Trump repeats debunked claims on 160-year-olds getting Social Security
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President Trump addresses reporters at the White House. Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Trump on Tuesday called for an end to people hundreds of years old collecting Social Security benefits — a claim his own administration has debunked.
Why it matters: Trump and his cost-cutters, like Elon Musk's DOGE, frequently make the claim in an attempt to justify the prospect of huge cuts to the Social Security Administration, if not the actual program itself.
Catch up quick: During an address to Congress, Trump cited supposed statistics showing the Social Security rolls are full of people who've lived longer than any human in history.
- "Over 130,000 people according to the Social Security databases are aged over 160 years old," Trump said.
- Trump went on to claim the database shows one person on the rolls aged 360 years — not long after the Mayflower landed in what's now the United States.
Yes, but: There's no evidence of hundreds of thousands of super-elderly people actually collecting benefits.
- An audit by the Social Security Administration's inspector general, released in July 2024, did find more overpayments in fiscal 2023 than in the prior eight years, some $4.9 billion in total. But many of those benefits were for programs not related to the elderly.
- In 2021 the auditors reported that SSA had paid benefits to about 24,000 dead people in total.
The intrigue: The Trump administration's own acting Social Security commissioner said two weeks ago there was no actual epidemic of centenarians collecting benefits.
- "I also want to acknowledge recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security," Lee Dudek said in a Feb. 19 statement.
- "The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits."
- Part of the problem, according to computer scientists — the agency uses an older programming language for its databases called COBOL that doesn't handle dates quite like other languages.
- As a result, programmers use placeholders and other shortcuts, many of which automatically assign people birthdates in the 19th century.
Trump also made light of the situation, calling out Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed a "Make America Healthy Again" agenda.
- "We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby," Trump said.
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