Posted on 02/18/2025 4:08:19 PM PST by SeekAndFind
In a closely watched Oval Office event, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk shared some of the findings and rationale behind his Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump has tasked with cutting spending across the government.
As an example of his work so far, Musk cited some “crazy things” that had emerged in just the “cursory examination of Social Security” his team was undertaking.
“ We’ve got people in there that are 150 years old,” Musk said Feb. 11. “Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t, OK. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. … I think they’re probably dead, is my guess, or they should be very famous, one of the two.”
The U.S. has roughly 100,000 centenarians, according to the Pew Research Center, but none is older than about 114 years old, and the oldest documented age for anyone in modern times was 122, according to the Guinness Book.
When we checked with experts on Social Security, they offered two key points of context for Musk’s comment.
* Government databases may code someone as 150 years old for reasons peculiar to the large and complex Social Security database.
* Improper payments are a longstanding concern for the agency, though they represent a small share of all payments.
The White House did not provide additional information on what Musk found.
Social media commenters came up with one possible explanation for the 150-year age, and experts who have worked closely with the Social Security Administration told PolitiFact it was plausible.
Under an international standard called ISO 8601, a missing value for a date is coded as May 20, 1875, because that was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
For that reason, under some coding systems, a missing value for a date will default to 1875 — which in the year 2025 produces a round figure of 150.
150.
“Some people, particularly some immigrants, really don’t know their exact birthday, so there would have to be some alternative means of verification,” said C. Eugene Steuerle, a fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank, and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury Department during the Reagan administration.
Another possibility is that a beneficiary’s record in the system may have multiple fields for birth dates, one of which is missing data because it’s not needed for calculations.
“Some records may have missing codes, while others may have conflicting information on age or date of birth, so the staff would have created queries to determine which fields are actually used,” J. Michael Collins, a University of Wisconsin professor of public affairs, said.
Beyond the question of whether 150-year-olds are receiving payments, Social Security does sometimes send out payments improperly.
The sheer scope of the agency’s payments — over $1 trillion a year — means that even a tiny fraction of mistakes adds up quickly.
Between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, which includes Trump’s first presidency, the Social Security Administration sent almost $71.8 billion in improper payments, according to a July 2024 agency inspector general report. The inspector general’s office called improper payments “a longstanding challenge.”
A November 2021 inspector general’s report found $298 million in payments after death to some 24,000 beneficiaries. (About $84 million was returned, the report said.)
The Social Security Advisory Board, a group of outside experts, has regularly issued bipartisan recommendations to improve the agency’s accuracy record for payments, such as shifting death data collection to the Treasury Department.
Collins said that incorrect birth dates or unnoticed deaths may not represent the biggest fraction of overpayments. Other reasons may be that the system has not caught up with life developments that prevent a former beneficiary from receiving payments, such as being incarcerated.
As a percentage of all payments, improper payments account for 0.84% of the total, the inspector general has found.
That’s “better than any private insurance company in the nation,” and with a lower cost of administration, said Henry J. Aaron, a fellow with the Brookings Institution think tank and a former chair of the Social Security Advisory Board.
As is often the case with complex systems, solving the last remaining fraction of technical problems can prove to be the most difficult. “The costs of having 0% error rate would actually be quite high, and would increase administrative costs,” Collins said.
Adding to the challenge is that the Social Security Administration has had trouble securing funding and high-quality talent for years.
“If one is concerned about administration at Social Security — and there is cause for concern — it is because SSA staff has been cut for years, even as workloads have increased,” Aaron said. “The backlog on disability insurance claims has grown.”
The agency’s complicated databases need top-flight specialists to fix and upgrade, but the government pay scale isn’t high enough to attract the best the information technology sector has to offer, Steuerle said
“For many years they weren’t even allowed to buy the best software,” Steuerle said. “Outsiders are brought in for a price, but they generally aren’t personally committed for more than a short time.”
Another challenge is a quirk in how the agency’s finances are structured.
A dollar spent on fixing the improper payment problem could pay for itself with $10 in saved funds, said Jeffrey R. Brown, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois. For a private-sector company, those savings would be easy to see in the bottom line. Not so for Social Security.
To secure that first dollar to invest in technical fixes, the agency needs to lobby Congress, which is never easy and which could result in offsetting cuts to other parts of the agency. Then, if the agency does get that dollar and ends up saving $10 in payments, those proceeds would remain in the Social Security Trust Fund, which doesn’t help Congress’ own fiscal balance sheet, nor the agency’s own administrative budget.
PolitiFact news researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Even in 1999, the y2k issue stopped age counts at 99 !
Bring back windows 98 and msdos
The database contains everyone who has ever had a SS number, because the numbers are not reused. The first SS check went out in 1938.
Right now, with 340 million people in the US, probably at least 300 million have a SS number. If you add in everybody who has died since in the past 85 years, the database is going to be pretty big. However, the number of people collecting SS benefits right now is 67 million, which seems about right.
Here’s an excerpt from WIRED:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-doge-social-security-150-year-old-benefits/
Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.
Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.
“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records,” Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency executive-turned-whistleblower, tells WIRED.
They sure do put out a lot of excuses, but no real defense. People that work for the federal government need to go to jail.
As for the title, I do not think that is what Elon Musk said. I don’t think he knows yet exactly who all are receiving checks. These are just people on the active Social Security list. So, the list is ripe for fraud.
Why would people that old be left on the SSA database if they weren’t considered still active?
Maybe I missed it, but I'm not sure that Musk said those checks are going out. I believe that Musk stated the SS database contains some people who are unbelievably old. I think he left it as an implied problem if checks are going out to people who are 150. He didn't say the checks were going out. He just said the database was sloppy.
Overall, this article seems like a desperate attempt to explain away all sloppiness and imply "there's a good reason for that". I, for one, am tired of such excuses.
They don’t send checks.
Weak excuse and honestly not believable. We are expected to believe these no name anon programmers who have not seen the data know better than real genius programmers and Musk how data sets work in a database.
I was learning COBOL back in 83 using punch cards, it is not as obscure as they are trying to make it out to be.
Here is some info on the size of Congressional Staffs.
The size of individual members’ personal staffs were still relatively small, with the average senator having six staffers and representatives limited to having five staffers.
So we have 535 House and Senate members and they have more than 2,500 staff employees.
And for decades the House and Senate have Oversight Committees and during that entire time these more than 3,000 Congress Critters have been unable to find any of the non-sense spending that Elon Musk and his few helpers have found in four weeks.
I can only conclude that it takes far more people to cover up waste, fraud, and abuse than it takes to expose waste, fraud, and abuse.
The issue is that the database has the “deceased” field set to false. Whether checks are going out to them is a separate question; one which nobody seems to dispute. The real question is how much. They say in this story that it’s about 0.7% of the total sent each year. It should be double checked, and systems upgraded.
And they still have 40+ million more active accounts than the population.
What a stupid question.
“”Why would people that old be left on the SSA database if they weren’t considered still active?”””
Because they still vote.
I assumed from the start that the age numbers were bad data. The bottom line is that ALL data discrepancies MUST be resolved before granting benefits.
Yes and no.
I believe that should be FORMER inspector general.
If that's not true in the present, it will be true in the not too distant future.
The only quote from Elon Musk that I read us from his own Tweet on X, which reads as follows:
——————————
According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security 🤣🤣
____________________
Nothing in that Tweet tells us that Musk is saying that these centenarians are still receiving social security.
The title of this article is MISLEADING.
Has he said this or that there all these very old people still on the rolls
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