Exclusive: Some aren’t even fraud but rather known attempts by states to protect victims of identity theft, former top official says
In a series of late-night posts on X last week, Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” revealed the seemingly startling findings of their “initial survey” into unemployment benefits.
They cited examples of claimants who were deceased, between one and five years old, or not born yet. They even cited one case of someone with a listed birthday in 2154 allegedly claiming $41,000.
News of the claims swept across rightwing media, including Fox News and Breitbart, and were attributed to Doge. They were repeated by the secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who declared during a cabinet meeting with Donald Trump that the revelations were the latest to be “exposed by our partners at Doge”.
“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote on X, his social network. “There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”
But there was, in reality, a “sanity check” of unemployment claims years before Doge launched its blitz of the federal government – including under Joe Biden. People previously involved with the process say Doge’s claims are lifted from it.
“They’re coming up like they uncovered something brand-new,” Andrew Stettner, who served as the director of unemployment insurance modernization at the US Department of Labor in the Biden administration, told the Guardian. “Going back in 2020 to say there was a lot of fraud – that’s the definition of old news.”
Though Doge and Musk failed to cite the survey, or the agency it came from, the US Department of Labor’s office of inspector general is tasked with auditing state unemployment benefit systems.
“They got some access to data from the Department of Labor and office of inspector general, and are trying to make conclusions without doing a full audit or understanding the content,” said Stettner.
Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at the economic thinktank Groundwork Collaborative, said: “What you have is the issue of an outside person who doesn’t know anything coming in and claiming that everything’s broken. The public should be really skeptical of Elon Musk’s claims.”
“For the most part, he and his gaggle of 20-year-olds are going to these federal agencies of staff who have been there for five, 10, 15, 20 years working on these programs,” added Pancotti. “For the most part, these programs work as intended.
“And now you have people coming in, spending five minutes looking at them and claiming that there’s widespread fraud, or they’re broken or they could be fixed in these ways.”