I wonder how many people at the Social Security Administration knew about this extraordinary “error,” the billions in fraudulent payments going out, and never said anything or tried to “fix” it?
A look at the comments in the yahoo news article about the SS benefits to people older than 100, shows the TDS/ MDS is strong over there.
There are people who actually think Musk thinks there are people that are 140 years old! Again, I think many leftist have trouble connecting dots….
Plus , there were a lot of ” show us the proof!”
Hopefully Bondi and Patel will go looking for the SS fraud and bring charges.
Then the leftist can just ignore it.
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah said that there is a day coming when a person dies at 100 he would be considered still a child in age. We not there yet….
Nonapod – geez and I thought this blog was old!?
Is there a method that state and/or local govt’s use to notify SS when someone has died? Wonder how many of these over 100 are registered voters?
My first thought was that there are children collecting a dead parents SS, but it occurs to me that many of these may be non related id thieves, including illegal immigrants, that are using the dead person’s SS .
From comments at Fox on this SS story:
When my aunt went into a retirement home I remember my dad saying that she had to sign over her social security and retirement to the facility. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if these facilities are still collecting social security benefits for years even after the residents have passed away. Seeing as how they would be the ones that should be telling the social security administration that the person had died.
Surely local authorities know when someone dies and/or buried/cremated? Surely SS is in the chain to be notified?
It seems to me that whenever someone proposes that various government records keeping systems should be checked–one against another–the objections start to fly fast and furious, usually on the basis that doing this would somehow be “discriminatory,” have some sort of racial tinge to it, or be a waste of time and money.
Perhaps such apparently massive, wholesale corruption–with regard to many different subjects and processes–and keeping it covered up, is one of the key reasons for so many objections.
Another article about the justice departments emergency appeal to SCOTUS of a temporary restraining order from a district judge blocking them from firing the head of the office of special counsel.
“Trump admin seeks permission to fire head of the Office of Special Counsel
Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, was appointed to his post by former President Joe Biden
The emergency appeal, obtained by The Associated Press on Sunday, could likely be the start of a steady stream of court filings by lawyers of President Donald Trump and his administration aimed at reversing lower court rulings that have delayed his priorities for his second term in office.
The appeal seeks to prevent Hampton Dellinger from resuming his role as the head of the Office of Special Counsel.
A lower court judge previously temporarily reinstated Dellinger to his position, which he was appointed to by former President Joe Biden. Now, the Department of Justice is calling on the high court to lift the judge’s order.
The case is not expected to be placed on the docket until the Supreme Court returns after the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend. Once filed, the earliest the justices will be able to act will be Tuesday.
Tell me, when a state issues a death certificate, is a copy of that death certificate automatically sent to the relevant Federal government agencies, Social Security most prominent among them?
Maybe not.
It seems to me that when someone dies, it is up to whatever relatives who are left to procure multiple copies of that death certificate, and, in order to prove death and trigger other processes, to send them to insurance companies, Banks, the Social Security Administration, and other relevant agencies.
And, if they don’t tell Social Security that ol’ uncle Joe has just died, perhaps Social Security doesn’t have some sort of program which automatically notifies them when someone reaches, say, ninety or a hundred, prompting Social Security to check to see if they are, indeed, still alive.
Given human nature, it seems pretty stupid not to have something like such a verification program in place.
Looks like a hit ‘n miss situation on SSA getting notified – according to a quick 3 AI check.
• Local authorities typically notify the Social Security Administration (SSA) when someone dies, but this isn’t always automatic.
• In the United States, funeral directors typically report deaths to the SSA as part of their professional duties. However, this isn’t automatic in all cases, and sometimes family members need to report the death themselves.
Some of these are likely relatives of the dead and some are non related ID thieves, including illegal aliens.
I collect social security benefits from Germany. Each year I am obligated to go to the local govt authority to attest my existence on earth – that is, to certify I am still alive and kicking. I send this cert to the federal ss office. If I do not submit the cert, my benefits are cut. Why has this not been done in the USA?
I receive social security payments from Germany. Each year I am obligated to have the local government office certify that I am still alive. I send this certificate to the ss department. Without the cert, the payments stop. Why not the same in the USA?
This was topic number one in the discussions between Rubio and Netanyahu (I hope)
Iran warns Israel and US ‘can’t do a damn thing’ to thwart Tehran nuclear ambitions as tensions escalate
A senior Iranian official on Monday excoriated a meeting between U.S. and Israeli officials, calling it an illegal effort to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei blasted the meeting as a violation of international law and an effort that, in his view, Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv remain powerless to stop.
“When it comes to a country like Iran, they cannot do a damn thing,” he told reporters Monday, according to a readout provided by state media.
Baghaei took aim at the sit-down between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday, just one day earlier. Their meeting reportedly focused heavily on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
It’s almost not worth reading news, so many things are being confused and conflated in the last month.
