In a landmark win for American taxpayers, the Department of Government Efficiency worked with the Social Security Administration to remove about 11 million deceased number holders from the SSA’s records, potentially leading to significant savings for Americans.
For context, on April 24, 2025, DOGE announced on X that they had successfully cleaned up the Social Security Administration’s records by rooting out fraud and waste, focusing on the presence of millions of numberholders listed over the age of 120 on the list of those receiving benefits. Following this cleanup, DOGE also announced that they expected over one million more numberholders to be taken off the records for similar reasons in the coming weeks.
In their announcement on X, DOGE told their followers that they had been working with the SSA for “the past 7 weeks,” going on to explain that “Approximately 11 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked deceased.” In addition, the agency confirmed that “another ~1.4 million to go with expected completion in 2 weeks.”
This post from DOGE followed an initial announcement on March 18, 2025, in which the agency announced that “@SocialSecurity has begun a major cleanup of their records.” The agency then explained that at that point, “Approximately 3.2 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased.” They then added, “More work still to be done.”
After DOGE shared their successful work within the SSA on X, conservatives rejoiced in the comments. One user with the handle EagleMAGA wrote, “Democrats will go crazy after seeing their voters being cut off.” Another commenter wrote, “If any of those 3.2 million ‘people’ were receiving money, their bank account needs to be checked and the address used on the account needs to be verified and warrants issued for the arrest of the people benefiting from the illegal activity.”
Following the revelation that millions of Social Security numberholders on record were deceased, the Trump Administration reportedly asked the Supreme Court to let DOGE access the SSA’s data to get more information on May 2, 2025. However, according to press accounts, a federal judge in Maryland blocked DOGE from accessing the records. That judge said, “To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest. But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.”
Furthermore, the judge, Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland, provided more background on why she denied DOGE’s request, saying, “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
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According to recent press coverage, the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals also rejected the Trump Administration’s request to give DOGE access to Social Security records on May 2, 2025. In response, Judge Hollander said that the decision “emphasizes that all this highly sensitive personal information has long been handed over to SSA by the American people with every reason to believe that the information would be fiercely protected.”
Watch Elon Musk explain the SSA situation at a Wisconsin rally:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video