Elon Musk engaged with Senator Fetterman on D.O.G.E’s possible IRS data access, turning attention to significant Social Security record mistakes.
Summary
- According to SSA data, there are more than 21 million centenarians living, with examples of persons above the age of 220 showing inefficiencies and incorrect payments.
- Gavin Kliger, a D.O.G.E. official, may receive IRS access to update IT, igniting a dispute about openness vs. privacy in government networks.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has responded to US Senator John Fetterman’s claims that the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) is “rummaging through Americans’ data.” The heated discussion took place on X, where Fetterman published a report claiming that D.O.G.E. may acquire access to sensitive taxpayer information.
Musk reacted to the senator’s comments a little more than an hour later, providing a graphic illustrating what he called a “HUGE issue” within the US Social Security Administration (SSA).
The “First Buddy” published D.O.G.E data that highlighted anomalies in the SSA’s statistics, including over 21 million persons labeled as “living” in the SSA database who are over 100 years old.
“Some of these folks would have lived before America formed as a nation. Think about that for a second,” Musk said.
Does America Truly Have a Large “Aged” Population?
According to a recent X thread from the Kobeissi Letter, US Census data from 2020 shows that just 80,000 Americans were 85 or older at the time. According to the SSA database, there are over 1,041 people over the age of 220, with one record indicating that someone is over 360 years old.
There is no proof that anyone in the United States, let alone the globe, is 300 years old. According to Google, the world’s oldest known surviving person as of February 2025 is 116-year-old Inah Canabarro Lucas, a lady from Brazil.
The Kobeissi Letter highlighted a 2023 SSA audit, which found that the agency had very certainly missed to record death information for almost 18.9 million people. American taxes may be paying billions of dollars in inappropriate payments to persons who are not even alive.
Nonetheless, other netizens argue that even if the SSA did not list individuals above 115 years of age as “dead,” it did not always mean they were living.
“Elon does not state that these persons are *receiving* SS payments, only that they are in the dataset. And why would you remove the data? SSA automatically cuts off payments if a recipient is above the age of 115; this policy is extremely easy to locate,” stated one X user.
Another D.O.G.E critic said that if the date of birth is unknown or the person filing it fails to provide the information, the database defaults to 5/20/1875. “If Elon or his crew were competent, they’d know that,” they said.
Trillions of Dollars in Government Spending
The SSA’s Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs received $8.3 billion in fraudulent payments in 2022, which is three times more than the previous year, despite the craziness surrounding the SSA’s age group data. This excludes the $4.6 billion in incorrect Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments made over the same time.
Adding to financial problems, without D.O.G.E. involvement, Social Security spending in 2025 is predicted to be 21% of total taxable payroll, with revenue covering only 14%. According to experts, the 7% gap renders government spending “unsustainable.”
The US Treasury has now mandated the use of Treasury Access Symbols (TAS) for all government payments. Previously, the TAS field was optional for around $4.7 trillion in federal payments, rendering many transactions virtually untraceable.
According to reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Internal Revenue Service is examining a request to provide D.O.G.E officials access to taxpayer data.
If authorized, the move would give Musk’s team, led by 26-year-old software developer Gavin Kliger, full access to IRS systems such as tax returns and bank information. Kliger has allegedly been working from IRS headquarters and is likely to act as a senior adviser to Acting IRS Commissioner Doug O’Donnell.
Harrison Fields, a White House spokeswoman, justified the IRS investigation, saying, “Waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply embedded in our dysfunctional system for far too long. Direct access to the system is required to detect and resolve the issue.”
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