Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) The project is unable to cover the government's fraud when it is said that 150-year-olds claim social security benefits.
But Musk did not provide evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that it was probably just a quirk of decades coding languages undergoing payment systems of payment of Government.
Musk first made the claims to his Oval Office Press Conference Last week, when he claimed a “Social Security Cursory Review, and we got people there 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone 150? I don't know. They must be in the Guinness Book of World Records … So a case where I think they are probably dead.
While no evidence was made to back up this claim, commentators took it to the right wing online, especially on Musk's own Platform, as well as reported Credentials by pro-trump media outlets.
Computer programmers quickly claim that 150 figures are not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of Social Security Administration's benefit system, which is more written in Cobol, a 60 -year -old programming language That has undergone SSA databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.
Cobol is rarely used today, and as such, the Musk cadre of young engineers may not be familiar with it.
Since Cobol does not have the type of date, some implementation relies rather than a system where all dates are coded in a reference. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875Because this is the date of an international standard setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention Du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference reference when a date of birth is missing or incomplete, meaning all those entries by 2025 will display an age of 150.
That is just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk can also look at SSA's own website, explaining that since September 2015 the agency automatically stopped benefits payments When there reaches the age of 115.
However, on Monday morning Musk doubled, posting a screenshot of what he claimed were numbers from the “Social Security Database” to X, written that “the number of people per age that bucket with the death field set to the wrong! “
The numbers suggest that over 10 million people over the age of over 120 are collecting benefits.
“Maybe the lid is real and there are many vampires collecting social security,” Musk wrote.
Database Musk took the screenshot from the listed nearly 400 million people, with more than five times the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to SSA's own website. This is also important than the entire US population.
The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from dead people is likely to differ from a potential Cobol-caused error, nor news. A report written by SSA's Inspector General in 2023 It was found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in Social Security databases were not received by any advantages. The report added that the database will not be updated as money costs greater to do so.
