DOGE Announces 'Major Cleanup' for Social Security

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Newsweek

Published Mar 18, 2025 at 3:43 AM EDT | Updated Mar 18, 2025 at 9:29 AM EDT


Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has said it has begun a "major cleanup" of records at the Social Security Agency. "For the past two weeks, @SocialSecurity has begun a major cleanup of their records. Approximately 3.2 million numberholders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased. More work still to be done," DOGE said on X early on Tuesday. Newsweek has contacted the SSA for comment via email outside of regular working hours.

Why It Matters

Tesla's billionaire CEO Musk, who is leading President Donald Trump's cuts to federal spending, in February said millions of people well above the age of 100 could be collecting Social Security benefits.

The SSA has suggested the figures have been misread and those millions refer to many not receiving benefits but "do not have a date of death associated with their record." Its published statistics show of 67 million receiving Social Security benefits, approximately 53,000—about 0.1 percent—are centenarians.
What To Know

The post from DOGE said that over two weeks more than 3.2 million people older than 120 years old had been removed; though 9.5 million Social Security numbers belonging to people over the age of 120 remained. DOGE released a chart that broke down the records cleanup by age brackets. It showed:

Read more: https://www.newsweek.com/doge-announces-major-cleanup-social-security-2046231https://www.newsweek.com/doge-announces-major-cleanup-social-security-2046231

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I expect some of those birth years may have been erroneous data errors when records were switched from system to system over the years, so you may have many elderly on there who don't even know that their record had errors as they probably had no way or ability (physical health issues) to double check.

[Ray Bruns]

1. Here it comes! Stand by!

[brush]

2. What bullshit. I don't believe for a second that 3.2 million dead people are getting SS benefits.

As the old saying goes, I was born at night, but not last night. When someone dies the coroners/local/state reports that death to local, state and federal authorities. The benefits stop and next of kind is notified of the few hundred dollrs funerl allowance...not hardly enough to buy a casket. I know as I wen thru it when I lost my wife.

Musk and DOGE, the most loathsome lying pieces of shit going...and that's saying something as trump is still not dead.

Musk is either stupid or he thinks we are to believe that crapola.

[aggiesal]

7. They weren't. One of the laid off officials stated that ...

People that were over 120 years never get any payments. And because of system limitations,
they couldn't enter years beyond a specific date, so they entered the maximum year just to let them know
that person won't get paid.
Does the system need fixing? I think it does, but I just don't trust the Mu$krats to do it, not knowing, what
exactly they have on their hands.

[brush]

8. In other words, Musk was lying and should never have made such an unbeivable claim.

[aggiesal]

12. Correct. SSA never pays anyone over 120 years old. n/t

[cbabe]

3. Terrorism.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. So, we're paying the minions $8 million a week to change a system that knew it wasn't paying benefits

out to those SSNs, by removing the record of that social security number. I don't think we're getting our taxpayer moneys worth.

[mellow]

5. "Hi, we don't understand this system ...

... but we're going to modify it. We're quite confident this won't lead to the introduction of new bugs."

[SunSeeker]

9. Exactly this. They have no understanding of Cobol, which is what this system is based on.

Does the system need updated software? Of course. But that's not what they're doing, and it would take tens of millions of dollars to install new software--and may cause disruptions in checks. Which is why SSA still uses Cobol. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[johnnyplankton]

6. Maybe this means they'll leave the rest of us SSA recipients alone...

I can dream, can't I? :laughing :

[jgmiller]

10. Its all just more performance politics

SSA already explained that the deceased field isn't used for sending out payments, it's a secondary field. Part of my work involves large databases and we always have things like this, fields that might not be complete but you have other fields that are also used and the two combined tell the truth. However I will say that it's a best practice to go in and clean up that bad data so you don't have misunderstandings.

Finally I have no clue what DB SSA uses but I'm pretty certain that even if they have any DB system that has been created in the last 20-30 years that cleaning up a single field of 3.2 million records would take all of maybe 60 seconds to execute. It's all just a PR stunt to make it sound like they are doing all of this hard work and in reality they are doing exactly what a good DBA would do as a routine cleaning job.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. Someone noted upthread

that it is still using COBOL (my dad was a COBOL programmer for the VA, where his group did the veteran's checks years ago).

It doesn't seem like they were just relying on a "deceased" field but seemed to apparently be looking at actual birth years and that is where I can see all kinds of errors that may have occurred whenever data was transferred to newer versions of the software/database and/or to new hardware.

Remember this is the same idiot group that searched for ridiculous "DEI" terms across websites - including what they deemed as banned words like "woman" and any page with a "banned word" was removed and replaced with a "404 Page not found" error.

[slightlv]

13. If these people's SS checks didn't stop,

why and how would they know there was a problem with their account? They'd assume everything was ticking along just fine... and it probably was because the true administrators of the SS office knew and understood about the programming issue with missing birthdata, and made allowances for it. This is what happens when you fire everyone willy-nilly. You lose all your institutional knowledge and throw a bunch of people off their retirement accounts, many of whom only have that money upon which to live.

I hope these seniors who get hit like this file a class action lawsuit against trump and musk. Make it as hurtful as possible. Not only for the sake of the Seniors who have been wronged, but to teach ANY administration to keep their damned hands off OUR money!