I’ve spent years working with databases and I do not believe any media narrative that involves what’s in a database.
A database has two major components: there’s the information in it, which you can see, but you don’t always know what it means. Then there’s the logic used to populate and report from the database, which is not necessarily in the database itself but may be in different systems that talk to the database, and it won’t be in the data fields.
Unless I knew all these things about the SSA database: how it knows how to report how old people are, how it knows to report who is dead; and what data and logic is used to report those things, and what data and logic is used to trigger payments, I would not know that a statement like “20.789 million Americans are collecting social security benefits over the age of 100” is accurate.
What I saw Musk actually post was a distribution of people in the SS database by age with the death field set to “false”: it has hundreds of millions of people in it and most of them are not collecting Social Security, so I don’t know how I would know from that post that the people over 100 are actually all collecting benefits.
And since I don’t know what is in the birth date field for those people, I don’t know how their ages are being calculated. Since I don’t know what is in the death date field for those people or if that field is even used to report death, I don’t know how that system reports who is dead.
The narrative could be right but I simply don’t trust what people are saying yet, because they’re not putting out the kind of information that would actually tell me what is going on. There’s what Elon’s team gave him to look at, what Elon said he saw, there’s what people said he said he saw, there’s people confusing what he said with something else, there’s people conflating what he said with something else, there’s what’s actually in the database, and then there’s the actual payments that went out, and unless I can see the right kinds of information come out I would hesitate to jump on the narrative.
Lots of databases will fill in a “default” date. One of the biggest one I worked with used “1900-01-01” for a default “past” date and “2078-12-31” for a default “future” date. So if you looked up the death date for someone still alive it would say “2078-12-31”. If you looked up the birth date for a really old record imported from an earlier system it might say “1900-01-01” just because there was no data there.
Were there people in that system with birth date 1900-01-01 and death date 2078-12-31? You bet!
Each database does something analogous and probably does it differently. Musk probably knows that, but I don’t know how many people writing narrative about what Musk’s team is doing know that.
I don’t know how the SSA databases were set up and so I just don’t know to evaluate what is being claimed. I do know that people who haven’t spent a lot of time working with a specific database can easily be misled by what they find in there. I can’t tell you how many times people I worked with misinterpreted date fields they found: signature move would be confusing effective dates for a member record with effective dates for an enrollment record, that sort of thing. Ot they’d not filter their effective and terms dates correctly: to retroactively cancel out a record it would not be erased, the effective date would be set after the term date, which looks like time travel, and if you use the wrong logic you would pull those records, but they were not intended to be reported as active records.
So it’s really easy to get this stuff wrong or misunderstand it especially if they are new people brought in who are writing code against the database instead of using canned reporting. It often took weeks to get them up to speed on basics like what field is actually used to know who died.
My municipal retirement agency contracts with a private service that searches death records for matches with people receiving benefits. I do not know what that service uses to verify life. Every-other year I get a request from my retirement health (different from pension) in the form of a letter to verify my being alive.
Many years ago the SocSec stopped publishing, at least for public consumption, its death index. Before that one could look up a specific name, with identifiers, to see if their death had been reported. Not so today.
One X user pointed out that 2023 data showed the US population at around 334.9 million. However, Musk’s data (likely from DOGE’s ‘Big Balls’ analyst) shows 394 million names in the Social Security Administration database.
Musk responded: “Yes, there are FAR more “eligible” social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA. This might be the biggest fraud in history.”
Yeah, well I’d need some clarification on that number. What exactly qualifies as an “eligible” SSN? Does that mean that a person is supposed to be alive? For one thing, that number might make sense if you were to count all the people who have ever had an SSN, both living an dead. Since the establishment of Social Security system if you were to count every person who has ever been assigned a number I can see how that number could be 394 million (or even more). As an aside, SSNs are currently 9 total digits so there’s enough range to accommodate up to a billion individuals before you’d have to either reuse old ones or extend the range.
This website lists all the currently living people in the US who are at least 110 and up. There are 76 individuals. That’s a low enough number that it’d probably be easiest to simply cut off all payments >= 110 and send people out to confirm that each of these people are alive and reinstitute payments if they are.
Nonapod…that discrepancy between 334 and 394 million might include folks like me. US citizens in the SS database and eligible for benefits, but currently residing overseas.
I’m still alive by the way and not yet over 100… and also not yet receiving benefits.
==
The Population Pyramid site has it that there are about 70,000 centenarians in the United States. There are about 60 million people in this country over the age of 65.
==
The Social Security Administration’s beneficiary statistics have it that there are 68 million beneficiaries. Of these, 54.8 million are old age beneficiaries, 5.8 million are survivors, and 8.3 are disabled beneficiaries and their dependents. Another 7 million are collecting Supplemental Security Income.
==
I suspect Musk has been misinterpreted or is misinterpreting something.
Can a database be wrong? Of course.
