The Trump administration is doing a massive sweep of Social Security Numbers to mark as “deceased” those who are 120 years old and above — a move it says is part of its greater mission to root out waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Thursday that the Social Security Administration (SSA) over the last seven weeks as marked 11 million number holders listed over the age of 120 as “deceased.” The agency is going through another 1.4 million numbers and expects to complete its project by May 3, a White House official told Breitbart News.
The cleanup effort comes as Democrats seize on the Trump administration’s efforts to streamline the agency, instead painting Republicans as a threat to the program and its retired and elderly beneficiaries.
Left-wing outlets have been reporting cases of people who are still alive accidentally having their Social Security Numbers moved to the Ineligible Master File (previously known as “Death Master File”), creating a headache for Social Security offices and the individuals who must prove they are still alive to go through reinstatement. These outlets have additionally decried the cancellation of 6,300 Social Security Numbers quietly given to illegal immigrants in prior administration, including to those with criminal records, terrorist affiliations, or canceled visas. Democrats are framing the Trump administration’s efforts as chaotic and not-to-be trusted — an extension of their upset with DOGE’s overall work slashing billions government-wide in federal spending.
Ultimately, the agency has come up with a detailed system to handle processing the numbers of those who are “implausibly old,” Acting Commissioner of Social Security Lee Dudek told Breitbart News.
“Closing the records of individuals who are implausibly old to still be alive is an important anti-fraud measure. Criminals may use those individuals’ information to commit fraud. As we close the records, we have safeguards in place to ensure that we do not adversely affect individuals who are still alive,” Dudek said.
“No instances have arisen to date where an implausibly old individual whose record we closed actually contacted the agency for reinstatement. We have a process in place to reinstate individuals in our records if we ever make an error,” he clarified.
According to the White House, data is being reviewed by three separate teams to prevent errors from being made.
Breitbart News obtained internal SSA documents from an administration official detailing the agency’s criteria for classifying numbers over 120 years old as deceased. Some criteria include:
- Having a data of birth before 03/01/1905 (i.e. aged 120 or older).
- Having a date of birth on or after 01/01/1871
- No earnings in the past 45 years.
- No address changes in the past 50 years
- Office of Analytics and Improvements (OAI) data integrity checks.
“120 was chosen because no person has ever been recorded living to 120 in the U.S., so we can be reasonably certain that any person with such an actual date of birth is deceased,” the document notes.
The document details that it chose the age bracket to make sure “that all selected people were, at most, 65 in 1936 when SSN issuance began” in order to “filter out those with unreasonably old dates of birth, which are indicative of data entry error (E.G. dates of birth in 1800).
The agency document said its criteria ultimately check for “death, lack of signs of life, and data integrity” and “give reason to mark matches as deceased.”
“Complete death records strengthen nation-wide improper payment and identify theft prevention. It also ensures quality records management standards within SSA. In the above recommendation, SSA readily has the information, process, and resources on-hand to mark someone as reasonably deceased — we should clean up our records in the best interests of our agency and the nation,” the document reads.
While it is necessary to note that the SSA has been automatically stopping payments to account holders over 115 years of age since September 2015, the agency is largely concerned about fraudsters using old numbers for synthetic and dual identity theft to receive benefits from other agencies and commit fraud against financial institutions. The White House referred Breitbart News to various cases of Social Security fraud as examples of what they are working to prevent (see here, here, and here).
It is a concern that extends back to previous administrations, with the SSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) admitting in March 2015 that the administration had not established a new system capable of properly logging death information, resulting in nearly 19 million Social Security Numbers for people born in 1920 or earlier not being labeled as deceased.
In July 2024, during the Biden administration, SSA’s OIG released another report on “Preventing, Detecting, and Recovering Improper Payments,” and noted that despite dozens of recommendations aimed at preventing improper payments before they occur, many had remained “unimplemented.” An audit for that report found that from 2015 to 2022 SSA made nearly $72 billion in improper payments.
“While this is less than 1 percent of the total benefits paid during that period, at the end of FY 2023, SSA had an uncollected overpayment balance of $23 billion,” OIG said in a press release.
Some Biden-era recommendations for cleaning up Social Security data included establishing systems criteria “to identify Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance beneficiaries in address suspense who are likely deceased, such as identifying beneficiaries suspended for prolonged periods who do not have activity on any SSA records since their suspension.”
These proposals sound eerily similar to what SSA is enacting now under the Republican Trump administration.
In March, the White House reiterated President Trump’s support of Social Security, which has more than 73 million beneficiaries. The White House told Breitbart News the SSA’s crackdown on old numbers is an example of the administration “improving” the program, not threatening it.
“The updates to the Ineligible Master List underscore President Trump’s commitment to safeguarding and improving Social Security. This initiative will improve the accuracy of the agency’s data and prevent fraud.” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton
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