On March 25, 2025, tech mogul Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced (archived) that the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) had "marked as deceased" around 9.9 million social security number (SSN) holders
For the past 4 weeks, @SocialSecurity has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 9.9 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked deceased. Another ~2 million to go. https://t.co/Kp0Dsh9HgB pic.twitter.com/EiPCC5rcCl
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) April 1, 2025
The announcement followed earlier (archived) posts (archived) that said the SSA had marked 3.2 million, then 7 million, SSN holders aged 120 or older as deceased. The 3.2 million post continued to circulate into late March on Facebook (archived), X (archived), Threads (archived) and Reddit (archived).
DOGE wrote:
For the past 4 weeks, @SocialSecurity has been executing a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 9.9 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked deceased. Another ~2 million to go.
Though the method might seem drastic, DOGE's apparent goal of marking improbably old SSN holders from the SSA's database as deceased could actually achieve a goal auditors from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) have recommended since at least 2015, but that the SSA had repeatedly said would be too costly.
Snopes reached out to the SSA to confirm DOGE's reported actions as well as for comment on the cost of such action and how the government established that the SSN holders marked as deceased were actually dead — a mistake made at least once since the Trump administration's increased focus on social security. We will update this story should we hear back.
SSA records cleanup urged by auditors since 2015 — but dismissed due to cost
Snopes previously reported on Numident, the central social security database, and whether "millions" of people over 100 years old were collecting social security checks.
According to that report, an audit by the Office of the Inspector General published in 2023 found that the Numident contained 18.9 million people born before 1920 who did not have death information on record, making them more than 100 years old at the time the audit was published.
Of the 18.9 million, 44,000 SSN holders — around 2% — received social security payments, according to the audit.
An earlier 2015 audit looked into individuals above the age of 112 with no death information recorded in the Numident and found 6.5 million people matching this description. Payments were sent to 266 beneficiaries — less than 1% of the 6.5 million — recorded as 112 or older, according to the audit.
Since September 2015, the SSA has implemented an automatic process that ends entitlement to SSA benefits for SSN holders aged 115 or older if they fulfill the listed criteria. It's unclear how this automation relates to the DOGE announcement in March 2025.
The 2023 and 2015 audits are notable in terms of DOGE's March announcements because the audits recommended the Numident be updated to mark as deceased improbably old people.
Following the 2015 audit, the SSA rejected recommendations to mark as deceased, where applicable, around 6.5 million SSN holders aged 112 or older. According to a separate audit in 2023, the SSA estimated
By 2023, the SSA again declined OIG recommendations to add death information to the now 18.9 million number holders born before 1920 found in the audit,
Not following recommendations was a problem, the OIG said in 2023, because it left SSNs belonging to dead people open to fraudulent use and risked causing inaccuracies in other federal databases that relied on the Numident and other SSA data, like the Death Master File (DMF).
The SSA shares its records of deaths in the U.S. — the Death Master File — with benefit-paying federal agencies. A limited version of the DMF is also sold to other federal agencies and private organizations, such as banks and credit companies.
Leaving SSNs open also meant people could fraudulently use them to collect social security checks. In 2024, an SSA report found that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022:
The SSA paid almost $8.6 trillion in benefits and made approximately $71.8 billion (0.84 percent) in improper payments, most of which were overpayments.
The audit did not say how many, if any, of the overpayments were made to improbably old people, or how many resulted from fraud. Audit numbers from 2015 and 2023, as seen above, indicated that a very small percentage of SSN holders who "exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies," as the OIG phrased it, received social security checks.
Though individuals who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies were likely included in the 2024 report's improper- or overpayments, the effect of the
Musk and DOGE have posted extensively on X about their work to overhaul the U.S. social security system, mainly focused on eliminating fraud.
Musk has previously said he sought to eliminate "waste and fraud in entitlement spending" and called the social security system a Ponzi scheme. U.S. President Donald Trump has also claimed that millions of people over the age of 100 were collecting social security checks and said the system was full of "probable fraud."