Voter ID’s ‘n Proof of Life … I like Xylourgos point – tho am guessing that cheating can still happen.
Have Qualified Medicaid Beneficiary(QMB) as secondary ins for Medicare and it gets handled by Florida Medicaid. Also get $85 a month for food. Both are available for those living below the Poverty Line guidelines. Like Xylourgos – I have to fill out a form (every year) – either by mail or online to show that I still live below the Poverty Line. I bet if I live to 109 that someone is gonna want to see some living flesh.
As a retired unsuccessful criminal I have been on Parole and/or Probation off ‘n on. In Miami I didn’t have to report in but once. Suwannee county required me to report in monthly, if I recall correctly. Officers could also show up at work and/or home at anytime.
Yeah, SSA need some double-checking going on…just like Fort Knox’s gold supply…fuking Govts…
Musk makes snarky comments but obviously SSA data controls and data quality processes are not good enough. Are there some of these people whose deaths have been concealed? Probably. If there is a way to steal from the taxpayers, someone is doing it.
The linked article says that, back in 2015, a report made officials at Social Security aware of the problems with it’s database, and all of the people who were over a hundred collecting Social Security, and that proposed fixes of their database were proposed, but rejected on the basis that–
“… options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”*
The more government programs and expenditures DOGE looks into, the more corruption and theft they find, and the worse it gets.
Scam artists are gonna scam, but it’s up to government employees to make it hard, if not impossible, for these scam artists to run their scams against the government and, ultimately, against us taxpayers.
To take one example, it is starting to look like the panoply of programs which makeup our “social safety net” have been so thoroughly gamed that they all need to be completely reworked, claims very thoroughly examined, claimants periodically checked on to see if they still qualify, and strict limits set, so that aid goes to those who really deserve it, and that these programs aren’t just basically shoveling a lot of our tax dollars out to a bunch of scam artists.
@Snow on Pine: The linked article says that, back in 2015, a report made officials at Social Security aware of the problems with it’s database, and all of the people who were over a hundred collecting Social Security,
Doesn’t establish that in 2015 20 million centenarians were getting checks. No numbers at all from the 2015 report in the linked article about how many getting checks that ought not to be. Too many people with numbers, sure.
Don’t Die – have been watching this Biohacker Bryan Johnson for some time now, and almost each time he shows up again his looks are weirder. Keeps the body in top shape, but his mug it not a 30 year old mug. My mug at 47 was closer to a 30 year old than his.
Some of his routine involves experimental medical treatments and radical lifestyle habits all in an effort to find out the best way to break the 120-year ceiling of the human lifespan.
Not a gambler, but will give 1000 to 1 he doesn’t make it to 120+ years old—I will hold all betting monies.
“Don’t Die” – just a guess, but am guessing he is driving himself into an early grave…
I used to work in a business that used Punchcards, which meant that we had manual keypunchers. It’s a safe bet that the older numbers in the SSA database were entered the same way.
Some of those women (and they usually were women) were blindingly fast. You literally couldn’t see their fingers move.
What’s relevant is that they couldn’t either, because they didn’t watch their own hands; they watched the papers they were keying from and keyed by feel. If the papers had an error, they had no way to know. If they accidentally keyed “08” instead of “80”, they wouldn’t know that either, and the computer wouldn’t catch it because a machine doesn’t care what the number is, as long as some number is there.
(I recall an adding machine tape which said that the total for a batch of six numbers all less than $900 was over $42,000 – someone had hit the “subtotal” key on the previous batch so the two batches were added together. I figured this out in about a minute but the machine didn’t even know that there was a problem.)
Human nature being what it is, a lot of the numbers in the database are probably fraudulent. If there’s a way to cheat, someone is probably cheating. But a lot of them, possibly most, are probably simple data entry errors, which no one caught because no on looked.
I think Musk is just reporting a fact that the age distribution of the SS database. There are lots of people assuming that the US is paying all of them. But, I think there would have to be a cross check against the treasury data files to make sure. It is just Musk’s way to call attention to a potential problem, the need for better database management and procedures. Don’t forget, the US is paying big bucks to programs which lost their authorizations many years ago.
What was said about Trump a few years ago – “Salena Zito, … summed up Trump’s election campaign by saying: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
Richf – when I was in auditing, we had to run two adding machine tapes to prove the amount. That way, the reviewer could check the work without having to run a tape. Unfortunately, when the company switched to machines that had thermal tape, the information eventually faded. Sometimes the numbers were gone by the next audit. They changed back to regular paper tape.
I rather like the term ‘clawback’ as it is being used in reference to Trump’s efforts on taxpayers’ behalf.
I have read (I can’t recall the source) that some or a lot of the “people over 100” are simply errant entries in the “Year of Birth” record–specifically that for many people it is incorrectly listed “1900,” due to sloppy record-keeping. That should be easy to check. I know that when my father passed at just shy of 99 the SS payments stopped. I don’t remember whether I contacted the SSA or if it happened (from my point of view) automatically.
