The Mother of All Frauds?

Social Security database contains millions of apparent recipients over the age of 110. Are payments really being sent out to these people?

This morning I read a story posted by Jeff Childers on his marvelous Coffee & Covid 2025 Substack that I am struggling to interpret. On the one hand, the story is so stupendously preposterous that I find it extremely hard to believe. On the other hand, I suppose that at this point, no story about U.S. government insanity, no matter how outlandish, should be dismissed out of hand.

Indeed, in recent years, the U.S. government’s conduct has reminded me of a friend on Cape Cod in the early nineties who owned a Cigarette Boat called the TOTAL INSANITY. He boasted that the Total Insanity could traverse the 29 miles between Hyannis and Nantucket in less than 20 minutes.

After hearing this boast several time, I asked him to show me. A minute after embarking from Hyannis, I profoundly regretted my request. The boat’s ramping off of every swell in Nantucket Sound felt like being repeatedly picked up and dropped 30 feet in an elevator shaft, and I soon doubted that I would survive the ferocious and relentless pounding with my spine and organs intact. Truly this was TOTAL INSANITY. Over the deafening roar of the 1000 horsepower engine, I yelled at the sadomasochistic lunatic pilot to slow down and take me back to Hyannis at once.

Can the following tale of total insanity—told by Jeff Childers—possibly be true?

A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.

But last year (2024), PEW Research reported there are only 80,000 living Americans aged 100+, leaving a shocking discrepancy of 18.8 million mysterious perennial people still receiving social security and possibly disability as well, not to mention generous credits from phantom tax returns, and of course, blue state and local benefits.

And of course, these immortal individuals are probably also voting. Voting Democrat.

The IG’s 2023 follow-up report detailed all the Agency’s terrific progress in resolving the problems identified since the earlier 2015 report. In short, the Social Security Administration’s diligent, alert, and apolitical permanent career civil servants grabbed hold of the IG’s 2015 report with both hands and shoved it into the basement furnace.

I, for one, thank the gods of bureaucrats for all the hardworking, non-biased, non-partisan federal workers in the Social Security Administration who concluded, probably right after their 3-mimosa-lunch (held by Zoom), that it was just too hard and too expensive to stop 18.9 million fraudulent social security records by putting a presumed date of death into the date field. It’s no use.

It’s not like it might have made any difference in the 2020 election or anything.

🔥 I’m sure this will (not) shock you. Both times, 2015 and 2023, the media ignored or downplayed the story. A sane person living in pre-Millennial America might assume that the tireless watchdog media, upon learning about the vast numbers of impossibly fake Social Security accounts and the trillions of dollars of attendant waste and fraud would never give the government a moment’s peace until it was fixed.

But no.

We are not surprised. We are scarred veterans of the post-Millennial period, and we understand the media’s main job is not to expose, but to cover up government incompetence — and especially bury any news at all that might fuel legitimate concerns about election integrity.

Not to mention upholding corporate media’s timeless narrative chestnut that entitlement fraud is rare and overhyped and only a right-wing conspiracy theory. That narrative, after all, is as timeless as the millions of zombified centenarian recipients.

In 2015, apart from one-offs in some conservative media (Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox), I could only find a single AP story about the 6.5 million fraudulent Social Security records aged 112+. In 2023, after the SSA’s OIG published its report finding 19 million digitally breathing people over 100 still “alive” in the system, once again, there was mostly media silence. It should have been a five-alarm fire, but only a handful of “far-right” sites mentioned the news (Federalist, Washington Examiner). The usually reliable New York Post only briefly mentioned the OIG report, but even that was buried in a bigger article about government waste generally.

But CNN, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the other major outlets? Crickets. My searches came up empty. It just wasn’t important enough to report.

In the latest electrifying development that will also probably not shock you, DOGE —for the last week slogging through the SSA’s septic systems of archaic paper and antique Cobol software — is beginning to report that the OIG canaries in the SSA mineshaft were, if anything, woefully underreporting the problem.

🔥 Yesterday, apparent DOGE mouthpiece Elon Musk posted a simple database count of active Social Security Numbers by age range. The dumbfounding chart was a political hydrogen bomb, and it speaks for itself:

Apparently, we’ve been operating on the honor system this whole time. We normal, non-civil-service Americans were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s just the latest reason they sneer at us and think we’re stupid and gullible. Those neanderthal conservatives will believe anything. They’re right. We’re the biggest suckers in human history.

I added up the numbers for our cherished, specially abled readers in Portland. Based on Elon’s chart, the total count of active SSNs is 398 million. That means there are +64 million more active SSNs than the entire population of the United States (334 million).

Let me say it again: sixty-four million zombies. Needless to say, it’s totally impossible, at least under our current scientific understanding of human mortality. The diligent, hardworking, apolitical employees in the federal government appear to have diligently preserved a shadow army of dead or nonexistent “Americans” on the books — zombies — with tens of millions of them potentially still receiving benefits, filing tax returns, and “voting” Democrat.

This appears to be a scandal of unfathomable, indescribable, revolutionary proportions. Since I have a very strong feeling that we will not be receiving tax refunds for our cataclysmically misspent entitlements lavished on millions of career criminals, including those inside the government, I say burn it all down.

There is no fixing this. There is no audit big enough. There is no reform package meaningful enough. It is a soul-crushing abomination. It boils the blood. It is enraging beyond explanation. Just napalm the whole Kafkaesque apparatus and start over from scratch.

This scandal will be the Deep State's Waterloo.

Thank you Jeff for researching and writing this marvelous piece. To me it raises many questions:

1). Is the Social Security administration really issuing checks to all of these people?

2). Could it somehow be that millions of names remain in the database, but are nevertheless NOT issued payments?

3). If payments are being sent to these certainly dead people, who are the living people who are receiving the payments?

4). How can all of the above be verified?

I highly welcome reader feedback.