Elon Musk made headlines this week when he revealed the Social Security Administration (SSA) failed to record the deaths of millions of people over the age of 100 and suggested vampires might be real and a lot of them were collecting Social Security. He also noted there were more “eligible” Social Security Numbers (SSNs) than U.S. citizens, suggesting “this might be the biggest fraud in history.” Sadly, Musk’s comments reveal how little he knows about Social Security, rather than how much the program pays to dead people or non-citizens.
Since Social Security was enacted in 1935, there have been more than 530 million SSNs issued, that’s out of one billion possible combinations of nine-digit numbers. The number of SSNs for each age group that Musk revealed does not reflect the number of people collecting benefits, but rather the number of SSNs issued minus the number of deaths recorded by the SSA. Thus, these numbers are not indicative of scandalous activity, as Musk seems to believe.
As The Concord Coalition has previously written, most SSNs are issued when children are born in the United States. However, many immigrants are also eligible to receive SSNs for employment purposes. Some of these immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship, while others leave the country. As a result, the number of SSNs will always be greater than the number of U.S. citizens. That is especially true given the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive death records, both here and abroad.
The SSA maintains a computer database known as the Death Master File. However, this database was not established until 1983, and not every state has fully participated until recently. Thus, deaths that occurred prior to the 1980s were less likely to be included.
According to a report issued by the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in 2023, there were 18.9 million individuals born in 1920 or earlier with no death information reported in their official (“Numident“) record. Approximately 44,000 of these individuals were receiving benefits. That’s less than the roughly 80,000 centenarians identified by the Census Bureau in the 2020 Decennial Census.
The SSA OIG recommended that the Agency add a death indicator to the records of individuals who have exceeded some reasonable maximum life expectancy. The Agency rejected this advice claiming such actions would involve individuals who do not receive benefits, and amending their records would divert resources from other work necessary to administer the program. Agree or disagree with the Agency’s decision, one thing is perfectly clear, the vampires are not the ones responsible for Social Security’s financial problems.
