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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced on Friday that millions of people who were marked as being 120-years-old or older have been marked as deceased as part of a "major cleanup" at the agency.
"After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased. Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort."
The cleanup effort began in March, after it was revealed that millions of people were listed as being 120 years or older. The count of those marked as "living" on Social Security’s rolls as of March 8 were 3.4 million people between the ages of 120 to 129, 3.9 million people between the ages of 130 to 139, 3.5 million people between the ages of 140 and 149, and 1.3 million people between the ages of 150 to 159.
As of Friday, nearly all of those found to be listed as living well past a century have been marked as deceased.
Musk revealed in February that there were millions of people listed in the Social Security database whose ages were well beyond the average life expectancy. "According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE," Musk wrote at the time. "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security."
The post revealed that there were also thousands of people above the age of 159, including one person older than the nation’s founding, listed in the database.
The Trump administration has taken moves to protect Social Security, with Trump signing an executive order in April barring illegal immigrants from obtaining Social Security benefits and cracking down on fraudulent claims.
The order released from the White House stated that it is "aimed at stopping illegal aliens and other ineligible people from obtaining Social Security Act benefits" and that it "directs the administration to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from Social Security Act programs."
English (US) ·