It said that around 12.3 million people aged 120 and older are ’marked as deceased.’
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said in a statement on Thursday that its staff have completed a “major cleanup” of Social Security records after it was discovered that more than 12 million people aged 120 or older were in the system.
“After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative,” DOGE wrote in a post on social media platform X, adding that some 12.3 million individuals listed as being aged 120 or older “have now been marked as deceased.”
After 11 weeks, @SocialSecurity has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased.
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) May 23, 2025
Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort. https://t.co/u942yTxlsG pic.twitter.com/DaXyqx5e4k
But it added that “some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file,” which “will be investigated in a follow-up effort.”
DOGE also provided a portion of a screenshot that showed there were about 3.3 million people aged 120 to 129, 3.9 million aged 130 to 139, 3.5 million listed as age 140 to 149, 1.3 million listed as age 150 to 159, and around 124,000 listed as age 160 to 169, all of whom were marked as deceased in the Social Security system.
The update comes as new Social Security Administrator Frank Bisignano told Fox Business earlier this week that Social Security’s “records were not very good, and that’s the source of fraud.”
“The amount of people that were not alive that did not show on the system … was outstanding. Millions and millions. And that is a source of potential for fraud,” he told the news outlet, adding that the work that DOGE did in the agency “was 100 percent accurate” in a bid to locate anything that could lead to fraud.
That’s because, according to Bisignano, an active Social Security number that is “still alive in the system” presents the “opportunity for fraud.”
Established by President Donald Trump in January, DOGE is tasked with finding what officials say are fraud, waste, and abuse. But its efforts have been blocked in several court cases, namely in the Social Security Administration.
DOGE’s recent announcement on its Social Security record cleanup efforts comes as the Trump administration submitted an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month to allow access to Social Security data after lower courts blocked its access.
