I’ll begin with an apology. We must discuss Social Security a little more. The Deep State’s firefighting bots were out in force yesterday, desparately trying to extinguish the flames of righteous outrage kindled by DOGE’s Zombie Army disclosures.
The distraction that nearly everyone focused on was the threshold question of whether the Zombie Army (people older than 100+ lacking dates of death in the Social Security System) were still receiving direct Social Security payments. The simple answer is we don’t know for sure but it doesn’t matter. The almost-certainly deliberately over-complicated answer is the kind of thing that gives you a rage-induced migraine.
But we shall strain for clarity. Let’s begin with yesterday’s most cited sentence from the OIG’s 2023 Report:
Hecklers focused on the first highlighted sentence above, wherein the OIG apparently admitted the Agency assured him no direct SSA payments were being made to most of the 18.9. million in the 100+ cohort. Accepting that as true for argument’s sake, crater-sized holes remain.
For example, SSA said “almost none” currently receive SSA payments, which is not the same as none. The number of zombies having checks scattered over their gravesites remains unquantified. A better question is: do they even know? Or were they just guessing? If they did know how many there were —“almost none”— then they must also know who they were, and so they could stop the payments. But apparently not.
Or, for another example, how confident are they that deceased people under 100 aren’t still receiving payments? It was never studied.
But the totally ignored second highlighted sentence above explained why direct payments still don’t matter. As the OIG understatedly observed, “these (Zombie) SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse.” The active SSNs, appearing valid in the system, enable fraudsters to apply for and receive a panoply federal, state, and local benefits, like PPP loans.
The OIG warned that nearly every other government agency uses the SSA database to stop improper payments to people who are, well, teats up.
The potential amount of misspent money staggers the imagination and far exceeds any amount to which dearly departed direct SSA payments might sum.
“Millions of deceased numberholders,” the OIG flatly explained, “could result in erroneous payments by other Federal benefit-paying agencies that use the DMF to detect inaccurate or unreported deaths.” The report continued, “it can also hinder private industry, as well as state and local governments’ ability to use the DMF to prevent identity fraud.”
Conspicuously absent from the OIG’s report was any mention of what is likely the real reason for all the bureaucratic snow-blindness: fraudulent voting. I don’t blame him for not mentioning that, either. His report would’ve never seen the light of day. They’ve probably have found him tied up in a sack on the sandy bottom of the Potomac River.
Doubters next decried that the problem was “fixed” in December 2023, when Congress ordered the SSA to report all the Zombies to the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay portal. This is the sickest joke of all. Here’s where the OIG explained the then-upcoming “solution.”
Since the Treasury Department issues all federal payments, it has a critical gatekeeping role. It’s the final line of defense against waste, fraud, and abuse. And the diligent civil servants at Treasury had a high-tech solution: a database listing all the crooks, terrorists, known fraudsters, and Zombies, against which it diligently cross-referenced all outgoing payments to ensure that nobody who shouldn’t get our tax money “accidentally” does. That solution is called the “Do Not Pay Portal.”
There was only one Zombie-Army-sized problem.
According to DOGE engineers, Treasury never used the Do Not Pay list. Not once. Even though it had engineered its fancy portal and everything. Elon reported the news last week:
CLIP: Here’s Elon discussing problems in the Oval Office including the Do Not Pay failure (1:06). Obviously, if there weren’t significant waste, fraud, and abuse from the Zombie SSNs, Congress would not have ordered SSA to start using the Do Not Pay Portal. What nobody fully understood was that the bureaucracy is broken everywhere, with all our critical safeguards transformed into creaky points of failure.
(Update: On February 8th, Elon reported that, as a result of DOGE efforts, Treasury agreed to begin actually using the Do Not Pay list for its intended purpose: not paying bad actors. Unfortunately, this still does not fix the Zombie SSN problem.)
The argument remains: how significant is the cumulative waste, fraud, and abuse? Yesterday, people who, for whatever reason, defended the Zombie Army said, go back to sleep, it too small to worry about. Sigh. A lawyer’s work is never done. I now direct you to the General Accounting Office’s September 20, 2024 report titled, “Payment Integrity: Significant Improvements Are Needed to Address Improper Payments and Fraud.”
In its first full paragraph, GAO reported identifying $2.7 trillion dollars in improper payments since 2003. For the prior year (2023), it estimated $236 billion in improper payments. Those are just the ones they know about.
Don’t believe the psyoperators. The fraud is not insignificant— not according to GAO, which explicitly said, “Improper payments and fraud are long-standing and significant problems in the federal government.” Unsurprisingly, it gets worse every year as more crooks get in on the grift:
(The reason the trend bumps in 2021 is because that was the covid wheeeee free money for fraudsters year.)
The SSA deliberately refused to fix its Zombie Army problem because it was “too expensive” to fill in the empty Dates of Death—which all the other federal agencies use to stop improper payments. (SSA estimated a fix would have cost three million dollars.) SSA supposedly “fixed” the problem when it was ordered to report Zombies to the Do Not Pay list beginning December, 2023. But the Do Not Pay list was moribund.
And, it appears, some problem arose, because SSA did not, after all, begin reporting its Zombies to Do Not Pay. I’m still tracking this one down, but I found a recent bill in Congress that was still trying to order SSA to report their Zombies to Do Not Pay. (That bill died in committee.)
In related news, yesterday DOGE reported that Treasury has been omitting another critical requirement besides Do-Not-Pay: a field linking payments to a specific Congressional authorization. According to DOGE, up to $4.7 trillion of literally untraceable payments have gone out:
Among other potential problems, the ‘optional’ TAS field facilitated Deep State off-book payments and color-revolution slush funds. Thanks to DOGE, both the Do Not Pay and the TAS problems are now fixed.
I worry this issue is super-wonky, and that the sheer scale of the fraud numbs peoples’ brains and makes them feel like switching back to reruns of The Office on Netflix. As you can see, this horrifying problem has been studied for years, it just never made it into the public conversation. Thank goodness for DOGE.
There are more than 64 million active Social Security accounts more than there is population of the United States. I wonder how many of these are the result of bureaucratic laziness and bumbling and how many are due to fraud itself. Since the fund itself is rapidly dwindling, eliminating fraudulent or mistaken payments is pretty important.
And, of course, those are 64 million potential votes to be mined. We all know who the election spelunkers are, too. The same people out cursing, chanting, singing out-of-tune songs and screaming the loudest in opposition of these investigatory audits.