According to my IBM data processing manual, the IBM 56 card verifier is used for that data quality. Bottom line, data gets punched a second time and the verifier notches card columns that don’t verify.
Meanwhile,
The brat wants more, but the gravy train is coming to a full stop.
”The brat wants more, but the gravy train is coming to a full stop.”
And another call for suicide. Sigh.
Information about death certificates is strange, IMO. You can search for and get some basic information on people online, using their full name and city. Typically, you will get age, marital status, and political party registration because those things are available to automated searches.
Having been a widower for more than 3 years, I’ve noticed that I’m still listed as married. Because marriage and divorce docs are available to automated searches, but death certs. are NOT. Why not?? In my part of CA anyway, it requires a written request for information from the proper county.
My mother was a keypuncher and verifier. Two different machines.
One woman would type the numbers on the sheet on a keypunch machine and it would punch out the corresponding numbers on the card.
Another woman would feed the punched cards into a verifying machine. She would type the same numbers and a red light shined on the card, verifying the pattern with light sensors on the other side of the card. If it didn’t match it expelled the card.
My mom was a lightning fast typist!
Gratified to see many of the commenters at Althouse pushing back on the “20 million centenarian SS checks”–some because of their experience with databases and some because they’ve connected the dots with other information about how payments systems work or the software that runs SSA.
That was always the promise of the blogosphere, the “Army of Davids”–Gell-Mann amnesia can’t stand up to it. I’ve been a little sorry to see that promise degenerate into monetized, politicized commentary on stuff from pasted from legacy media, podcasts, and X and games of telephone amongst bloggers. Our gracious hostess being an exception to that criticism, naturally…
@ Liz > “But, I think there would have to be a cross check against the treasury data files to make sure.”
But maybe not. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doge-says-found-nearly-untraceable-budget-line-item-responsible-4-7t-payments
“The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),” DOGE wrote in a post on X. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”
@ richf > “I used to work in a business that used Punchcards, which meant that we had manual keypunchers.”
When I first started learning to program in college (1970), we did all our coding via punch cards. Most of us quickly learned the value of numbering the cards in our deck. Later, we entered code via a sort-of teletype machine, and considered that luxury living. Does anyone else remember “turn around time” as being “the time spent studying for your other classes”?
When I first started teaching computer programming at a two-year technical college in the late 1970s, I earned some extra money over one summer by writing a Manual for Key Punch Operators. By the end of the next summer, they had pulled out all the key punch machines and replaced them with a set of terminals hooked to a mini-computer for the students to learn their data entry & programming skills.
Thus does progress make obsoletists of us all.
@ Snow “Scam artists are gonna scam, but it’s up to government employees to make it hard, if not impossible, for these scam artists to run their scams against the government and, ultimately, against us taxpayers.”
Ah, well, there’s the problem.
You are assuming the government employees are not in on the scams.
@ sdferr > “On the Chutkan TRO hearing”
UPDATE from Monday afternoon– judge kicks the can down the road on Federal holiday: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/17/judge-chutkan-musk-lawsuit-hearing-00204590
“I’m not seeing it so far. … It’s sort of like a prophylactic TRO and that’s not allowed,” Chutkan said, adding that she hoped to issue a ruling within 24 hours. “The courts can’t act based on media reports. We can’t do that.”
Seems President Trump is mostly outta his League in International affairs—especially when dealing with Russia. He needs to find his ‘Kissinger’ quickly before it blows it all.
US and Russian officials engaged in four-and-a-half hours of negotiations, which the Kremlin said ‘went well’ and are now complete.
In the aftermath of the discussions, Moscow has been laying out its demands and stipulations for peace talks, warning that a lasting settlement in Ukraine is ‘impossible’ without addressing the wider issue of European security.
‘A lasting and long-term viable resolution is impossible without a comprehensive consideration of security issues on the continent,’ Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Peskov stated last week that Moscow wanted to use talks with the US to address Russian ‘concerns’ about the security situation in Europe. While he did not go into further detail, the Kremlin has demanded in recent years that NATO roll back to its 1997 borders.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova later said that Moscow wants NATO to disavow its 2008 promise to one day give Ukraine membership of the US-led military alliance.
Yeah, Trump ‘n Hegseth ‘n Vance gave up too much even before the negotiations started…the Kremlin is running the show now.
This morning, 22 degrees, and Foggy. Gloomy
On the Chutkan TRO hearing to take place at 11:00am today concerning an 14 (blue) States’ suit barring DOGE entry to systems in Departments of Education, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, and Office of Personnel Management: https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/17/democrats-lawfare-threatens-to-sideline-musk-and-doge/
It’s a stinker.
Not a stinker, Brahms Intermezzo no. 3, op. 117, Glenn Gould: https://youtu.be/Sfe2Mh2-jMo
Elon Musk claims to have uncovered a pretty big error in Social Security. He’s saying that 20.789 million Americans are collecting social security benefits over the age of 100. A quick Google AI response claims that there were approximately 101,000 people aged 100 or older in the United States In 2024.
