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Americans who had been wrongly declared dead after Elon Musk’s government-slashing force was granted access to the Social Security Administration’s databases are being forced to prove that they are very much alive.
Musk has repeatedly peddled claims that as many as 20 million citizens over the age of 100 have been receiving Social Security checks, an impossibility, considering there are an estimated 101,000 centenarians in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.
The world’s richest man and his Department of Government Efficiency’s claims about dead people getting benefits have meant millions of names have been moved to the Social Security Death Master File: a database to keep track of those who should no longer receive payouts as they are no longer with us.
However, Social Security claimants who are very much alive have cried foul and the SSA acknowledged that about 600 people a month are placed in the database by mistake, according to the Washington Post.
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“We have people who did not receive benefits come in every day with their ID and say, ‘I’m not dead, I’m alive!,” Rennie Glasgow, a technical analyst at the SSA, told the Daily Beast.
More than 70 million Americans rely on Social Security, including retirees, disabled individuals, and surviving family members. For many, the benefits are often their primary source of income, and even short delays could leave vulnerable people in dire financial jeopardy.
Glasgow, who handles the agency’s most challenging cases at the Schenectady office, said that DOGE employees “went into the system and they killed off people.”
“About four million people, they marked them as dead,” Glasgow said. “But they’re not sure if those people were supposed to be marked as dead, so they’re sending us an email saying, ‘If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.’”
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Glasgow explained that staff cuts have led to 12 hour working days for those that remain and inflated wait times at the system’s payment center. The overall number of employees at the SSA has dropped from 57,000 to 50,000.
Now, Glasgow said, SSA staff have to go through a long and arduous process of ‘resurrecting’ those mistakenly marked as deceased, which can take several days.
“It stops their car payments, it stops their credit, it stops their ability to do anything,” the SSA employee explained. “Their identification gets flagged. And most times those things have to go to the payment center.”
In just one example Richard VanMetter learned he had mistakenly added to the Death Master File in February after he had been locked out of his bank account. The government took back his last Social Security check and shut off his retirement checks and Medicare.
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“Hi, I’m dead,” VanMetter, who is still attempting to get his pension back, recalled to The Post after he arrived at the SSA office in Boca Raton, Florida.
“Another one,” a guard responded, he said.
A field worker created records for his bank to assist him in getting back into his account. “It was like she was rebuilding my whole database,” he said. “It wasn’t just unclicking the dead box.”
The Independent has contacted DOGE for comment.
When previously asked about the criticism, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said: “A previous investigation revealed the SSA paid at least $71.8 billion in improper payments. “The Social Security Administration is now working to find even more waste, fraud, and abuse in the Administration’s whole-of-government effort to protect American taxpayers.”
