“President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” Leavitt said during an appearance on Fox News Monday.
She claimed she had spent the day battling with “fake news reporters” who had been “fearmongering” about Musk. Earlier that day, Michelle King, SSA’s acting commissioner, resigned due to a clash with the unelected bureaucrat, who recently gained access to the agency’s databases that contain troves of sensitive data belonging to American citizens.
“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.… So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead,” Musk said during an appearance in the Oval Office.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk wrote.
But that’s not the only part of Musk’s fraud claims that don’t quite pass the smell check.
The Numident contained the names of more than 18 million people born before 1920 who had no death information. “Death information missing from the Numident and the DMF hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent and detect fraud and misuse,” the report authors said. This isn’t the first time that Musk has claimed DOGE discovered something that was actually publicly available.
The 2023 report found that 98 percent of social security numberholders aged 100 years or older were not receiving benefits. Ultimately, the report determined that the system didn’t need to be updated because it was too expensive. Musk should like that kind of thing, right?
Experts have suggested another possible explanation for the wide-ranging ages of beneficiaries is a quirk of COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language, which might use May 20, 1875, as a reference point in its coding. A COBOL system might indicate that anyone with a missing birthdate in the SSA’s database was 150 years old, which could explain Musk’s assertion about the droves of centenarians receiving social security benefits, according to Wired.
“This is absurd, corrosive nonsense,” wrote journalist James Surowiecki in a post on X Tuesday. “There are not tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security checks, and the only reason Leavitt is out here making these hysterical claims is because Elon Musk misunderstood a table of numbers.”
“Sounds like WH may have misinterpreted DOGE data on social security… it seems we are NOT PAYING these benefits… rather, these people (age 150 and whatever) are just on the rolls despite no checks going out,” Trish Regan wrote on X Tuesday.
In another post, she urged Musk and DOGE to “triple check the math.”
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump Press Secretary Hit With Embarrassing Fact-Check on Fraud Claim )
Also on site :