By Meryl Kornfield, Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
When Richard VanMetter tried to buy a sandwich, he didn’t realize he was dead.
The 76-year-old retired physicist, on vacation in Boca Raton, Florida, in February, assumed there might have been a fraudulent charge that caused his credit card to be declined for a $6 Italian sub purchase. Then he called his bank and learned the government had told every financial institution he had ever interacted with that he had died. The government clawed back his last Social Security check and shut off his retirement checks and Medicare. Months later, he’s still working on getting his pension payments back.
“It has been the bane of my existence,” VanMetter said.
VanMetter had been mistakenly added to Social Security’s Death Master File – a database the government maintains to keep track of deceased people who should no longer receive benefits that is also provided to financial institutions, employers, election offices and other organizations. The agency has acknowledged that about 600 people a month are placed in the database mistakenly, for reasons ranging from clerical errors to bad information.
Now, false claims by Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service about dead people getting benefits have led to a new effort to move millions of names to the Death Master File- increasing the odds that more people who are alive will inadvertently be declared dead, according to current and former officials at the agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The unprecedented move could have far-ranging impacts for any people wrongly labeled dead, roiling their families and potentially depriving them of housing, transportation and medical care, former officials and outside experts said.
Musk has repeatedly claimed that as many as 20 million Americans over the age of 100 receive Social Security checks – a mathematical impossibility given that there are only about 100,000 centenarians in the United States. The reality is much more banal: Millions of often very old entries in the agency’s main database of more than 530 million Social Security numbers are flawed by coding quirks, old technology, missing birth dates and other errors, according to current and former agency officials and a 2023 inspector general report. Few if any of the numbers are attached to Social Security payments, however, leading agency officials to argue that cleaning up the records would require them to find evidence that each person has died, a massive cost that would outweigh any meager benefits, the report said.
But Musk and his team – who became fixated on entries with impossibly high ages – went ahead with an effort to rapidly move those flawed records into the deaths file, overriding objections from staff who argued that they needed to be sure that each person had really died to avoid any errors. More than 10 million people have been added to the deaths database since early March, according to records obtained by The Washington Post, including millions added after a federal judge in Maryland on March 20 barred the DOGE team from accessing, viewing or working with any system containing “personal identifiable information.”
The names were not marked as dead based on clear evidence but rather based on the assumption that they were no longer alive, according to one former senior official who worked on the project.
About 7.3 million people marked as deceased were recorded as having a date of birth before March 1, 1905 but after 1871; no earnings in the past 45 years; no address changes in the past 50 years; and not in a database for people receiving benefits, according to an internal document that did not account for the millions of other people added to the database.
The administration made the project a higher priority out of concern that these Social Security numbers could be used for fraud, according to a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details about the plans. But the official did not provide any evidence of fraud.
“The recent updates to the Ineligible Master File are part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to enhance the accuracy of its data and prevent fraud,” White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said, referring to the Death Master File.
It is not clear whether DOGE, which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency, violated the court order with its actions. But DOGE itself promoted its involvement in an X post on March 16, saying DOGE and the Social Security Administration “are now working together to increase the accuracy of the ‘Death Master File.’”
In addition, the Social Security Administration also moved the names and Social Security numbers of more than 6,000 living immigrants into the deaths database earlier this month over the objections of staff.
The gambit, carried out at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at pressuring the immigrants to leave the U.S., administration officials said. Instead, dozens of those people found themselves locked out of their economic livelihoods and went to their local field offices, which reinstated their Social Security numbers over the past couple of weeks, records show.
When VanMetter read news stories about the immigrants added to the deaths database, he said he understood how devastating that might be to people, especially those without the technical skills and financial safety net the D.C. resident has. VanMetter doesn’t know why he was added to the death database.
“Being dead is personally no big deal, if you really are dead,” VanMetter said. “But, if you are still living, it creates a mess.”
‘Likelihood of mistakes is high’
The procedure for listing people as dead within Social Security databases is complex and multilayered, with opportunities for errors at several steps, said an agency employee with knowledge of the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job. There are also controls to minimize mistakes, ones that have been bypassed in recent months.
An automated program inputs updated data through Social Security’s internal systems – including the Death Master File, the agency’s record of millions of deaths. In addition, a handful of select staff members – about 40 to 50 employees who face intense vetting – do have “God-level” permissions to write directly into the Death Master File, though they still need to fill out a request form to a control board, the employee said.