Monopod—That’s quite an “error.”
I wonder how many people at the Social Security Administration knew about this extraordinary “error,” the billions in fraudulent payments going out, and never said anything or tried to “fix” it?
A look at the comments in the yahoo news article about the SS benefits to people older than 100, shows the TDS/ MDS is strong over there.
There are people who actually think Musk thinks there are people that are 140 years old! Again, I think many leftist have trouble connecting dots….
Plus , there were a lot of ” show us the proof!”
Hopefully Bondi and Patel will go looking for the SS fraud and bring charges.
Then the leftist can just ignore it.
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah said that there is a day coming when a person dies at 100 he would be considered still a child in age. We not there yet….
Nonapod – geez and I thought this blog was old!?
Is there a method that state and/or local govt’s use to notify SS when someone has died? Wonder how many of these over 100 are registered voters?
My first thought was that there are children collecting a dead parents SS, but it occurs to me that many of these may be non related id thieves, including illegal immigrants, that are using the dead person’s SS .
From comments at Fox on this SS story:
Surely local authorities know when someone dies and/or buried/cremated? Surely SS is in the chain to be notified?
It seems to me that whenever someone proposes that various government records keeping systems should be checked–one against another–the objections start to fly fast and furious, usually on the basis that doing this would somehow be “discriminatory,” have some sort of racial tinge to it, or be a waste of time and money.
Perhaps such apparently massive, wholesale corruption–with regard to many different subjects and processes–and keeping it covered up, is one of the key reasons for so many objections.
Another article about the justice departments emergency appeal to SCOTUS of a temporary restraining order from a district judge blocking them from firing the head of the office of special counsel.
“Trump admin seeks permission to fire head of the Office of Special Counsel
Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, was appointed to his post by former President Joe Biden
The emergency appeal, obtained by The Associated Press on Sunday, could likely be the start of a steady stream of court filings by lawyers of President Donald Trump and his administration aimed at reversing lower court rulings that have delayed his priorities for his second term in office.
The appeal seeks to prevent Hampton Dellinger from resuming his role as the head of the Office of Special Counsel.
A lower court judge previously temporarily reinstated Dellinger to his position, which he was appointed to by former President Joe Biden. Now, the Department of Justice is calling on the high court to lift the judge’s order.
The case is not expected to be placed on the docket until the Supreme Court returns after the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend. Once filed, the earliest the justices will be able to act will be Tuesday.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-admin-seeks-permission-fire-head-office-special-counsel
Tell me, when a state issues a death certificate, is a copy of that death certificate automatically sent to the relevant Federal government agencies, Social Security most prominent among them?
Maybe not.
It seems to me that when someone dies, it is up to whatever relatives who are left to procure multiple copies of that death certificate, and, in order to prove death and trigger other processes, to send them to insurance companies, Banks, the Social Security Administration, and other relevant agencies.
And, if they don’t tell Social Security that ol’ uncle Joe has just died, perhaps Social Security doesn’t have some sort of program which automatically notifies them when someone reaches, say, ninety or a hundred, prompting Social Security to check to see if they are, indeed, still alive.
Given human nature, it seems pretty stupid not to have something like such a verification program in place.
Looks like a hit ‘n miss situation on SSA getting notified – according to a quick 3 AI check.
• Local authorities typically notify the Social Security Administration (SSA) when someone dies, but this isn’t always automatic.
• In the United States, funeral directors typically report deaths to the SSA as part of their professional duties. However, this isn’t automatic in all cases, and sometimes family members need to report the death themselves.
Some of these are likely relatives of the dead and some are non related ID thieves, including illegal aliens.
I collect social security benefits from Germany. Each year I am obligated to go to the local govt authority to attest my existence on earth – that is, to certify I am still alive and kicking. I send this cert to the federal ss office. If I do not submit the cert, my benefits are cut. Why has this not been done in the USA?
I receive social security payments from Germany. Each year I am obligated to have the local government office certify that I am still alive. I send this certificate to the ss department. Without the cert, the payments stop. Why not the same in the USA?
This was topic number one in the discussions between Rubio and Netanyahu (I hope)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iran-warns-israel-us-cant-do-damn-thing-thwart-tehran-nuclear-ambitions-tensions-escalate
Iran warns Israel and US ‘can’t do a damn thing’ to thwart Tehran nuclear ambitions as tensions escalate
A senior Iranian official on Monday excoriated a meeting between U.S. and Israeli officials, calling it an illegal effort to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei blasted the meeting as a violation of international law and an effort that, in his view, Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv remain powerless to stop.
“When it comes to a country like Iran, they cannot do a damn thing,” he told reporters Monday, according to a readout provided by state media.
