It turns out the government has been “paying” respect to a few too many immortals.
Thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — the Elon Musk-led federal cleanup crew under President Donald Trump — more than 7 million outdated and potentially fraudulent Social Security records have now been marked as deceased. That’s not a typo. Millions of “people” in the system were listed as 120 years old or older. Some were registered as being over 140.
Unless the government has been quietly tracking a secret population of vampires or high-functioning zombies, this was long overdue.
Back in February, Musk called attention to the problem by releasing a spreadsheet from the SSA’s own data, showing an eye-popping number of active Social Security numbers with no recorded death, some dating back to the 19th century. In typical Musk fashion, he joked, “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
While the SSA insists most of these records weren’t linked to active benefit payments, that’s hardly the point. This is about government waste, sloppy bookkeeping, and a system that — before Trump and Musk got involved — was practically begging to be exploited.
And let’s not pretend fraud hasn’t happened. In 2021 alone, watchdogs reported that more than $1 billion in Social Security payments went to dead people. And that’s just the fraud we caught. Under the Biden administration, no one lifted a finger. Now DOGE is steamrolling through the mess — correcting millions of ancient files with missing death dates and cleaning out a bureaucracy that hasn’t seen a mop since the Cold War.
This is precisely the kind of no-nonsense efficiency conservatives have been demanding for decades. Elon Musk isn’t just tweeting memes anymore — he’s digitally disinfecting federal agencies that have been bloated, outdated, and error-prone for generations.
Of the 7 million death record updates so far, DOGE says another 5 million still need to be cleaned up. And while the SSA claims they already stop payments for anyone listed over 115, that’s not good enough. In Trump’s America, we don’t tolerate a single dime going to fictional centenarians or phantom citizens.
This isn’t just an audit. It’s a reckoning.
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