The Truth About Social Security and Dead People
There’s a reason millions of people are not listed as deceased in the main database when they should be, but it's not the fraud that Elon Musk and Trump say it is.
Wrong again.
Photographer: Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg
For more than a decade, Social Security’s inspector general has been on a quest to get dead people off the benefit rolls. The effort started before former corporate lawyer Gail Ennis took the job in 2019, appointed by President Donald Trump, but picked up speed afterward. This work has consisted mostly of audits comparing Social Security records with death records kept by the states, other federal agencies and even different Social Security databases.
In a related but somewhat different audit that has been in the news lately, Ennis in 2023 also looked into the 18.9 million entries in the Social Security Administration’s “Numident” master file of all assigned Social Security numbers that had (1) a birth year of 1920 or earlier, and (2) no record of death. As of 2020, only 86,000 Americans were that old, leaving about 18.8 million dead people not listed as dead by Social Security. As you may have heard, these undead hordes were discovered recently by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, with Musk implying and President Trump claiming outright that tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security benefits.