WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments.
Over the past few days, President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits — a “HUGE problem,” Musk wrote, as his Department of Government Efficiency digs into federal agencies to root out waste, fraud and abuse.
It is true that improper payments have been made, including some to dead people. But the numbers thrown out by Musk and the White House are overstated and misrepresent Social Security data.
Here are the facts:
On Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” Trump said.
“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” he said. He also said that there’s one person in the system listed as 360 years old.
Late Monday, Musk posted a slew of posts on his social media platform X, including: “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” and “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as “ALIVE” when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem. Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second …”
A July 2024 report from Social Security’s inspector general states that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion — or less than 1% — in improper payments. Most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people.
In addition, in early January, the U.S. Treasury clawed back more than $31 million in a variety of federal payments— not just Social Security payments— that improperly went to dead people, a recovery that former Treasury official David Lebryk said was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
The money was reclaimed as part of a five-month pilot program after Congress gave the Department of Treasury temporary access to the Social Security Administration’s “Full Dea