By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-18 14:16:45 | Updated at 2025-03-20 18:56:27
2 days ago
Elon Musk lauded DOGE's clean-up of the Social Security database, which had millions of impossibly-aged Americans still on file.
The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by the billionaire 'first buddy', discovered last month that the system for the U.S. Social Security Administration included millions of people above the age of 120 and even some into their 200's and 300's.
Musk jokingly called the efforts to delete these records a clearing of the 'dead people database.'
The DOGE X account posted overnight that the team has over the last two weeks marked as deceased 3.2 million people from the SSA database who were listed over the age of 120-years-old.
There are still millions, however, listed as living in these age brackets that the team is working to delete.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has so far marked 3.2 million people in the Social Security database as dead who were previously in the system as living
DOGE found that the U.S. Social Security Administration had millions of people in its database for benefits eligible individuals who were over the age of 120
One example is the 150-159 age-range within the database that on March 8 had 1,357,967 marked a living. By March 17, the count in that category decreased by 186,415 to a total of 1,171,552.
In that two week time span in March, DOGE was able to mark 3,261,057 people as dead who were previously in the Social Security system records as part of the 'living count' between the ages of 120 and 159.
'More work still to be done,' the cost-cutting group noted.
While the millions of clearly dead people are still in the system as eligible for benefits, that doesn't necessarily mean that money is being distributed to those individuals.
Since President Donald Trump got back in power in January, his newly created DOGE has cut billions in government contracts to private industry, thousands of federal jobs and even obliterated whole agencies – like USAID.
Musk has promised to make even more cuts and to reduce government waste, fraud and abuse.
Elon Musk says DOGE is 'cleaning up the dead people database' in the Social Security systems and has so far marked 3.26 impossibly-aged individuals as dead
During an interview released on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's podcast this week, Musk said most of the problem his group is identifying in the federal government is a general sense of waste of taxpayer dollars and not an intentional misuse of money.
'What is the waste to fraud ratio?' Musk proposed in the sit-down with the Republican senator.
'In my opinion it's like 80 percent waste, 20 percent fraud,' he revealed. 'But you do have these sorts of gray areas.'
'An example would be – so we saw a lot of payments going out of Treasury that had no payment code and no explanation for the payment. And then we're trying to figure out what that payment is and we'd see that okay, that contract was supposed to be shut off, but someone forgot to shut off that contract, and so the company kept getting money,' he noted.
'Now is that waste or fraud?' Musk asked.
Cruz replied that it was 'both.'
