Elon Musk revealed Tuesday that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency uncovered people supposedly 150 years old still collecting Social Security. Standing alongside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Musk said his team was finding some “crazy things” as they comb through Uncle Sam’s bloated and wasteful financial records.
“Just a cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old,” Musk told reporters. “Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records, they’re missing out.”
Musk made it clear that either these people should be “very famous” or, more realistically, they’ve been dead for decades while still collecting taxpayer-funded checks. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122, as the oldest verified person in modern history. That makes it rather unlikely that a Neo-Methuselah is currently enjoying Social Security benefits somewhere in Kansas or Tennessee.
The far more probable explanation? Old-fashioned fraud. Between 2018 and 2022, the federal government lost between $233 billion and $521 billion every single year to waste, fraud, and abuse, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Social Security Administration has long been plagued by mismanagement, but for decades, no one in Washington had the backbone to take a serious look at where the money was going. Now, with Trump’s second administration and Musk’s efficiency task force, that era of unaccountability is coming to an end.
Despite how much the media despises the DOGE effort, Musk doubled down on his commitment to cut reckless government spending. “If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not spent in a sensible and frugal manner, then that’s not okay,” he said. “Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on the things that matter to the people.” Musk made it clear that rooting out fraud and stopping government waste isn’t radical or extreme—it’s just basic common sense.
Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply among the media elites and Washington bureaucrats who have grown fat off taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. But the American people overwhelmingly support efforts to clean up Social Security, stop sending checks to dead people, and ensure that every dollar spent actually serves the public interest. With Trump and Musk leading the charge, the bureaucratic gravy train is finally coming to a screeching halt.
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