150-year-olds are not receiving Social Security payments
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150-year-olds are not receiving Social Security payments
Update: The Social Security Administration has announced that it is correcting beneficiary records of those who are listed as 100 or older. “The data reported in the media represent people who do not have a date of death associated with their record,” the agency said.
Elon Musk, the de facto leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, says that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are marked as “alive” in the U.S. Social Security system.
This week, he tweeted a spreadsheet showing how many people in the system are in each age bracket. More than 1.3 million people are marked as between the ages of 150 and 159, while almost 2,800 are listed as 200 and older.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” tweeted Musk, implying that the Social Security Administration could still be distributing benefit checks to these people.
President Donald Trump also expressed concern that people are receiving “fraudulent” payments.
“If you take all of those millions of people off 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 years old,” Trump said.
But data on the Social Security Administration’s website shows that only about 89,000 people over the age of 99 are receiving payments on the basis of their earnings. And there are only an estimated 108,000 centenarians living in the U.S., according to United Nations data, while the oldest known human being lived to the age of 122.
The idea that millions of centenarians are still receiving benefits is “preposterous,” said Eric Kingson, a professor emeritus of social work at Syracuse University and an expert on Social Security.
“This is part of an orchestrated attack to undermine Social Security,” Kingson said.
SSA Acting Commissioner Michelle King recently left the agency over DOGE’s attempts to access Social Security recipient information, and dozens of probationary SSA employees have been offered job reassignments.
Social Security has records on millions of people, but that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving payments, said Charles Blahous, a former public trustee for Social Security and Medicare who served as deputy director of President George W. Bush’s National Economic Council.
“There are many people who were born more than 150 years ago for whom Social Security lacks information about their death, just like we lack information about a lot of things involving people who lived that long ago,” Blahous said.
The SSA also says it has a special code in place to stop payments from going to people over the age of 115.
Wired magazine reported that the number of people in the 150-year age bracket may have to do with the programming language used by the SSA, known as COBOL, or the Common Business Oriented Language. The 65-year-old system can still be found at government agencies, businesses and financial institutions.
Basically, when there is a missing or incomplete birthdate, COBOL defaults to a reference point. The most common is May 20, 1875, when countries around the world attended a convention on metric standards. Someone born in 1875 would be 150 in 2025, which is why entries with missing and incomplete birthdates will default to that age, Wired explained.
Another explanation for some centenarians being on the books: Social Security benefits are provided to qualified widows and widowers, who have to wait until they reach a certain age to receive payments, said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University.
If there was a large age gap between a couple, and one partner who’s now deceased was born over 100 years ago, the SSA would still need to maintain the information of that deceased person, Kotlikoff said.
The SSA does make mistakes, though. A report from the agency found that between fiscal years 2015 and 2022, the agency sent out nearly $72 billion in improper payments, which were mostly overpayments. That’s about $9 billion a year.
It might sound like a lot of money, but it’s a very small amount relative to the $1.5 trillion in benefits the Social Security Administration paid out last year, said Richard Himelfarb, a political science professor at Hofstra University.
That $9 billion is less than 1% of expenditures, he pointed out. It’s also a tiny fraction of last year’s federal deficit, which stood at more than $1.8 trillion.
“If you want to save money, if you want to really reduce the deficit,” Himelfarb said, “you’re going to have to do more than find waste and fraud and abuse in Social Security.”
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