Baghaei took aim at the sit-down between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday, just one day earlier. Their meeting reportedly focused heavily on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
It’s almost not worth reading news, so many things are being confused and conflated in the last month.
I’ve spent years working with databases and I do not believe any media narrative that involves what’s in a database.
A database has two major components: there’s the information in it, which you can see, but you don’t always know what it means. Then there’s the logic used to populate and report from the database, which is not necessarily in the database itself but may be in different systems that talk to the database, and it won’t be in the data fields.
Unless I knew all these things about the SSA database: how it knows how to report how old people are, how it knows to report who is dead; and what data and logic is used to report those things, and what data and logic is used to trigger payments, I would not know that a statement like “20.789 million Americans are collecting social security benefits over the age of 100” is accurate.
What I saw Musk actually post was a distribution of people in the SS database by age with the death field set to “false”: it has hundreds of millions of people in it and most of them are not collecting Social Security, so I don’t know how I would know from that post that the people over 100 are actually all collecting benefits.
And since I don’t know what is in the birth date field for those people, I don’t know how their ages are being calculated. Since I don’t know what is in the death date field for those people or if that field is even used to report death, I don’t know how that system reports who is dead.
The narrative could be right but I simply don’t trust what people are saying yet, because they’re not putting out the kind of information that would actually tell me what is going on. There’s what Elon’s team gave him to look at, what Elon said he saw, there’s what people said he said he saw, there’s people confusing what he said with something else, there’s people conflating what he said with something else, there’s what’s actually in the database, and then there’s the actual payments that went out, and unless I can see the right kinds of information come out I would hesitate to jump on the narrative.
Lots of databases will fill in a “default” date. One of the biggest one I worked with used “1900-01-01” for a default “past” date and “2078-12-31” for a default “future” date. So if you looked up the death date for someone still alive it would say “2078-12-31”. If you looked up the birth date for a really old record imported from an earlier system it might say “1900-01-01” just because there was no data there.
Were there people in that system with birth date 1900-01-01 and death date 2078-12-31? You bet!
Each database does something analogous and probably does it differently. Musk probably knows that, but I don’t know how many people writing narrative about what Musk’s team is doing know that.
I don’t know how the SSA databases were set up and so I just don’t know to evaluate what is being claimed. I do know that people who haven’t spent a lot of time working with a specific database can easily be misled by what they find in there. I can’t tell you how many times people I worked with misinterpreted date fields they found: signature move would be confusing effective dates for a member record with effective dates for an enrollment record, that sort of thing. Ot they’d not filter their effective and terms dates correctly: to retroactively cancel out a record it would not be erased, the effective date would be set after the term date, which looks like time travel, and if you use the wrong logic you would pull those records, but they were not intended to be reported as active records.
So it’s really easy to get this stuff wrong or misunderstand it especially if they are new people brought in who are writing code against the database instead of using canned reporting. It often took weeks to get them up to speed on basics like what field is actually used to know who died.
My municipal retirement agency contracts with a private service that searches death records for matches with people receiving benefits. I do not know what that service uses to verify life. Every-other year I get a request from my retirement health (different from pension) in the form of a letter to verify my being alive.
Many years ago the SocSec stopped publishing, at least for public consumption, its death index. Before that one could look up a specific name, with identifiers, to see if their death had been reported. Not so today.
Yeah, well I’d need some clarification on that number. What exactly qualifies as an “eligible” SSN? Does that mean that a person is supposed to be alive? For one thing, that number might make sense if you were to count all the people who have ever had an SSN, both living an dead. Since the establishment of Social Security system if you were to count every person who has ever been assigned a number I can see how that number could be 394 million (or even more). As an aside, SSNs are currently 9 total digits so there’s enough range to accommodate up to a billion individuals before you’d have to either reuse old ones or extend the range.
This website lists all the currently living people in the US who are at least 110 and up. There are 76 individuals. That’s a low enough number that it’d probably be easiest to simply cut off all payments >= 110 and send people out to confirm that each of these people are alive and reinstitute payments if they are.
Nonapod…that discrepancy between 334 and 394 million might include folks like me. US citizens in the SS database and eligible for benefits, but currently residing overseas.
I’m still alive by the way and not yet over 100… and also not yet receiving benefits.
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The Population Pyramid site has it that there are about 70,000 centenarians in the United States. There are about 60 million people in this country over the age of 65.
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The Social Security Administration’s beneficiary statistics have it that there are 68 million beneficiaries. Of these, 54.8 million are old age beneficiaries, 5.8 million are survivors, and 8.3 are disabled beneficiaries and their dependents. Another 7 million are collecting Supplemental Security Income.
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I suspect Musk has been misinterpreted or is misinterpreting something.
Can a database be wrong? Of course.
Voter ID’s ‘n Proof of Life … I like Xylourgos point – tho am guessing that cheating can still happen.
