that is over 60 years old. This system lacks an appropriate data type for birth dates, causing some entries with absent or incomplete information to default to a reference date more than 150 years ago. A report from WIRED first pointed out the implications of this programming issue.
Moreover, several reports released by the SSA’s inspector general in early 2023 and again in mid-2024 indicate that the agency has failed to modernize its database to accurately record death information. This database contains approximately 18.9 million Social Security numbers of individuals born in 1920 or earlier who haven’t been properly marked as deceased. However, this does not imply these individuals were receiving benefits.
The agency has refrained from updating its system due to the anticipated cost of over $9 million. A report from July 2023 mentioned that “almost none of the number holders discussed… are currently receiving SSA payments.” Furthermore, since September 2015, the agency has automatically ceased payments to individuals older than 115 years.
In his recent communication, Dudek reiterated the SSA’s commitment to transparency and addressed the misunderstanding surrounding claims about older beneficiaries. His statement emphasized that data indicating a lack of a death date does not confirm anyone is currently receiving benefits.
Concerning the issue of fraud in Social Security, a July 2024 report highlighted that between the fiscal years 2015 and 2022, the SSA distributed nearly $8.6 trillion in benefits, out of which $71.8 billion—less than 1%—were improper payments. Most of these erroneous payments were overpayments to living individuals.
In early January, the U.S. Treasury reclaimed over $31 million from various federal payments—beyond just Social Security—that were mistakenly issued to deceased individuals. This recovery effort is part of a larger initiative following Congress’s authorization for the Treasury to access the SSA’s “Full Death Master File” for a three-year period beginning in December 2023. The SSA’s database is the most comprehensive federal record of deceased individuals, containing over 142 million entries dating back to 1899.
Experts have expressed concern about the potential misinformation surrounding Social Security payments. Chuck Blahous, a senior strategist at the Mercatus Center, acknowledged Musk’s efforts to identify and end improper payments but remarked that Social Security is not among the federal programs with the highest error rates.
Sita Nataraj Slavov, a professor of public policy at the Schar School at George Mason University, cautioned that Musk and Trump’s assertions might give the public a misconception about the simplicity of rectifying the financial issues inherent to Social Security. She emphasized that the real challenge lies in restoring the program’s solvency without relying solely on easy fixes, tax increases, or benefit reductions.
In response to the criticism surrounding improper payments, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt pointed to the reports of the SSA’s inspector general, noting efforts to identify wasteful spending and fraud as part of an overarching initiative to safeguard American taxpayers.
