by Stacy Jackson
April 18, 2025
The jokes write themselves.
The Department of Government Efficiency claimed to uncover nearly $400 million in unemployment fraud claims, but it’s reportedly the same data federal investigators discovered years ago.
DOGE announced the $382 million in fake unemployment claims since 2020 in an April 9 post on X, which listed: 24,500 people over 115 years old claimed $59 million in benefits; 28,000 people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254 million; 9,700 people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69 million; and someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41,000.
The Associated Press reported that DOGE’s findings had previously been uncovered by federal investigators on a larger scale years ago, and the $382 million is only a fraction of what officials were aware of.
Following DOGE’s announcement, President Donald Trump’s Senior Advisor Elon Musk took to X and stated how “crazy” the findings were, so much so that he had to “read it several times before it sank in.”
During a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump said the “numbers are really bad” following U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s report of the alleged unemployment fraud payments, which included claims filed by unborn children.
The U.S. Department of Labor is “committed to recovering your stolen tax dollars,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote in an April 10 post on X. “We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud.”
As “crazy” as the numbers seem, Amy Traub of the National Employment Law Project said DOGE’s findings are not “news to anyone” since they have already been widely reported and several congressional hearings have already addressed the matter.
Michele Evermore, a member of the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Labor, accused DOGE of “trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient, and government is stupid, and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch.’”
Both Traub and Evermore question DOGE’s intentions by calling attention to old fraud that has already been marked.
According to the Social Security Act of 1935, individual states have almost complete control over employment systems and how they collect unemployment taxes, implement application processes, and distribute benefits. The COVID pandemic outbreak created a flood of new beneficiaries after Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law in March 2020.
The Department of Labor warned state officials that unemployment benefits and programs were at risk of becoming “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.” Pseudo claims later uncovered records that identified toddlers and centenarians as recipients of funds that totaled around 4,895 unemployment claims filed by individuals over 100 years old between March 2020 and April 2022.
By 2022, the department suspected fraud claims worth over $45 million, totaling far under the Government Accountability Office’s potential estimates of $100 billion to $135 billion.
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