We’ve already caught WorldNetDaily uncritically repeating false claims by Elon Musk about purported Social Security fraud in the form of payments made to people who are long dead — in fact, Musk and his DOGE toadies don’t understand how the Social Security database works. Bob Unruh — who previously wrote up some of the false claims — took another stab at parroting Musk’s bogus narrative in a Feb. 17 article:
Maybe there are vampires after all.
And they’re collecting Social Security.
That stunning conclusion comes from Elon Musk, chief of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, and is a result of DOGE’s initial review of the nation’s Social Security, its payouts, and more specifically, those getting the benefits.
Musk posted on social media the comment, “According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”
He continued, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
The chart, for example, lists one person each in the age range 360-369 and 240-249.
That would make those beneficiaries older than the Civil War, older than the Revolutionary War, older than the Constitution, older than … the United States, which is coming up on its 250th next year.
Musk noted that, “This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Again, no. The Concord Coalition explains:
Elon Musk made headlines this week when he revealed the Social Security Administration (SSA) failed to record the deaths of millions of people over the age of 100 and suggested vampires might be real and a lot of them were collecting Social Security. He also noted there were more “eligible” Social Security Numbers (SSNs) than U.S. citizens, suggesting “this might be the biggest fraud in history.” Sadly, Musk’s comments reveal how little he knows about Social Security, rather than how much the program pays to dead people or non-citizens.
Since Social Security was enacted in 1935, there have been more than 530 million SSNs issued, that’s out of one billion possible combinations of nine-digit numbers. The number of SSNs for each age group that Musk revealed does not reflect the number of people collecting benefits, but rather the number of SSNs issued minus the number of deaths recorded by the SSA. Thus, these numbers are not indicative of scandalous activity, as Musk seems to believe.
As The Concord Coalition has previously written, most SSNs are issued when children are born in the United States. However, many immigrants are also eligible to receive SSNs for employment purposes. Some of these immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship, while others leave the country. As a result, the number of SSNs will always be greater than the number of U.S. citizens. That is especially true given the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive death records, both here and abroad.
The SSA maintains a computer database known as the Death Master File. However, this database was not established until 1983, and not every state has fully participated until recently. Thus, deaths that occurred prior to the 1980s were less likely to be included.
Unforunately, Unruh and WND care only about generating cheap clickbait and pro-Trump propaganda and care nothing about accurately informing their readers.