Trump’s Dead People on Social Security Lie
March 7, 2025
Donald Trump told many lies in his address to Congress last night, but the one I found especially galling was when he repeated the absurd claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. My anger probably is part due to the fact that I spent many years studying and defending the program. Part of the story is that I look to soon be getting benefits from the program myself.
But a big part of the story is that it is just such an obvious lie. It is infuriating to see Trump keep repeating it and then have all his MAGA cronies nod their heads like it somehow makes sense.
There have been extensive analyses of the problem of people continuing to get checks after they are dead by the Social Security Administration (SSA) itself. It does happen occasionally, largely because families often don’t contact the SSA immediately after a person has died. But in almost all cases, the checks are stopped a month or two after death and most of the money paid out is returned.
The biggest obstacle to ensuring that payments don’t go to dead people is that we don’t have a centralized national death registry. The reason we don’t have such a system is that Republicans would block it as an intrusion of the deep state. So, in keeping with that great Republican tradition, they blame the government for a problem they themselves created.
But we don’t need to trust the work done by the SSA or outside investigators to know that millions of dead people are not getting Social Security. As I showed a few weeks back, we just need to trust arithmetic.
Mr. Arithmetic Shows Donald Trump is Lying
The basis point is very simple. The SSA gives us very good data on the number of people getting benefits by age, as well as their average benefit. We can add that up (even the “super high IQ” DOGE boys should be able to do this) and calculate how much Social Security is paying out to people who are alive, or at least who are at ages where we expect them to be alive.
When we add up the numbers, we find that the payments we can identify as going to living people come out to be pretty much exactly the amount of spending in the budget reported for Social Security. In other words, there is no room for the checks that are supposedly going to millions of dead people.
Let me try to explain this point so that even Donald Trump might be able to understand. The SSA can identify real living people getting Social Security benefits. They also know how much money they get in benefits.
We can check the SSA data against other sources. The Census gives us good data on how many people are in each group. For example, we can use the Census data to see how many people in the country are between ages 70 to 74 or 75 to 79. We can see that these data pretty much align with how many people SSA tells us are getting benefits in these age groups.
We also know roughly how much these people should be getting in benefits. Social Security has a well-defined benefit formula, so we know roughly what we would expect an average 75-year-old or 80-year-old to be getting in benefits. There are also surveys that tell us how much people report getting in Social Security benefits each year. We could see if SSA was putting out obviously bogus numbers for the average benefit size.
This means that we can be fairly confident that the SSA numbers on the total number of living people getting benefits are close to the mark. We also can be fairly confident that the number they are reporting for the amount of benefits they are getting is close to the mark.
Since this total is equal to the amount of money that the government reports it pays out for Social Security each year, there is no room for the benefits going to Donald Trump’s millions of dead people. And just to be clear, there is no room for a hidden pool of money being paid to dead people.
If there were hundreds of billions of dollars of unreported payments, they wouldn’t be in the budget by definition – they are unreported. So, Elon Musk, the DOGE boys, and Donald Trump would not be finding fraud in the budget.
They would then be claiming that the government is making hundreds of billions in payments that no one knows about, and the deficit is far larger than anyone realized. Maybe this somehow makes sense in Trump World, but it is getting outside the bounds even allowed for the Twilight Zone.
Repeating the Social Security Zombie Lie
Given its obvious absurdity, the repetition of the lie about Social Security zombies has the same function as asserting the 2020 election was stolen or that Ukraine started the war with Russia. It’s Trump asserting the right to create his own reality in obvious defiance of the facts.
It speaks volumes about the Republican Party that almost all of them are willing to go along with this obvious lie. Unfortunately, the media have largely given in at this point. The fact that Trump would tell an outlandish lie about the country’s most important social program, on which tens of millions of people depend for their livelihood, is barely even news.
This originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
The Greatest Threat to Social Security in Its
90 Year History
Social security card – Public Domain
The last few weeks have been the most destabilizing for Social Security in its 90-year history.
America’s historic retirement security program has survived world wars, pandemics, and recessions. But without a rapid course correction, it may not survive Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
In mid-February, Musk demanded access to private Social Security data. When the Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) declined, President Donald Trump immediately replaced her. He leapfrogged over 120 more senior employees to install a DOGE sympathizer, Leland Dudek.
Dudek is reportedly planning to lay off at least 15 percent of SSA’s already understaffed, overworked workforce. SSA staff were sent a message on February 27 telling them the organization will soon undergo an “agency-wide organizational restructuring” and incentivizing them to resign rather than get fired.
Trump and Musk have also instructed the government to terminate the leases on SSA’s over 1,200 field offices, which are critical for the agency’s public-facing work. Social Security field offices, like our post offices, are in every community. They’re there to help us when it’s our turn to access our benefits.
They’ve also ordered all workers to return to the office. But where are those workers supposed to go if their offices are closed? That only makes sense if the ultimate plan is not just to fire the currently reported 7,000 workers from SSA, but everyone!
Many of SSA’s most senior employees, including five of eight regional commissioners, have left. This is causing an enormous brain drain. Together, they represent a huge loss of critical institutional knowledge. Collectively, those employees had almost 1,000 years of institutional knowledge and skills.
SSA was already severely underfunded and understaffed before all of this. The DOGE bloodbath could lead to its collapse.
Most at immediate risk are those applying for disability benefits. Already, large numbers of disabled workers find themselves homeless, and a staggering 30,000 Americans die every year while waiting to receive their earned benefits. Now that number is likely to rise significantly.
Retirement benefits are less complicated to administer, but they’re not safe either. People who are accidentally over- or under-paid will have a far harder time correcting the error. And the planned layoffs are so destabilizing that seniors may even see a disruption in their monthly payments.
Furthermore, Americans will have a terrible time reaching SSA if they have questions, need to change their bank accounts, or have other issues. Moreover, grieving families may have trouble getting the survivor benefits their loved ones have earned for them. Relying on a website or worse, an AI chatbot, won’t cut it.
Nobody voted for this. During the presidential election, Donald Trump blanketed swing states with campaign flyers pledging that he wouldn’t touch Social Security. Make no mistake: Trump has broken that promise.
In his March 4 address before Congress, Trump lied about this extremely efficiently run program. Worse, he’s given Elon Musk, who recently slandered Social Security by calling it a criminal “Ponzi scheme,” the power to destroy it.
SSA’s budget comes out of the Social Security trust funds, not general government revenue. That means that when Americans pay into Social Security with every paycheck, they’re also paying for high-quality customer service.
That’s exactly what we would get — if Congress allowed SSA to spend just a few percentage points more of its $2.7 trillion surplus to hire and adequately train staff, open new field offices, and get wait times down. Instead, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are planning to utterly demolish Social Security’s customer service to pay for billionaire tax cuts.
It isn’t too late to stop this disaster. Everyone should call their members of Congress. Tell them that cuts to the Social Security Administration are cuts to Social Security. Tell them that you value your local Social Security field office.
Tell them to represent the people they serve by making Elon Musk and Donald Trump keep their hands off our earned benefits.
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