In a recent Fox News appearance, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed how fraudsters steal from Social Security, putting seniors at risk. Musk said this scheme is “happening all the time at scale” and depends on using numbers associated with deceased people still considered alive within the SSA system.
As background, DOGE has spent significant time working to reform the massive government program. During this effort, Musk has found evidence of illegal immigrants receiving social security benefits, vast networks of fraud, and impossibly old recipients, such as several accounts that were over 150 years old.
However, Democrats have cynically decided to use DOGE as a scare tactic to improve their dismal prospects in upcoming elections. Specifically, many progressives have objected to DOGE gaining access to social security data, which is vital to continuing its work.
Beginning his remarks on March 30, 2025, Musk explained the details of the scheme. He said, “One of the key tricks that the fraudsters pull is that they will use the fact that someone is marked as live as sort of just that that social security number is marked as live in Social Security, and then get disability and unemployment insurance for a dead person because the databases don’t talk to each other.”
Building on that point, the tech genius said, “All they got was from Social Security, is like, is this person alive? Yes, they’re not. They’re not alive. It’s falsely marked. Persons falsely marked as alive Social Security, but they didn’t, but that was a fraudster. [They] can now get unemployment and disability from a dead person.This is happening all the time at scale.”
In the comments under a clip of Elons interview, users expressed their gratitude for DOGE. One of the comments said, “I’m shocked by this. It’s alarming how easily fraudsters exploit database gaps. We need better systems to prevent this.” Another one of the replies added, “It is a level of corruption so overt it is genuinely hard to comprehend.”
Watch Elon Musk explain Social Security fraud:
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Other users wondered at how much this fraud was costing the average American. One such comment read, “Fraudsters exploit the disconnect between databases, claiming disability and unemployment for deceased individuals. This kind of fraud is happening at a large scale, costing taxpayers billions.” Another user chimed in to say, “This has been happening for literally decades…in CA .. ..have you seen the inmate databases in prisons? Honed there. I know it well.”
Some comments highlighted the issues with siloed government systems that don’t share data. One of these replies read, “What’s wild is that these inter-agency database issues are like trying to play a game of telephone with a lot of different players. If the databases don’t talk to each other, it’s not hard to see how issues like this can slip through the cracks.”Another comment said, “Question is, who set up this opportunity and who’s been taking advantage of it? Has to have been organized and fairly large, going for a long time.”
Featured image from embedded video