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To hear President Donald Trump and Elon Musk tell it, the dead steal elections. They get fraudulent Social Security checks. And now, apparently, dead people are working for the government too.
Musk resurrected a go-to bogeyman to explain why millions of federal workers were asked, in an unsigned weekend email from the Office of Personnel Management, to justify their existence with a bulleted five-point list of accomplishments from last week.
Describing the request as “a very basic pulse check” in a post on X, Musk also separately alleged – as he has with Social Security and foreign aid – that Americans are being defrauded.
“The reason this matters is that a significant number of people who are supposed to be working for the government are doing so little work that they are not checking their email at all! In some cases, we believe non-existent people or the identities of dead people are being used to collect paychecks. In other words, there is outright fraud,” Musk wrote on X.
Trump did not echo Musk’s idea that there are dead people working for the government, but he did endorse the exercise of asking federal workers what they did last week.
“If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working,” Trump said Monday during an appearance alongside French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House.
Complicating that rationale, however, is the fact that multiple federal agencies – including large-scale employers like the Pentagon and the FBI – told their workers to ignore the request.
If he has proof of fraud, Musk didn’t share it and he didn’t explain what could have led him to believe that dead people are getting paid. We’ve asked OMB, the White House and the Treasury Department for the evidence behind Musk’s claim, but have not yet received any. It is the second time in as many weeks Musk has come back to the idea of dead people getting checks.
If it’s anything like his recent suggestion that an unbelievable number of centenarians – tens of millions – are drawing Social Security benefits, it is possible that Musk is simply misreading the data.
Last week, Musk shared data that purported to show that millions of people over the age of 100 are included in a Social Security database. Trump later repeated the claim, reading from Musk’s list. Both men left the impression that these Social Security numbers are getting Social Security checks. It didn’t hold up to much scrutiny.
There is documented fraud in the Social Security system, the government retirement insurance plan which pays out benefits to tens of millions of older and disabled Americans.
But there is little evidence for fraud on the scale of what Musk implied. Social Security actually only pays checks to fewer than 90,000 people over the age of 100. That’s in line with the US population of centenarians.
Musk doesn’t appear to be much interested in facts, however, as he tried to convince Americans their tax payer dollars are being wasted on a massive scale and that government needs to be shrunk by a lot.
The specter of dead people used in the name of fraud should feel familiar. Trump has long argued that mail-in voting has enabled voter fraud and that voting by dead people and the undocumented cost him the 2020 election.
While there are some isolated examples of such voter fraud, there’s no evidence of a widespread problem of ballots being cast in the names of dead people, as Trump’s own campaign found when they made the allegation in 2020 in Georgia, Michigan and elsewhere. State and local officials largely refuted their claims.
