DOGE: Millions over age 110 getting Social Security checks. 6 things to know about the claim

That's the problem career politicians lies are coming out!!!

I was counting up from the 100 - 109, ~15M over 100.

CMSgt (Join to see) - It really can't, which isn't to say there isn't a problem. I see similar things when I report findings for cybersecurity incidents. Our tools query all kinds of great information, but sometimes they report duplicates, false positives, and other errors in high numbers. However, even when we sort these out, we still tend to find a significant amount of critically concerning information. A crude example can be the number of admin accounts in a Windows domain. We like to see that number as low as possible, but we've seen examples of where a large company (10s of thousands) could report hundreds to thousands of admin accounts. I had one company confirm the data and managed to discover duplication in almost half the accounts, but the number was still way too high in the end.

Maj Kevin "Mac" McLaughlin - Good explanation. Have to see how it shakes out.

I wonder which database they got the information from because that doesn't agree with the information in the Master Beneficiary Record (MBR)* and/or the Number Identity firle (Numident file)*. That information is published to the public at ssa.gov* and briefed to Congress. Unless the claim is also that the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been lying to every administration (Democratic or Republican) , the numbers are really off-base.

The SSA DOES need to improve the reconciliation process with state death records as the SSA's OIG continues to find discrepancies when they do a targeted deep-dive and match them against the local death records.

For example, the latest OIG audit compared state death records for New York City from 2010-2023 to the SSA's records where they identified 2,683 individuals who received payments after the death date in the local records, 1,883 who were still receiving benefits when the IG did the audit. To put in in context, NYC has about 225k individuals who were receiving benefits in 2023 (about a 0.8% discrepancy).

SSNs weren't issued to anyone before November 1936* and the earliest year of birth for anyone issued a SSN is 1880. If someone from 1880 were still alive they would be 145 years old at most. That means about 2.9M of those entries would belong to individuals whose birth-year is earlier than are recorded in the Master Beneficiary Record* (MBR).

To date, the SSA has issued approximately 453.7M numbers, and contrary to popular myth, the SSA doesn't reissue SSNs.

According to the January 2025 information in the MBR, there are 68.5M individuals that are collecting Social Security benefits (if you include SSI, then it's 73M), of which 53.7M are over the age of 65.

Finally, the last detailed breakdown that was publicly published* (December 2023), there were only 53,616 individuals older than 100 that were receiving benefits.

Now, if the claim is that the SSA has been lying to the public, Congress and every administration pretty much since its inception, that's a different conversation to be had.
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* First SSN - https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/firstcard.html
* Monthly Statistical Snapshot (January 2025)
* Annual Statistical Supplement, 2024 - https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2024/5a-expanded.pdf
* Number of beneficiaries with benefits in current-payment status (December 2023) - https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/oasdi_zip/2023/ny.pdf
* SSA Master Beneficiary Record - The MBR is used to administer the OASDI program and contains beneficiary and payment history data. An MBR record is created whenever an individual applies for benefits and SSA adjudicates the application as an award, a denial, an abatement, or a withdrawal. Information maintained in the MBR includes the primary worker's SSN, the beneficiary's own SSN, benefit application date, benefit entitlement date, and type and amount of benefit.
* Numident file - The Numident file is a record of applications for Social Security cards. Unique, life-long SSNs are assigned to individuals based on these applications. A full record of all changes to the information (such as change of name) is also maintained. To obtain a card, the applicant must provide documented identifying information to SSA. Through the "enumeration at birth" program, children can be issued a Social Security card when they are born. Examples of data elements on a Numident record include name, date and place of birth, parents' names, and date of death.

COL Randall C. This is good information I need to sort through. I'm positive Musk only has the raw numbers which have not been normalized, deduplicated, and reviewed for false positives. I'm still sure there are mistakes and even fraud out there, but no where near this level. But we have to be careful about what we see and hear. As an example, a spouse can collect their husband's/wife's SS when they are deceased. So it is possible that the deceased is reported as 100+ years if the spouse is over 62 when they apply to collect. I someone marries another who is significantly younger, it is possible to see that age well beyond what we know is possible. However this should be extremely rare.