Is Social Security Really Paying Out Benefits to Millions of Deceased People?

There is so much misinformation, propaganda, and lies surrounding government operations ever since the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second term as president. One of those includes the Social Security Administration and payments to millions of dead Americans. But is this true? How bad is the situation, really?

We consulted with reputable and trustworthy third-party sources to determine whether Trump and Elon Musk’s claims were true, and if they were not, what the truth really is. Here is what we found.

Background on the Accusation

In early 2025, Elon Musk shared data he obtained from the Social Security Administration on his Twitter profile. Shortly after, Trump shared the data again and claimed that it showed “millions and millions of people over 100 years old” were being paid Social Security benefits.

It began when Musk claimed that “cursory examination of Social Security” information showed evidence of “people in there that are 150 years old.” He also claimed that “there’s a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information.”

He then fired a handful of posts on his Twitter profile with images of what he claimed was evidence of millions of people over age 99 receiving Social Security payments. It was at this point that Trump made his claim that:

“We have millions and millions of people over 100 years old. Everybody knows that’s not so. We have a very corrupt country, very corrupt country, and it’s a sad thing to say, but we’re figuring it out. […] If you take all those numbers off because they’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off of Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90 but not 200.” 

Trump claimed that millions of people were being paid fraudulent amounts of Social Security, he said “it’s a massive fraud […] I mean, maybe millions of them.”

What is the Truth?

In short, the answer is: no, the Social Security Administration is not making payments to millions of dead Americans, and there are not millions of people receiving fraudulent Social Security payments.

Government auditors reported in 2023, that 18.9 million people were born before 1920 for whom there was no record of their death. The government recognized that almost all of these records were outdated. Why are they outdated? The biggest reason is that all these people died decades ago, long before the use of reporting deaths electronically and the cost to correct all those records is more than just leaving them as they are. While the Social Security Administration receives notices of death from a wide variety of sources, it says that its “records are not a comprehensive record of all deaths in the country.”

In that same audit, and according to independent government officials, the vast majority of those people have never received payments.

There are around 18.9 million people who have Social Security numbers, and 98% of those people are not receiving benefits and have not reported any earnings for the last 50 years. Only .2% of that total are people receiving benefits. (That is 44,000 people who had not reported earnings in 50 years).

The Office of Audit that analyzed the SSA’s system concluded that there had been “$298 million in payments to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries in suspended payment status” and that the “SSA did recover some of the funds.”

According to that same audit, the rate of improper Social Security payments between 2015 and 2022 was 0.84%, or $71.8 billion, with the vast majority of those improper payments being overpayments to living recipients, not fraudulent payments to people who are dead.

In 2024 alone, the SSA made payments to 89,106 people who were over 99 years old, and only a small portion of those people were those already dead.

In response to Trump and Musk’s misinterpretation of the data, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Lee Dudek, said, “The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.”

While the reasons for the incorrect records include a handful of issues, the SSA and the Office of Audit announced steps they would be taking to address these issues and reduce the incorrect payments in the future. But this is beyond the concern of Musk and Trump and those who were duped into believing the SSA was involved in massive fraud.

As law professor Richard J. Pierce Jr. said, “When you’ve got an agency with such a massive task, with scores of millions of people that they’re sending money to all the time, they’re going to make mistakes. […] So, it’s not like these circumstances are nonexistent. It’s just that they don’t add up to a trillion dollars.”

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