President Donald Trump and his conservative allies are playing rhetorical games to spin his claims about the U.S. DOGE Service's alleged accomplishments.
The president claimed during his March 4 congressional address that Elon Musk's team had found "shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program" that was based on an apparent misunderstanding of the system's database, but the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler found that Trump was still misrepresenting the problem.
"This is an example of how, even after falsehoods are exposed, the spin machine keeps working," Kessler wrote.
Trump falsely claimed at the time that millions of people older than 120 were receiving Social Security payments, but that had already been thoroughly debunked, including by the Post, before his address to Congress.
"Social Security databases rely on COBOL, a nearly 70-year-old computer programming language, and COBOL doesn’t have a standardized way to store dates," Kessler wrote. "So a default date, such as 1875, was chosen for people lacking birth information. But when Musk’s team entered Social Security’s systems, they were shocked to find people listed in the system with absurd ages because of the limitations of an old programming language."
The Social Security Administration has for a decade automated the termination of benefits for anyone who reaches age 115, but the idea of nonexistent or impossibly old people receiving benefits proved to be "an irresistible talking point," Kessler said, and DOGE claimed to have fixed the problem in a May 23 social media post.
"After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased," the service posted.
However, Kessler said, the carefully worded post stopped short of saying that 12 million people had received improper payments, but instead claimed those people had been marked as deceased.
"In other words, DOGE appears to have implemented the plan suggested by the [inspector general] two years ago," Kessler wrote. "We checked with the White House and confirmed our understanding that anyone listed as 120 years or older was labeled deceased."
That project had been considered a low priority previously, according to an administration official, but it had been moved to the front burner after DOGE got involved out of concerns about identity theft and fraud, but Kessler said that misses the point.
"Identity theft is a serious problem," he wrote. "But it’s not the same thing that Trump claimed when he addressed Congress. Instead, it’s more prosaic. In effect, the White House decided to implement a recommendation from an IG report issued during the Biden administration."
Trump's allies in Congress and across the conservative media ecosystem hailed the news as a triumph, but Kessler said their praised was just as off-base as the president's claims to Congress about a problem that never actually existed.
"DOGE and the White House have never admitted that the original claims about Social Security payments being made to people above the age of 120 were wrong," Kessler wrote. "Interestingly, while Trump echoed Musk’s claims several times before his speech to Congress, he hasn’t repeated them since. He didn’t even mention Social Security in his news conference last Friday when Musk left government service. It’s rare for Trump to drop a compelling claim like this, so it’s possible he now realizes it was bunk."
"Yet within the echo chamber of the pro-Trump universe," he added, "a problem that never existed now has been fixed."