Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) undertaking had uncovered large authorities fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds have been claiming Social Safety advantages.
However Musk has offered no proof to again up his claims, and consultants rapidly identified that that is very doubtless only a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the federal government fee techniques.
Musk first made the claims throughout his Oval Workplace press convention final week, when he claimed {that a} “cursory examination of Social Safety, and we obtained folks in there which might be 150 years previous. Now, have you learnt anybody that is 150? I do not know. They need to be within the Guinness E book of World Data … In order that’s a case the place I feel they’re in all probability lifeless.”
Whereas no proof was produced to again up this declare, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators on-line, totally on Musk’s personal X platform, in addition to being reported credibly by pro-Trump media retailers.
Pc programmers rapidly claimed that the 150 determine was not proof of fraud, however relatively the results of a bizarre quirk of the Social Safety Administration’s advantages system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases in addition to techniques from many different US authorities companies.
COBOL isn’t used at present, and as such, Musk’s cadre of younger engineers might be unfamiliar with it.
As a result of COBOL doesn’t have a date sort, some implementations rely as a substitute on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference level. Essentially the most generally used is Could 20, 1875, as this was the date of a world standards-setting convention held in Paris, referred to as the “Conference du Mètre.”
These techniques default to the reference level when a delivery date is lacking or incomplete, that means all of these entries in 2025 would present an age of 150.
That’s only one doable rationalization for what DOGE allegedly discovered. Musk may even have merely seemed up the SSA’s personal web site, which explains that since September 2015 the company has routinely stopped profit funds when anybody reaches the age of 115.
Nevertheless, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims have been figures from “the Social Safety database” to X, writing that “the numbers of individuals in every age bucket with the demise area set to FALSE!”
The figures instructed that over 10 hundreds of thousands folks aged over 120 have been gathering advantages.
“Possibly Twilight is actual and there are lots of vampires gathering Social Safety,” Musk wrote.
The database Musk took the screenshot from listed nearly 400 million folks, which is greater than 5 occasions the variety of folks receiving advantages in 2024, in line with the SSA’s personal web site. It’s additionally considerably greater than all the US inhabitants.
The truth that the Social Safety system accommodates hundreds of thousands of entries from people who find themselves lifeless is probably going distinct from a possible COBOL-caused error, and likewise not information. A report written by the SSA’s inspector basic in 2023 discovered that 98 % of these aged 100 or older within the Social Safety databases are usually not in receipt of any advantages. The report added that the database wouldn’t be up to date as a result of it might value an excessive amount of cash to take action.
