Posted on 05/27/25
| News Source: FOX45
The Department of Government Efficiency claimed Friday the Social Security Administration (SSA) has "marked" approximately 12.3 million people with Social Security numbers as dead.
The listed ages of the millions of people were at least 120 years, according to DOGE, which posted on social media platform X the SSA has carried out a major “cleanup” of its records.
“After 11 weeks, @SocialSecurity has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased,” DOGE wrote. “Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort.”
Attached to DOGE’s post is an image of a chart that seemingly shows how many people in multiple age groups are marked as dead. Three-point-three million people with Social Security numbers who had listed ages of 120 to 129 years are now labeled deceased, while 3.9 million people in the 130 to 139-years age group are marked dead, according to DOGE.
The SSA also labeled 3.5 million people with listed ages of 140 to 149 years as dead, as well as 1.3 million people aged 150 to 159 years, the data shows. More than 124,000 people who had Social Security numbers and were listed as being 160 to 169 years of age, the chart says, were marked as deceased too.
DOGE has promoted SSA’s “cleanup” for at least two months in its mission to help eliminate fraud, waste and “abuse” in the federal government, but The National News Desk could not confirm the data. Multiple news outlets, including The New York Times, have previously reported DOGE has promoted misleading claims, accounting errors and out other miscalculations.
DOGE’s website has a section in which money the unit says it has saved the federal government is listed. A total of $175 billion, or approximately $1,086 per taxpayer, has been retained through the termination of contracts, grants and leases since DOGE’s work began, according to the “savings” section of the site.
The New York Times reported in February, when DOGE’s site had a different appearance, that the calculations behind the “wall of receipts” in the “savings” section had accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes. Some contract terminations DOGE promoted were counted twice or thrice, while another contract had only been partially canceled despite the unit's claim its entire value was recouped, according to the newspaper.
The Biden administration also reportedly canceled contracts that DOGE, which began during the Trump administration, said it terminated.