A former senior Social Security official has disclosed that the Trump administration drew up plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including United States citizens, legal permanent residents and teenagers — as dead, using one of the government's most powerful identity databases to effectively erase them from the financial system.
Jeremiah Schofield, who spent 25 years at the Social Security Administration and helped lead its IT modernization efforts, said he refused to implement the plan after agency lawyers warned it could violate federal law, and the Washington Post reported that he has detailed his account in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure filed with two Senate committees.
The plan, which the Social Security Administration says was never carried out at full scale, would have moved the 2.7 million people into the agency's Death Master File — a database used by banks, employers and government agencies to determine whether someone is alive. Being added to that file can cut off access to wages, bank accounts, credit, housing and health insurance.
Schofield said he began to understand the plan's true purpose after pulling a sample of 25 people from the list and discovering they were all still living. He brought his findings to a meeting with a DOGE official, Jon Koval, who was by then working at the Department of Homeland Security. After the meeting, a deputy commissioner called Koval back on speakerphone and asked him directly to explain the goal of the list.
Koval's answer, Schofield said, was delivered matter-of-factly: People would either choose to self-deport or they would show up at a Social Security office seeking help — and get arrested.
"That call was one of the most disappointing calls I've been in in my 25-year career," Schofield told the Washington Post. "I was shocked. I couldn't believe what I was hearing."
A smaller version of the effort had already been carried out when the Social Security Administration added 6,100 immigrants to its Death Master File last year, and some of those people later appeared at field offices to prove they were still alive. When the agency's acting commissioner raised concerns about the legality of the word "death," he resolved the problem by renaming the file, replacing "death" with "ineligible."
His reasoning: "Death is a state of ineligibility."
Schofield said he stayed quiet for months, watching other federal workers face retaliation and deciding the risks of speaking out were too great. It was only at a February happy hour, when he told a former colleague he was haunted by what he had witnessed, that she encouraged him to come forward.
The Social Security Administration denied the full plan was ever implemented. The White House did not directly respond to questions about it.
Schofield said he has no regrets.
"I don't think that it's right that they do this to us," he said. "I think that we need to stand up for each other in this time."
