Declaring People Dead Is Yet Another Trump Admin Failure to Protect Social Security
This claim of unbounded power is made all the more concerning by the lack of effective oversight at the Social Security Administration.
The Trump administration has made a shocking claim: that it can declare living people dead to cut off their access to government benefits and the broader U.S. financial system.
According to reporting from The New York Times, the Social Security Administration (SSA), at the direction of DOGE, has begun knowingly adding living people to SSA’s death records—the Death Master File (DMF)—by assigning them false “dates of death” to “terminat[e]” their “financial lives.”
Being wrongfully identified as dead in Social Security records “can lead to benefit termination… and severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals.” Because the DMF is leveraged by many federal and state agencies to determine eligibility—and by the Treasury Department’s government-wide “Do Not Pay” system to prevent improper payments—false inclusion of a death date can lead to an individual losing their health coverage through Medicare, having their tax return delayed, or having their Social Security or other eligible benefit payments cancelled, among other harms.
There is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.
The DMF is also used by some private-sector companies with a legitimate business or anti-fraud need for the data—including financial institutions, credit agencies, insurance companies, and pension administrators. As a result, being inappropriately listed as dead can result in severe financial consequences like disruption in bank account access, credit cards being cancelled, pension benefits being paused, insurance coverage being cancelled or claims being denied, rejected employment applications, or denial of credit.
The first group of people to be wrongfully and knowingly declared dead by the Trump administration are reportedly being targeted in an immigration enforcement effort focused, at least in part, on people who were lawfully present and eligible to work until the Trump administration abruptly terminated their lawful status. These individuals would have been correctly issued Social Security numbers (SSNs) upon obtaining their lawful immigration statuses, and any change in those statuses should not limit their access to their own financial resources in U.S. banks.
The Trump administration made an unsupported claim that everyone in the initial group had either links to terrorist activity or criminal records. But an internal review by SSA staff that focused on some of the youngest targets—including children as young as 13 years old—“found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions.” The administration’s unproven claim follows its other wildly inaccurate and widely debunked claims about Social Security—including false claims that people who are 150 years old receive Social Security payments and that 40% of calls to Social Security come from fraudsters, when evidence suggests the percentage is “minuscule.”
It is deeply concerning that the administration is knowingly falsifying records. While SSA has the legal authority to collect information about people’s deaths to administer Social Security, there is no legal authority that allows the Trump administration to falsely claim an individual is dead—and that opens the possibility that the administration could falsely add living people to the DMF for any reason.
Moreover, it’s unclear how an individual could have themselves removed from the list if being dead is no longer the sole criterion for being included on the DMF. Recognizing that wrongful inclusion in the DMF can be “devastating” to individuals and their families, SSA has taken steps under previous administrations both to reduce the chances of such mistakes and to resolve them as quickly as possible. Previously, when a person was included in error in the DMF, they had only to make the straightforward case that they were alive, something that could be achieved with identification documents and an in-person visit to a Social Security field office. In this case, without transparent guidance on what circumstances other than death would result in inclusion on the DMF, and without a clear process for appeal, there is no longer a clear pathway to proving that the inclusion was in error.
This claim of unbounded power is made all the more concerning by the lack of effective oversight at SSA. The Trump administration has already dismissed the acting Social Security inspector general without cause and pushed out many nonpartisan career officials, reducing oversight and guardrails. And there are reports that staff objections to the legality of falsifying death information in SSA data have already directly led to the removal of at least one agency senior executive.
As SSA and DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) prioritize carrying out this reckless and seemingly illegal action, it serves as just one more example of the Trump administration’s failure to protect Social Security, including undermining core systems that are critical to running the program. At a time when the administration should be doing everything it can to reassure seniors, people with disabilities, and others who receive Social Security benefits, it is instead making deep cuts to SSA staffing, leading to overworked and understaffed field offices and degrading customer service and the reliability of SSA systems; proposing and then partially walking back the unnecessary elimination of phone services, leading to confusion and unnecessary burdens on seniors; and now falsely labeling people as dead in SSA databases.