Those safeguards were disregarded when someone who did not have those permissions added the roughly 6,000 immigrants to the death file earlier this month, the employee said. It appears“they blew through every bit of policy and compliance and procedure supposed to be in place to protect that stuff,” the employee said.
Those who are wrongly declared dead have seen their bank accounts closed, tax returns rejected, Medicare and Medicaid coverage stopped, and government benefits halted, according to current and former Social Security employees. They also have frequently lost their credit history, meaning they cannot pass a background check, get a job, get approved for an apartment, rent a car or open a utility account. Many are also taken off their state’s voter rolls.
The death information – which reaches federal and state authorities, banks, credit companies, credit reporting agencies, prospective landlords, auto dealerships and employers – could be believed over the claims of the person who is alive, who could be suspected of being an identity thief, according to attorneys who have handled such situations.
“For people erroneously recorded as dead, the consequences are severe,” former Social Security employee Tiffany Flick wrote in a declaration submitted in an ongoing lawsuit over DOGE’s control of agency data.
That’s why the agency has such an intricate system for how it processes deaths, though it can still infrequently lead to mistakes.
First, news of a death comes in to technicians spread across telephone service units, field offices and processing units. Social Security classifies the report as either “first-party” or “third-party,” depending on whether the information comes from the dead person’s family, doctor, lawyer or accountant, or through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, state social services, or a friend or neighbor of the deceased.
Per Social Security guidelines, technicians can accept first-party reports on their face, but must verify third-party reports by, in part, seeking confirmation directly from family members.
This is where the chance for mistakes begins, the employee said. It is easy to mishear a name, the employee said, or to misread a poorly written letter or form. Missteps can also occur when staff members enter a dead person’s name and Social Security number into a special dataset called the Death Information Processing System, or DIPS, a system interface of “old computer green screens” that asks for codes specifying information about the deceased, the employee said.
Or an employee may have erroneously copied a baby’s date of birth into the computer when the newborn was issued a Social Security number, with the result being that decades later, someone listed in the database as aged may really be younger – and alive.
Sometimes workers only have a name, which might be similar to others or not match, and “staff just have to choose what seems like the best option,” the employee said.
“It’s a complicated system, it’s an old system, you have to memorize codes to know what they do,” the employee said. “The likelihood of mistakes is high.”
Still, despite the difficulties, the rate of errors is small, the employee said. Of about 1.5 million death reports that come into Social Security each year, only about 7,500 lead to living people being incorrectly listed as dead, the employee said.
‘Hi, I’m dead’
Those who have experienced being wrongly pronounced dead warn that it causes major inconveniences – or worse.
VanMetter considered himself lucky that he was in the tony town of Boca Raton when he realized he was declared dead. He happened to have his passport because he had taken a cruise while on vacation. And the office he visited was well-staffed and responsive.
VanMetter went to the office first thing in the morning and told the security guard, “Hi, I’m dead.”
“Another one,” he recalled the guard saying.
A field worker spent over an hour with him, typing at length at her desk and helping him navigate the complex process. She created records that he could provide to his bank to get back into his account.
“It was like she was rebuilding my whole database,” he said. “It wasn’t just unclicking the dead box.”
But chaos within the agency has made it difficult to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers. Amid website crashes and jammed phone lines – which have dramatically worsened as Musk’s team has slashed services and staff – frustrated recipients have thronged local field offices with questions about their benefits and concerns about access to help.
Ned Johnson of Seattle waited at his local Social Security office for hours over three visits after he realized in February that he had been declared dead when his wife was sent a letter by his Medicare provider.
He said he encountered a “skeleton crew” with just three workstations out of about 50 occupied when he visited. Johnson pleaded with workers to help him turn on his accounts, but staff members were handling such an influx of people that they repeatedly told him to wait. Eventually, two of his congressional representatives, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D), helped him by getting in touch with the agency on his behalf.
“I found that in my three visits to the Social Security office in the last 45 days that they’re well-meaning, professional and generally experienced and really trying to do their job,” said Johnson, who first shared his experience with the Seattle Times. “But they’re understaffed.”
After weeks of attempting to get his financial life back because of a government mistake, Johnson was aghast when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested in March that only “fraudsters” would complain about missing a monthly Social Security check.
“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain,” Lutnick said on the podcast. “She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.”
Why would anyone in the administration discourage people from speaking up about errors, Johnson wondered.
“That really irritates me,” Johnson said. “I’m not responsible for any fraud.”