Good followers of U.S. President Donald Trump have to believe an increasingly large collection of ridiculous lies. First and foremost, they have to believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Then they have the corollary, that January 6 was an inside job pulled off for some reason by the FBI. Of course, they have to believe global warming isn’t happening and apparently now that that Ukraine started its war with Russia.
However, this week Elon Musk and Donald Trump added another big lie to the list: There are tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security. As with all Trump lies it is hard to know what the guy really believes and what is being thrown out to advance a larger goal, but this lie definitely ranks alongside the others for both its craziness and potential importance.
It seems the origins of the Social Security zombie story is Elon Musk’s misunderstanding of a Social Security file on the ages of people getting Social Security. He immediately began tweeting to his hundreds of millions of followers that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security. This line was quickly picked up by various right-wing influencers as yet another example of government incompetence and corruption.
It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.
Then Donald Trump made the claim about millions of dead people getting Social Security himself. And under MAGA rules, once the “king” makes a pronouncement, everyone has to say it’s true no matter how utterly absurd it might be. This means all good Republicans have to insist that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, or at least millions.
This claim is absurd on its face. Social Security actually keeps very good track of who is getting benefits, as numerous audits over the years have found. Yes, Social Security is in fact regularly audited by its inspector general and also the Government Accountability Office. It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.
And the system does have problems, most of which are widely known to those familiar with the program. The two most obvious ones are the country’s method of tracking deaths and the age of the Social Security computer system.
The first problem is that there is no national death registry. We could compile this nationally, but this has been a big states’ rights issue, with many people, mostly Republicans, complaining that a national system of registering deaths would be a dangerous step toward totalitarianism. Therefore, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has to rely on getting data on deaths from states.
The other problem is that SSA is relying on an antiquated computer system that is using a computer language from the sixties. Musk and the DOGE boys may well want to ridicule SSA for using a computer system that is 50 or even 60 years old, but an analysis of the problem would again require looking in the mirror.
It would cost billions of dollars to put in place a new system, while maintaining the operation of the current system and ensuring that the privacy of workers’ earnings and benefit records are not compromised. Cost-conscious Republicans in Congress, along with many Democrats, have not wanted to fork over the money. If Elon Musk and the DOGE boys can arrange for the funding for modernizing the system, they would be widely applauded by supporters of Social Security, but that doesn’t seem the direction they are taking.
In fact, SSA has been pretty ingenuous in working around these obstacles to ensure that the overwhelming majority of its payments are accurate. And when overpayments are made, such as when benefits go to a dead person for a couple of months after death, they often are able to get the money back.
Mr. Arithmetic Exposes the Lie
Anyhow, when it comes to the claim that the zombie hordes are getting Social Security, a quick visit with Mr. Arithmetic should put this nonsense to rest. Social Security gives us very good data (it’s even available to Elon Musk and the DOGE boys) on payments to beneficiaries by age.
We can add this up and calculate the total amount of payments that SSA can identify. That came to $1,227 billion at the end of 2024. We can also go to the Social Security Trustees Report and find out the total amount the program paid out in retiree benefits last year. Interestingly, that also came out to $1,227 billion. So where is the money that is going to the millions of Musk-Trump Social Security beneficiary zombies?
Okay, but maybe these are fake numbers that the geniuses at SSA have put together to trick real tax-paying Americans. But which numbers would be fake?
It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong.
We know the total amount Social Security pays out in benefits each year. There are dozens of records kept on this that are regularly published. Even Elon Musk and the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys can find this out.
Furthermore, if we want to venture into the Twilight Zone and imagine that there are actually hundreds of billions of dollars secretly being paid out to the Musk-Trump zombies every year, we wouldn’t have to worry about this money contributing to the deficit. If the zombie payments are never recorded anywhere, they can’t be a factor in the official deficit that we all know and love.
Maybe the SSA tricksters did it on the other side. They are hugely exaggerating what we are paying as benefits to real working people. All those numbers on people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are hugely inflated so that they have extra money to pay to the Musk-Trump zombies.
While that would be a very clever trick by the SSA fraudsters, it would also be pretty hard to pull off. We do have very good data on births. We know how many people were born in 1940, 1950, 1960, and every other year. We also know roughly how many of these people are dying. Anyone interested could examine whether, for example, the number of 90-year-olds SSA says are getting benefits makes sense.
The same applies on the benefit side. Social Security has a very well-defined benefit formula, which is readily available to anyone who wants to look. We have good data from a wide variety of sources on the wages people earned during their working years, so we can know roughly what they should be getting in Social Security benefits. We also have data from both public and private sources on what Social Security beneficiaries are actually getting from the program.
If the SSA bureaucrats are able to find ways to exaggerate their proper payments to living people, to hide hundreds of billions of dollars being paid out to dead people each year, they are way more clever than anyone gives them credit for. I’m not sure that fits the story that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys want to tell.
Is There Method to the Madness?
It is always dangerous to try to get into the head of someone who is not making any sense, but it is worth asking if there can be any purpose served by Musk-Trump spewing nonsense about tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security benefits. This could just be another absurd Trump power play where he forces his MAGA followers to accept an absurd lie just to show he can. He did this when he released a huge volume of water in California, ostensibly to help contain the Los Angeles fires, even though the areas getting the water were nowhere near LA.
There is another more pernicious possibility. Musk-Trump may want to foster the belief that there are large numbers of dead people getting Social Security benefit so that they can justify a purge of the rolls. The purge will not be directed at the dead people who are not there, but at their political opponents. This is obviously completely illegal, but if Trump gets decide the law, as he insists, it’s all fine.
It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong. I guess we will eventually find out his intentions with this idiocy. We have to hope that it’s just Trump’s dementia.
