White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt set the “record straight” Monday evening on Fox News to say that President Donald Trump has directed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk to “identify fraud” within the Social Security Department.
Democrats have pushed back against Musk and his DOGE team’s involvement with the Trump administration since the announcement of upending the U.S. Agency for International Development. However, a new wave of criticism targeted Musk after he posted a picture on X Sunday evening showing a chart in the Social Security database, ranging from ages zero to 369 years old.
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“I’ve been fighting fake news reporters all day long here in the Washington D.C. swamp who are trying to fear monger the American people into believing that this administration is going after their hard earned tax dollars and their hard earned Social Security checks,” Leavitt said to host Sean Hannity. “So I want to set the record straight on your show tonight, Sean, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to do so. President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration.”
“They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. So their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things,” Leavitt added.
In July 2023, the Social Security Administration’s [SSA’s] Office of the Inspector General released an audit saying that “approximately 18.9 million numberholders” were found to have been born in 1920 or earlier, “but had no death information on their Numident record.”
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Leavitt went on to describe DOGE’s and Musk’s main goal regarding the SSA’s potential waste, saying that the “legacy fake news” was attempting to “fear” people into believing the Trump administration had other motives.
“Number one, to identify duplicate payments and to end them. Number two, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money,” Leavitt said. “Number three, to protect the integrity of this system for hard working Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives. So, rest assured to all of the people watching your show tonight, if you paid into the system, honestly, you will continue to receive your Social Security tax checks.”
“Do not buy into the lies from the legacy fake news media who are trying to fear you and scare you into believing otherwise. This is what we’ve seen them do about President Trump for years with every promise that he has made. He’s going in there to protect your hard earned money. That is the ultimate goal,” Leavitt said.
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The Social Security Agency’s 2023 audit followed a 2015 report that advocated for the agency to address discrepancies within the database, as the 2015 audit found 6.5 million people with Social Security numbers but no death information.
However, the July 2023 audit says, “We believe it likely SSA did not receive or record most of the 18.9 million individuals’ death information primarily because the individuals died decades ago — before the use of electronic death reporting. Resolving these discrepancies will improve the accuracy and completeness of the DMF.”
DMF is the Social Security Death Master File. That file contains a list of deceased individuals who had Social Security numbers and whose deaths were reported to the SSA.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.