By Alex Moore
This January, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it has recovered $31 million in federal payments that improperly went to dead people in a five-month pilot project. The Treasury Department undertook this effort after Congress granted it temporary access to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) Full Death Master File, which is the most complete federal database of people who have died.
“These results are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk in a press statement. “Congress granting permanent access to the Full Death Master File will significantly reduce fraud, improve program integrity, and better safeguard taxpayer dollars.”
Currently, the Treasury Department only has access to the file from December 2023 to December 2026, a power granted by Congress in the 2021 omnibus appropriations bill. The agency projects that, after subtracting costs, it will recover $215 million over this period. However, as Lebryk mentioned, it would take another act of Congress to make the program permanent.
The problem is that the program’s impact will be relatively limited, considering the scale of the SSA’s budget, even if it’s made permanent. The SSA had more than $1.39 trillion in expenditures in 2023, with more than 99 percent going toward benefits. That means the $215 million the Treasury projects to recover during its temporary access period is little more than a drop in the bucket.
However, a drop in the bucket may not be enough for the new administration as it focuses on reducing waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government. President Trump and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, have claimed that millions of people receive fraudulent Social Security payments. Meanwhile, fact checkers at the Associated Press have refuted the claim, pointing to a misunderstanding caused by how the programming language used to maintain SSA records handles missing or incomplete dates.
This sets up a fight that will likely push SSA—and possibly Social Security benefits—even further into the spotlight. The final outcome remains to be seen, but here at TSCL, we’ll be working hard to pressure Congress and the administration to ensure that their efforts to clean up federal spending don’t have a negative impact on America’s seniors.
