Deroy Murdock, in the American Spectator:

Social Security is as big as government programs get. Naturally, even a glance at it with DOGE’s magnifying glass found plenty that seemed — charitably — not quite right.

“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE,” Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk stated via X on February 16. “Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”….

Trump critics insist that there is nothing to see here and that Musk and President Donald J. Trump are lying when they say that dead people are collecting Social Security — or that crooks are harvesting those checks on behalf of the deceased. …

Even if Trump and Musk are wrong, and Social Security is graft-free, what does it say about this federal database — and Uncle Sam’s technological prowess in general — if it “merely” is clogged with fake data about people who have been dead for centuries (if they ever even existed)?

“The fact that we are even discussing whether 1.3 million Americans over the age of 150 are receiving Social Security shows how antiquated the federal government’s IT systems are and how they need a dire update,” U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R – Tennessee) told me. The member of the Senate Finance Committee added: “That is exactly why President Trump has launched DOGE and brought in Elon Musk, who often jovially refers to himself as tech support. We need to make the Social Security Administration more efficient and improve its technology so we have transparency into who is receiving government benefits.”

Blackburn’s comment is, so far, the understatement of the year.

RTWT