- DOGE says it has discovered fraudulent unemployment claims totaling hundreds of millions of dollars paid to individuals with birthdates that indicate they should not exist. The data includes toddlers, centenarians, and even people “born” in the future.
- Elon Musk, who oversees DOGE, called the discovery “crazy” and pointed to a lack of safeguards in unemployment systems.
- In a separate discovery earlier this year, DOGE reported that deceased individuals were still receiving Social Security benefits due to outdated government software.
Full Story
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered what it describes as widespread fraud in federal unemployment benefits distributed since 2020.
According to DOGE, an initial review of federal claims data revealed that thousands of payments were made to individuals who do not appear to exist based on impossible or highly unlikely birthdates.
Fraudulent claims by the numbers
DOGE says it identified over 24,000 people listed as being 115 years or older who collected approximately $59 million in unemployment benefits.
Another 28,000 claims were filed on behalf of individuals between the ages of 1 and 5, totaling $254 million.
The agency also discovered nearly 10,000 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future who collected about $69 million.
“In one case,” DOGE stated, “someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41,000.”
Musk points to ‘Fake people born in the future’
DOGE is overseen by Elon Musk, who responded to the findings on X.
“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote. “This is so crazy that I had to read it several times before it sank in.”
He added, “The oldest living American is 114 years old, so it is safe to say that anyone 115 or older is collecting unemployment due to being dead. There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”
Media coverage of DOGE discovery
As of 15 hours after DOGE’s announcement, right-leaning outlets such as Fox News, the New York Post and Breitbart had published coverage.
Meanwhile, major left-leaning news organizations — including The New York Times, The Associated Press and broadcast networks like NBC, CBS and ABC — had not published reports on their websites about the discovery.
This apparent imbalance raises concerns about media bias, particularly through omission or oversaturation. A “media miss” occurs when one side of the political spectrum extensively covers a news story while the other largely ignores it.
Political reaction over DOGE is divided
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., briefly addressed DOGE’s efforts at a press conference on Thursday, April 10.
“We have a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in Medicaid. Just one tiny example — the estimate is $51 billion a year in Medicaid is lost to fraud,” Johnson said. “Now, with DOGE’s efforts and algorithms and opportunities, we have the ability to carve that out.”
In contrast, Democrats voiced concern during a DOGE-related hearing this week.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., a DOGE subcommittee member, said, “We have been deeply concerned that the entire DOGE effort has been a front to help support billionaires trying to privatize public services. And we have seen, as Elon Musk is on his exit out of the federal government, he has secured billions of dollars in new contracts across the federal government.”
Similar issues found in Social Security
This isn’t the first such discovery by DOGE. In February, the agency reported that tens of millions of dead people were still receiving Social Security benefits.
The Social Security Administration responded, admitting its system does not properly annotate death information. The agency said that roughly 19 million people born in 1920 or earlier were not marked as deceased in its system, but added that payments are automatically halted for anyone older than 115.
DOGE’s latest findings on unemployment fraud have not yet received a formal response from the relevant agencies. Whether any of the questionable claims stemmed from data input errors remains unclear.
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Author: Karah Rucker
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