Have Qualified Medicaid Beneficiary(QMB) as secondary ins for Medicare and it gets handled by Florida Medicaid. Also get $85 a month for food. Both are available for those living below the Poverty Line guidelines. Like Xylourgos – I have to fill out a form (every year) – either by mail or online to show that I still live below the Poverty Line. I bet if I live to 109 that someone is gonna want to see some living flesh.
As a retired unsuccessful criminal I have been on Parole and/or Probation off ‘n on. In Miami I didn’t have to report in but once. Suwannee county required me to report in monthly, if I recall correctly. Officers could also show up at work and/or home at anytime.
Yeah, SSA need some double-checking going on…just like Fort Knox’s gold supply…fuking Govts…
Musk makes snarky comments but obviously SSA data controls and data quality processes are not good enough. Are there some of these people whose deaths have been concealed? Probably. If there is a way to steal from the taxpayers, someone is doing it.
The linked article says that, back in 2015, a report made officials at Social Security aware of the problems with it’s database, and all of the people who were over a hundred collecting Social Security, and that proposed fixes of their database were proposed, but rejected on the basis that–
“… options would be costly to implement, would be of little benefit to the agency, would largely duplicate information already available to data exchange consumers and would create cost for the states and other data exchange partners.”*
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/02/elon-musks-doge-team-uncovers-25-million-people/#comments
Interesting charts at Power Line – The Daily Chart: Europe’s Weakness
The more government programs and expenditures DOGE looks into, the more corruption and theft they find, and the worse it gets.
Scam artists are gonna scam, but it’s up to government employees to make it hard, if not impossible, for these scam artists to run their scams against the government and, ultimately, against us taxpayers.
To take one example, it is starting to look like the panoply of programs which makeup our “social safety net” have been so thoroughly gamed that they all need to be completely reworked, claims very thoroughly examined, claimants periodically checked on to see if they still qualify, and strict limits set, so that aid goes to those who really deserve it, and that these programs aren’t just basically shoveling a lot of our tax dollars out to a bunch of scam artists.
@Snow on Pine: The linked article says that, back in 2015, a report made officials at Social Security aware of the problems with it’s database, and all of the people who were over a hundred collecting Social Security,
Doesn’t establish that in 2015 20 million centenarians were getting checks. No numbers at all from the 2015 report in the linked article about how many getting checks that ought not to be. Too many people with numbers, sure.
Don’t Die – have been watching this Biohacker Bryan Johnson for some time now, and almost each time he shows up again his looks are weirder. Keeps the body in top shape, but his mug it not a 30 year old mug. My mug at 47 was closer to a 30 year old than his.
Not a gambler, but will give 1000 to 1 he doesn’t make it to 120+ years old—I will hold all betting monies.
“Don’t Die” – just a guess, but am guessing he is driving himself into an early grave…
I used to work in a business that used Punchcards, which meant that we had manual keypunchers. It’s a safe bet that the older numbers in the SSA database were entered the same way.
Some of those women (and they usually were women) were blindingly fast. You literally couldn’t see their fingers move.
What’s relevant is that they couldn’t either, because they didn’t watch their own hands; they watched the papers they were keying from and keyed by feel. If the papers had an error, they had no way to know. If they accidentally keyed “08” instead of “80”, they wouldn’t know that either, and the computer wouldn’t catch it because a machine doesn’t care what the number is, as long as some number is there.
(I recall an adding machine tape which said that the total for a batch of six numbers all less than $900 was over $42,000 – someone had hit the “subtotal” key on the previous batch so the two batches were added together. I figured this out in about a minute but the machine didn’t even know that there was a problem.)
Human nature being what it is, a lot of the numbers in the database are probably fraudulent. If there’s a way to cheat, someone is probably cheating. But a lot of them, possibly most, are probably simple data entry errors, which no one caught because no on looked.
I think Musk is just reporting a fact that the age distribution of the SS database. There are lots of people assuming that the US is paying all of them. But, I think there would have to be a cross check against the treasury data files to make sure. It is just Musk’s way to call attention to a potential problem, the need for better database management and procedures. Don’t forget, the US is paying big bucks to programs which lost their authorizations many years ago.
What was said about Trump a few years ago – “Salena Zito, … summed up Trump’s election campaign by saying: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”
Richf – when I was in auditing, we had to run two adding machine tapes to prove the amount. That way, the reviewer could check the work without having to run a tape. Unfortunately, when the company switched to machines that had thermal tape, the information eventually faded. Sometimes the numbers were gone by the next audit. They changed back to regular paper tape.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-democrat-tells-mnsbc-jd-vance-used-same-language-hitler-did-to-justify-the-holocaust-during-munich-speech/ar-AA1zeEf4?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=b7098bbad9f34567d3aa342b71535541&ei=17
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This is the Democratic Party.
I rather like the term ‘clawback’ as it is being used in reference to Trump’s efforts on taxpayers’ behalf.
