No, 150-12 months-Olds Aren’t Gathering Social Safety Advantages

Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) venture had uncovered huge authorities fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds had been claiming Social Safety advantages.

However Musk has offered no proof to again up his claims, and consultants shortly identified that that is very seemingly only a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the federal government fee programs.

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when he claimed {that a} “cursory examination of Social Safety, and we obtained folks in there which might be 150 years outdated. Now, have you learnt anybody that is 150? I do not know. They need to be within the Guinness E book of World Information … In order that’s a case the place I feel they’re most likely useless.”

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.

Laptop programmers shortly 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 programs from many different US authorities companies.

COBOL is never used right this moment, and as such, Musk’s cadre of younger engineers could be unfamiliar with it.

As a result of COBOL doesn’t have a date sort, some implementations rely as an alternative on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference level. Probably the most generally used is Might 20, 1875, as this was the date of a world standards-setting convention held in Paris, generally known as the “Conference du Mètre.”

These programs default to the reference level when a beginning date is lacking or incomplete, that means all of these entries in 2025 would present an age of 150.

That’s only one attainable clarification for what DOGE allegedly discovered. Musk might even have merely regarded up the SSA’s personal web site, which explains that since September 2015 the company has mechanically stopped profit funds when anybody reaches the age of 115.

Nonetheless, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims had been figures from “the Social Safety database” to X, writing that “the numbers of individuals in every age bucket with the loss of life area set to FALSE!”

The figures steered that over 10 hundreds of thousands folks aged over 120 had been accumulating advantages.

“Perhaps Twilight is actual and there are lots of vampires accumulating 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 your entire US inhabitants.

The truth that the Social Safety system comprises hundreds of thousands of entries from people who find themselves useless is probably going distinct from a possible COBOL-caused error, and in addition not information. A report written by the SSA’s inspector common in 2023 discovered that 98 p.c of these aged 100 or older within the Social Safety databases should not in receipt of any advantages. The report added that the database wouldn’t be up to date as a result of it could price an excessive amount of cash to take action.