WorldNetDaily has been on quite the tear lately in its slavish devotion to serving as Trump Regime Media, uncritically repeating sensational claims that turn out to be, well, less than true. This happened again in a Feb. 11 article by Joe Kovacs:
Elon Musk joined President Donald Trump in the Oval Office Tuesday to discuss “mind-blowing” amounts of fraud and abuse they’re discovering through deep dives by DOGE, including people “150 years old” receiving Social Security.
“We had no idea we were going to find this much,” Trump said. “We have already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption.”
“Could be close to a trillion dollars that we’re gonna find.”
[…]“There’s crazy things,” Musk explained. “Like just a cursory examination of Social Security, we’ve got people in there that are150 years old. Now do you know anybody who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in ‘The Guinness Book of World Records.’ They are missing out.
[…]“So that is the case like I think they are probably dead is my guess. Or they should be very famous. One of the two. And then a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there is no identifying information? Why is there not identifying information?”
Turns out there are logical reasons for this, tied to the large and complex Social Security database, as PolitiFact detailed:
Social media commenters came up with one possible explanation for the 150-year age, and experts who have worked closely with the Social Security Administration told PolitiFact it was plausible.
Under an international standard called ISO 8601, a missing value for a date is coded as May 20, 1875, because that was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
For that reason, under some coding systems, a missing value for a date will default to 1875 — which in the year 2025 produces a round figure of 150.
“Some people, particularly some immigrants, really don’t know their exact birthday, so there would have to be some alternative means of verification,” said C. Eugene Steuerle, a fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank, and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury Department during the Reagan administration.
Another possibility is that a beneficiary’s record in the system may have multiple fields for birth dates, one of which is missing data because it’s not needed for calculations.
“Some records may have missing codes, while others may have conflicting information on age or date of birth, so the staff would have created queries to determine which fields are actually used,” J. Michael Collins, a University of Wisconsin professor of public affairs, said.
Bob Unruh made his own contribution in a Feb. 14 article:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says that the $2.7 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid fraud that already has been uncovered by President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is just part of “a very long list of fraud, waste and abuse that DOGE is identifying on a daily basis.”
The question was raised during a recent White House briefing, when she was asked specifically about the $2.7 trillion revealed by a House subcommittee run by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
She said:
The U.S. government sent $2.7 TRILLION in Medicare & Medicaid money overseas to people who were NOT eligible to receive it.
That’s 8% of our national debt.
Medicare isn’t going broke. The money is being stolen.
— DOGE NEWS- Department of Government Efficiency (@realdogeusa) February 13, 2025
“Elon Musk also talked about yesterday about Social Security payments that are going out the door for people who are no longer with us,” she continued, “I would say that is certainly fraud. There’s also a lot of contracts they’ve identified that, just as a hypothetical example, are a million bucks, but only $500,000 went out the door. So where’s the rest of that cash?”
But Unruh eventually got around to telling (some of) the truth:
It was a hearing Wednesday by the Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee in the House that confirmed since 2003, a “staggering” $2.7 trillion had been paid by taxpayers for “improper Medicare and Medicaid payments, including to individuals overseas who are not eligible to receive them.”
But DOGE did not make that finding, as Poynter detailed:
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan Congressional agency, published reports March 26, 2024, and June 27, 2024, estimating that, since fiscal year 2003, federal agencies had reported $2.7 trillion of what the GAO described as “improper” payments, defined as “those that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.”
The $2.7 trillion included payments made by Medicare and Medicaid and other federal programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Auditors said the improper payments were made for many reasons, from “unintentional administrative errors to fraud.”
Both of these false claims remain live and uncorrected.