CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked President Donald Trump’s congressional address, but he said one lie in particular stuck out. The president gloated over the changes he’s implemented during his first 43 days in office in a historically long, nearly 100-minute address, and Dale walked through some of the false or misleading claims Trump made during his speech, but he told host Kate Bolduan the lie that “stuck out the most” to him was his claim that Elon Musk had found rampant fraud in the Social Security system.
“I found that this is wildly misleading, at best,” Dale said. “So the president is at least strongly suggesting that millions of obviously dead people, you know, 200-year-olds, 300-year-olds, are receiving Social Security benefits. That is not the case, and that’s because he didn’t explain something critical.
While there is a well-known issue with people’s deaths not being marked in the Social Security database, that does not mean those people are still getting money, because Social Security has an automated system to automatically cut off people who are listed as being 115 years old or older.
Now, I’ll give you some specifics: In 2023, the inspector general who oversees the Social Security Administration looked into this, and found that about 19 million people didn’t have their deaths marked in the database even though they were 100 years old or over – so not good, an issue that has to be fixed. But the inspector general also found that only 44,000 of those about 19 million were actually getting money.”
“I spoke to a conservative expert about this,” Dale added. “He said the vast majority of even those 44,000 are likely to be legit payments, given that about 86,000 people were alive in the U.S. at age 100 or older. Now we have more recent data from Social Security. It shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or older, not millions, were receiving Social Security benefits as of December 2024, so these numbers in the millions are just way, way off.”
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