Bob Unruh served up more Trump stenography in an April 10 article:
If you thought the USAID-funded gay sex comic books and DEI-promoting theatrical productions were bad, you probably thought the revelations about people who, allegedly, are more than 200 years old collecting Social Security payments were horrific.
It gets worse.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, under the directorship of Elon Musk, has confirmed that thousands of people who haven’t been born yet are demanding benefits be paid to them under the nation’s unemployment compensation programs.
[…]The investigation so far as found more than 24,000 people over 115 years old claiming $59 million in benefits.
And 28,000 from 1 to 5 years old claiming $254 million.
Then there are the 9,700 people with birth dates more than 15 years in the future claiming $69 million in benefits.
DOGE said, “In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”
Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s secretary of labor, said it’s another benefit for Americans, the DOGE team’s discovery of nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment payments.
“The Labor Department is committed to recovering Americans’ stolen tax dollars. We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud – accountability is here.”
Just one problem: these were known issues that predate the Trump administration, though Trump himself may be a part of it. The Associated Press reported:
Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”
That same memo offered an option for states trying to protect a person whose identity was stolen to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits. To preserve a record of the fraud but keep innocent people from being linked to it, states could create a “pseudo claim,” the memo advises.
Those “pseudo claims” led to records of toddlers and centenarians getting checks. The Labor Department’s inspector general tallied some 4,895 unemployment claims from people over the age of 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, but another departmental memo explained that the filings stemmed from states changing dates of birth to protect people whose identities were used.
In other words: DOGE is taking credit for finding fraud that others have previously found. Unruh hasn’t told his readers that, of course. Recall that he previously hyped DOGE claims of massive fraud in Social Security which were also known issues and didn’t even identify ny aactual fraud.