In a long-overdue move to clean up government waste and tighten oversight, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has finally removed 12.3 million people from its records who were somehow still “alive” on paper — even though they were supposedly 120 years old or older.
Yes, you read that right.
This update comes straight from the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — the new watchdog outfit committed to draining the bureaucratic swamp and exposing decades of mismanagement. Their findings over the past few months have raised serious red flags about how badly some of our government systems have been run — and the Social Security system is front and center.
Concerns had been mounting for years about glaring errors in Social Security data — with millions of individuals still listed as alive well past any realistic age. The problem became so obvious that DOGE began issuing public updates to show the scale of the clean-up effort.
- March 18 Update: 3.2 million individuals aged 120+ were finally marked deceased.
- April 24 Update: That number grew to 11 million.
- Latest Update (May): The total reached 12.3 million now officially removed from active records.
In other words, we had enough “alive” 120-year-olds to populate a whole country — or more likely, pad some very sketchy government databases.
“Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort,” DOGE noted in its most recent statement.
The concerns don’t stop with clerical errors.
Back in March, DOGE head Elon Musk stirred the pot when he exposed that 2.1 million non-citizens were somehow issued Social Security numbers in just 2024 alone. That revelation triggered widespread backlash — and rightly so.
How does that happen?
According to Anthony Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners and a colleague of Musk working alongside DOGE, much of this stems from policies under the previous administration that allowed migrants to enter the country and then sign up for social benefits.
As Breitbart News previously reported, these policies created a pipeline where new arrivals were given Social Security numbers — often with little to no verification — paving the way for abuse, confusion, and staggering costs to taxpayers.
Thanks to DOGE’s ongoing work, the government has already tallied $170 billion in savings from these kinds of clean-up efforts — money that was either being wasted, lost in the system, or worse, used fraudulently.
While there’s still more work to be done, the message is clear: accountability is finally coming to Washington. It’s proof that with the right leadership and transparency, even a bloated bureaucracy like Social Security can be fixed — but only with a watchful eye and the will to confront corruption and waste.
