Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has 10 staffers at the Social Security Administration as the Trump White House looks for evidence to support its claim that there could be millions of dead people receiving public benefits.
Two sworn statements filed in federal court late Wednesday show that the SSA has staffed up in recent weeks to include four special government employees and six more DOGE staffers on loan from other departments.
Their mission: detecting waste, fraud and abuse in the nation’s 90-year-old social insurance agency.
Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and suggested this week that there could be as much as $700 billion a year in entitlement fraud. Critics have said he is setting up a move to cut the popular program. Others are concerned about Musk’s team having access to Americans’ most sensitive data.
From 2015 through 2022, Social Security estimated that it made almost $72 billion in improper payments — less than 1% of benefits paid, according to an inspector general report last year. Not all of that amount was because of fraud, however, and all but $23 billion was able to be recovered.
At least seven DOGE staffers have been granted access to a database known as the Master File of Social Security Number Holders and SSN Applications, also known as Numident. They currently have read-only access as they try to connect the dots between Social Security numbers and possible fraudulent benefits.
That database is often missing dates of death, a fact that President Donald Trump and Musk, his billionaire adviser, have used as the basis of claims that more than 20 million people over 100 are still on the Social Security rolls.
“And money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now,” Trump said in a speech to Congress last week.
Leland Dudek, an anti-fraud expert who Trump promoted to acting Social Security Commissioner last month after Dudek was suspended for cooperating with DOGE, has pushed back on those claims.
Just because a date of death is missing from Numident doesn’t mean payments are being made, Dudek said in a statement. Those are managed in a separate database, the Master Beneficiary Record.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to root out fraud, waste, and abuse in our programs, and actively correcting the inconsistencies with missing dates of death,” he said.
Death Data
Indeed, at least six DOGE staffers at the agency are working with death data. The Social Security Administration maintains a Master Death File of more than 94 million reported deaths collected from state records and funeral directors.
Other databases being used in the hunt are the Supplemental Security Record, which contains data on disability benefits and Treasury Department payment files. The benefits databases can also contain limited taxpayer information used to calculate eligibility for benefits.
DOGE has access to copies of the databases, limiting the ability to make changes, the agency’s chief technology officer, Michael Russo, said in a sworn statement. There are safeguards to ensure there are no private servers connected to SSA data, he said.
Russo’s statement was included in a court filing late Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. The public employees union filed suit against DOGE and the Maryland-based Social Security Administration, trying to block what it calls an “unprecedented data grab.”
“The overall goal of the work performed by SSA’s DOGE Team is to detect fraud, waste and abuse in SSA programs,” Russo said. “This level of access ensures these employees can review records needed to detect fraud but does not allow them the ability to make any changes to beneficiary data or payment files.”
Neither Russo nor Deputy Commissioner Florence Felix-Lawson, who filed a separate sworn statement, would identify the DOGE staffers by name, “to avoid exposing them to threats and harassment.”
But special government employees and DOGE detailees at the agency include former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners; Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital; and Marko Elez, re-hired by DOGE and sent to Social Security after resigning from the Treasury Department over reports of racist social media posts.
The Social Security Administration has emerged as a key outpost for DOGE, because it administers $1.6 trillion in annual benefits but also because of its unique position to access a wide range of government data. Indeed, DOGE’s hunt for fraud in Social Security is also radiating out into other federal agencies.
Two DOGE team members also have access to the National Directory of New Hires, a database kept by the Heath and Human Services Departments’ Office of Child Support Services to help states enforce child support orders.
And one Social Security DOGE team member will soon be dispatched to the Small Business Administration.
The court filing also shows how DOGE team members can move around from agency to agency. Six Social Security DOGE staffers are on loan from other agencies, including the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, Labor Department and General Services Administration.
And one comes from the US DOGE Service, the White House agency created by Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order creating the cost-cutting initiative.
