President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have spread claims implying that millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments, but publicly available data proves otherwise.
Musk started the rumor over the weekend when he posted a chart on social platform X allegedly showing more than 20 million people over 100 years old listed in “the Social Security database.”
“These are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!,” Musk said, joking that “a lot of vampires” are collecting Social Security. He went on to say the apparent discrepancy might be “the biggest fraud in history.”
Trump repeated the falsehood at a Tuesday press briefing in Florida, saying that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits.
The latest data shows that’s not true, with only about 90,000 beneficiaries aged 99 or older receiving a Social Security retirement check in December. That’s lower than the estimated 101,000 centenarians living in the U.S. and nowhere close to the “millions” the Trump administration has claimed.
Acting Social Security Commissioner Lee Dudek tried to clear up the confusion Wednesday.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said in a statement.
Here’s how many people in each age group actually get a retirement check and what to know about Social Security fraud.
How many people over 100 years old receive Social Security benefits?
Nearly 52 million Americans received retired worker benefits in Dec. 2024, according to data from the Social Security Administration.
About 90,000 of those payments, less than 0.2%, went to people aged 99 or older.
That’s far below the millions Trump and Musk warned about. It’s also lower than the number of centenarians living in the U.S., estimated at 101,000 in 2024.
In other words, Social Security is not sending checks to millions of dead people over 100.
Instead, Musk and Trump appear to be referencing a well-known, longstanding issue with a Social Security system called the “Numident.”
That database listed nearly 19 million Social Security numbers of people 100 or older but not dead, according to a 2023 agency inspector general report.
However, the audit found “almost none” of those people were receiving Social Security payments.
The agency hasn’t updated the database because fixing it would cost anywhere from $5.5 to $9.7 million, the report said.
There are other safeguards in place to make sure deceased beneficiaries aren’t being sent checks.
As of 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.
How often does Social Security pay people after they die?
Mistakenly paying people after they die does happen, though not nearly to the extent suggested.
An agency inspector general report from November 2021 found that the Social Security issued an estimated $298 million in payments after death to about 24,000 beneficiaries. Those individuals were mistakenly kept in “suspended payment status” after they died.
The audit said the agency recovered about $84 million, leaving an estimated $214 million unrecovered at the time of the report.
But fraud wasn’t the problem. The audit attributed the mistake to faults in policy and technician errors.
“[The Social Security Administration] needs to enhance its policy and controls to identify deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status and ensure technicians take appropriate action to record correct death information on their records,” the report said.
The audit said maintaining better death data would help prevent identity fraud, though the inspector general “did not identify specific instances of fraud.”
Most American taxpayers would probably agree that mistakenly paying people after they died is unacceptable, no matter how much money went out. However, the problem wasn’t uncovered by Musk or Trump, and the Social Security Administration agreed with the inspector general’s recommended solutions back in 2021.
The agency was in the process of implementing some of those changes as of last July.
Separately, in January, the U.S. Treasury announced that it had clawed back more than $31 million in federal payments that mistakenly went to dead people across various programs, not just Social Security.
How big of a problem is Social Security fraud?
Experts, who spoke with NewsNation, said Social Security fraud is rare.
“It’s a very small issue in that program,” said Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Nowrasteh commended Musk for trying to root out problems but added, “I don’t think it does us any good to try to exaggerate the amount of fraud because the problems with Social Security are primarily not ones of fraud.”
Improper payments, however, are a “longstanding challenge” for the Social Security Administration, but again, that doesn’t mean fraud is the main problem.
A July 2024 report from the agency’s inspector general found that Social Security sent about $71.8 billion in improper payments between fiscal years 2015 and 2022 — most of which were overpayments to living people.
That nearly $72 billion total represents 0.84 percent of the roughly $8.6 trillion paid out over the period.
A portion of the overpayments have since been recovered; still, Social Security had a $23 billion uncollected overpayment balance at the end of fiscal year 2023, the audit said.
Overpayments can happen for many reasons, such as if a person’s income is more than they expected, their marital status changes or they don’t report accurate information to the Social Security Administration.
Social Security’s sub-1 percent error rate is also fairly low compared to a program like Medicaid, which had an improper payment rate of over 5 percent in fiscal year 2024. Again, most of that was due to administrative mistakes, not fraud.
“If you had to pick the places in the federal government where error rates are high, Social Security would be near the bottom of the list, not near the top,” said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, who specializes in Social Security.