I have read (I can’t recall the source) that some or a lot of the “people over 100” are simply errant entries in the “Year of Birth” record–specifically that for many people it is incorrectly listed “1900,” due to sloppy record-keeping. That should be easy to check. I know that when my father passed at just shy of 99 the SS payments stopped. I don’t remember whether I contacted the SSA or if it happened (from my point of view) automatically.
According to my IBM data processing manual, the IBM 56 card verifier is used for that data quality. Bottom line, data gets punched a second time and the verifier notches card columns that don’t verify.
Meanwhile,
The brat wants more, but the gravy train is coming to a full stop.
”The brat wants more, but the gravy train is coming to a full stop.”
And another call for suicide. Sigh.
Information about death certificates is strange, IMO. You can search for and get some basic information on people online, using their full name and city. Typically, you will get age, marital status, and political party registration because those things are available to automated searches.
Having been a widower for more than 3 years, I’ve noticed that I’m still listed as married. Because marriage and divorce docs are available to automated searches, but death certs. are NOT. Why not?? In my part of CA anyway, it requires a written request for information from the proper county.
Heh, a callback worth the candle!: https://x.com/Scavino47/status/1891508141654700041
RichF and Chases Eagles,
My mother was a keypuncher and verifier. Two different machines.
One woman would type the numbers on the sheet on a keypunch machine and it would punch out the corresponding numbers on the card.
Another woman would feed the punched cards into a verifying machine. She would type the same numbers and a red light shined on the card, verifying the pattern with light sensors on the other side of the card. If it didn’t match it expelled the card.
My mom was a lightning fast typist!
Gratified to see many of the commenters at Althouse pushing back on the “20 million centenarian SS checks”–some because of their experience with databases and some because they’ve connected the dots with other information about how payments systems work or the software that runs SSA.
That was always the promise of the blogosphere, the “Army of Davids”–Gell-Mann amnesia can’t stand up to it. I’ve been a little sorry to see that promise degenerate into monetized, politicized commentary on stuff from pasted from legacy media, podcasts, and X and games of telephone amongst bloggers. Our gracious hostess being an exception to that criticism, naturally…
@ Liz > “But, I think there would have to be a cross check against the treasury data files to make sure.”
But maybe not.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doge-says-found-nearly-untraceable-budget-line-item-responsible-4-7t-payments
“The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),” DOGE wrote in a post on X. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”
@ richf > “I used to work in a business that used Punchcards, which meant that we had manual keypunchers.”
When I first started learning to program in college (1970), we did all our coding via punch cards. Most of us quickly learned the value of numbering the cards in our deck. Later, we entered code via a sort-of teletype machine, and considered that luxury living. Does anyone else remember “turn around time” as being “the time spent studying for your other classes”?
When I first started teaching computer programming at a two-year technical college in the late 1970s, I earned some extra money over one summer by writing a Manual for Key Punch Operators. By the end of the next summer, they had pulled out all the key punch machines and replaced them with a set of terminals hooked to a mini-computer for the students to learn their data entry & programming skills.
Thus does progress make obsoletists of us all.
@ Snow “Scam artists are gonna scam, but it’s up to government employees to make it hard, if not impossible, for these scam artists to run their scams against the government and, ultimately, against us taxpayers.”
Ah, well, there’s the problem.
You are assuming the government employees are not in on the scams.
@ sdferr > “On the Chutkan TRO hearing”
UPDATE from Monday afternoon– judge kicks the can down the road on Federal holiday:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/17/judge-chutkan-musk-lawsuit-hearing-00204590
“I’m not seeing it so far. … It’s sort of like a prophylactic TRO and that’s not allowed,” Chutkan said, adding that she hoped to issue a ruling within 24 hours. “The courts can’t act based on media reports. We can’t do that.”
Seems President Trump is mostly outta his League in International affairs—especially when dealing with Russia. He needs to find his ‘Kissinger’ quickly before it blows it all.
“Trump is a coward, sucking Putin’s d—,” said Charles Carter, another US volunteer, who previously served with America’s 101st Airborne Division.
Is Putin leading Trump around by the nose?!?
Kremlin reveals its price for peace: Thinly-veiled demand that NATO scales back its ambitions is issued as US and Russia conclude ‘successful’ Ukraine talks without Zelensky – amid fears Trump could abandon Baltics
Yeah, Trump ‘n Hegseth ‘n Vance gave up too much even before the negotiations started…the Kremlin is running the show now.
Kremlin issue peace demands and insist Putin is ready for talks with Zelensky as U.S. and Russia officials hold ‘successful’ meeting in Saudi Arabia
Trump seems more focused on sucking all the blood outta Ukraine – like some kind of New York Realtor Vampire horror show…
Trump’s demand for Ukrainian mineral wealth ‘was suggested by Zelensky to try and lure Donald into supporting Ukraine… but was so loosely worded the president saw a chance to strike a mega payday deal for US’
Hopefully all this news is wrong, but I doubt it…