Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security

Elon Musk put a big target on the Social Security Administration in the first weeks of the Trump administration, claiming it is plagued by “immense waste” and promising audits to root out “the extreme levels of fraud.” President Donald Trump said during his joint address to Congress earlier this month that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service was already “identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” at the agency.

But some of the biggest examples of allegedly wasteful spending held up by Musk and DOGE so far have been overblown or inaccurate. Musk’s assertion that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security benefits was so off-base that it had to be tamped down by the agency’s acting head, who had been promoted because of his willingness to cooperate with DOGE. “These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Social Security acting commissioner Lee Dudek said.

Musk’s intense focus on Social Security appears central to his promise to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. The agency distributes $1.6 trillion in benefit payments each year, making up about 20 percent of all federal spending.

Its sprawling size would appear to offer plenty of opportunities to root out waste and fraud for those who think such problems run rampant in government.

But less than 1% of Social Security’s payments in recent years were determined to be improper – often the result of an accidental oversight or change in benefit status, according to a report last year by the agency’s inspector general. That works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.

Despite the flood of money flowing through it, Social Security didn’t make a 2024 list by the Government Accountability Office, the legislative branch’s nonpartisan watchdog, detailing the 16 agencies with improper payment rates of at least 10% . That report further found that 80 percent of all improper payments were due to just five government programs, including Medicare and Medicaid – but not Social Security.

“The wild claims they are making – I’ve never seen anything like this,” Kathleen Romig, a former analyst and senior adviser at the agency, said of DOGE and Musk.

Social Security is among the most scrutinized and audited agencies in government, with frequent probes by its 500-person Office of Inspector General. It pays outside auditors to examine its books. Congress grills agency officials. Last year, a major focus in congressional hearings led by the GOP wasn’t waste or fraud – it was about Social Security being too aggressive in clawing back accidental benefit overpayments.

Criminal investigators with Social Security’s IG office typically investigate cases tied to disability fraud or covering up a relative’s death to continue receiving benefits. The IG also monitors seemingly minor issues, such as potential misuse of government credit cards. Last month, it reported that the risk for problems was low because of strict internal controls.

“It’s extremely closely watched,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group that seeks to expand coverage.

When asked about the reams of audits and reports that appear to contradict Trump and Musk’s assertions of rampant waste and fraud in Social Security, White House spokesman Harrison Fields said the cost-cutting operation was being unfairly maligned.

“The continued attempts to sow doubt in the massive accomplishments of this never-before-seen effort to make government more efficient speaks more about the illegitimacy of those peddling these falsehoods than the good work of DOGE,” Fields said. “The American public are in lockstep with the president’s mission and will not be swayed by more lies coming from the legacy media.”

Trump and Musk have latched onto the contention that extremely old Americans are supposedly getting Social Security benefits as a prime example of blatant fraud.

In his speech to Congress, early in March, Trump asked the Justice Department to investigate the spending at Social Security. “We’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty,” he said. He spent several minutes rattling off numbers from DOGE purporting to show that unbelievably old people are still collecting Social Security benefits, including one person listed at 360 years of age.

“More than 100 years older than our country,” Trump said, to laughter.

On social media, Musk alleged that more than 20 million Americans over age 100 receive Social Security checks, derisively describing it as “a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

But those claims are not backed up by agency data. Officials said they showed a misunderstanding of Social Security’s databases.

The agency has millions of people in its databases who lack recorded dates of death – the result of old computer systems and events that are decades in the past. That doesn’t mean they are getting checks. Social Security auditors in 2023 reported that 98 percent of those without recorded dates of death were not receiving agency benefits and were known to be deceased. Agency officials said it was costlier and riskier to update the records than to do nothing.

Musk’s claims of malfeasance, however, refused to die.

Last month, agency staff again looked into the issue. They found 1,294 Americans older than 100 who were receiving benefits from Social Security as of Feb. 19, according to internal agency records obtained by the Washington Post. Workers contacted 1,107 of these centenarians as of last month, the records show, finding that 905 were alive and 202 were dead.

That meant 202 dead people appeared to be improperly collecting benefits, not 20 million.

Mark Warshawsky, a former agency deputy and now senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, was among the people quick to dismiss DOGE’s claims. But he also noted that updates to Social Security’s death accounting could help with anti-fraud efforts at other agencies that use its records.

The uproar stoked by DOGE over alleged dead beneficiaries cast new attention on problems previously highlighted in audits by the Social Security inspector general – which, as its website shows, is aimed at detecting waste, fraud and abuse.

“It was like, ‘DOGE, we’ve been saying this this whole time,’” said Rebecca Rose, a spokeswoman for the inspector’s general office. “We’ve already put out that report.”

The degree of scrutiny by Social Security’s IG can be intense. One report issued by the office earlier this month found that a partner agency in Mississippi had incorrectly made a $14 payment because of a data-entry error.

Social Security’s inspector general was fired in the first days of the Trump administration, along with top internal investigators at 16 other government agencies. Although the office has continued to operate, it is expected to lose up to 20 percent of its staff because of budget cuts, Rose said.

Already DOGE has canceled many contracts at Social Security, just as it has at many other federal agencies. A DOGE-run website late last week listed $50.3 million in cost savings from these canceled agreements.

That included funding for a University of Wisconsin at Madison study project to understand how to prevent impostor scams. Government impostor scams – most commonly pretending to be from the Social Security office – resulted in estimated losses of at least $577 million last year, often by conning seniors into sharing personal data, according to the agency’s IG office.

“When you cut resources like this, there’s always room to make things more efficient. But you also could make things worse,” said Cliff Robb, a University of Wisconsin professor who has studied impostor scams. “You could end up making fraud worse.”