At least Haley Joel Osment only saw dead people; our federal government pays them. DOGE adviser Elon Musk set off another furor by posting a screenshot of a Social Security database showing millions of Americans still “alive” past age 130—suggesting they might still be “collecting” checks. Donald Trump piled on, slamming “fraudulent” payments to “200”-year-olds. The media pushed back, saying the Social Security list reflected antiquated coding and incomplete death information—and did not reflect who was actually receiving benefits.
Who’s correct? Both. It’s true the Musk screenshot doesn’t tell us exactly who is getting checks.
At the same time, Musk is highlighting a real problem. Yes, the federal government sends out huge sums annually to the dearly departed. Worse, the bureaucracy has known of this problem for at least 15 years, yet had done little to fix it until a recent push from Congress. And if anything, Musk is just skimming the target. When it comes to paying dead people, the Social Security Administration is far from the worst offender.
Here’s a breakdown of the vampire-check mess, just one example of how and why our federal government today swims in waste and fraud:
This is a longstanding—and documented—problem. As early as 2010, the late, great Sen. Tom Coburn issued a report (“Federal Programs to Die For”) spotlighting at least a billion dollars in payments made to deceased people over the prior decade. Subsequent reports from a slew of government watchdogs reiterated the problem. The issue got a bit more attention in the wake of the Covid stimulus payments, $3.5 billion of which (2.2 million payments) ultimately flowed to the unearthly. Yet it continues: the U.S. sent out nearly $1 billion to dead people in 2021 and 2022 alone.
Social Security at least has data. For all Social Security’s problems, it has the best data on who lives and who doesn’t, in the form of a Death Master File (yes, that is a thing), compiled via state agencies that supply constantly updated death records. While Social Security does mistakenly pay out to deceased beneficiaries, its inspector general reports that many of Social Security’s $72 billion in improper payments from fiscal 2015 to 2022 were erroneous overpayments to living people.
Hands off my death list. The far bigger problem is that the Treasury Department until recently did not have access to Social Security’s master list, and so was unable to add the names of the deceased to its do-not-pay system, which other agencies use. Consider the staggering scope of the checks that continue to flow to deceased people in the absence of that data. Checks to pay heating-oil costs, housing subsidies, disability insurance, pensions, farming subsidies, and Medicare claims, disaster aid, veteran’s benefits, food assistance, to name a few. Why didn’t Treasury have access to this info? Fabulous question, and one that continues to befuddle even lawmakers.
Congressional action. The Covid embarrassment did at least help Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy on his yearslong campaign to get action. Legislation he co-authored with then-Sen. Tom Carper became law in late 2020 and gave Treasury access to the Social Security file. But compromises watered it down to a “pilot program” that didn’t go into effect until the end of 2023 and will sunset at the end of 2026. Treasury last month reported progress, saying five months of access to the Death Master File had prevented or recovered $31 million in payments to deceased people, calling it “the tip of the iceberg.”
Next steps. In an example of how Congress can work alongside DOGE, Kennedy and Sen. Gary Peters several weeks ago reintroduced their bill to make the death-file sharing permanent (it unanimously passed committee last year but never got a vote in Chuck Schumer’s Senate). “This isn’t a silver bullet to fix all improper payments,” a Kennedy aide tells me. “It’s just one very good step, and frankly one that it shouldn’t have been on us to take. There’s a complete lack of logic and efficiency in these agencies.”This study in government noncommunication is just one example of how our bureaucratic dysfunction results in fraud and improper payments of as much as some $500 billion annually. If Musk’s DOGE really wants to find that $1 trillion in savings, it would do well to start systematically highlighting the fraud and waste numbers associated with big programs like Medicaid or the earned-income tax credit. It could go a long way in helping congressional Republicans sell long-term reforms to those and other programs. (Read more: Wall Street Journal, 2/27/2025)