Something smells rotten in Washington—and no, it’s not just the cafeteria meatloaf. It turns out the Social Security Administration has been keeping a secret graveyard in its database, and it’s not metaphorical. According to a jaw-dropping cleanup effort by the Department of Government Efficiency (yes, that’s a real thing, apparently), over 12 million people were still listed as “alive” despite being old enough to remember when fire was invented.
That’s right. As of March 2025, there were allegedly 3.4 million individuals in the system aged 120 to 129, another 3.9 million between 130 and 139, and—brace yourself—over a million people aged 150+. Either the fountain of youth is real and heavily guarded by the AARP, or our government has been cutting checks to digital ghosts for decades.
Now, before we dive deeper, let’s have a quick reality check. If you or I tried to claim we were 137 years old and still cashing checks, we’d probably end up on a watchlist—or in a padded room. But in the federal bureaucracy? That just means you’re part of the mailing list.
And the kicker? It took them eleven weeks just to clean this up. Eleven weeks. That’s how long it takes to binge-watch Matlock for the sixth time, or, apparently, to finally realize your list of recipients includes people born before Abraham Lincoln grew a beard.
Here’s what The Post Millennial reported about the cleanup effort:
“After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased. Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort.”
Ah yes, the “complex cases.” Because who among us hasn’t had two birthdates on file and been dead for a century?
Even Elon Musk couldn’t resist chiming in. In February, he quipped: “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.” At this point, that’s as plausible an explanation as any.
But beyond the absurdity, the implications are deadly serious. This is money—your money—being siphoned off to prop up a database that couldn’t pass a middle school Excel exam. Imagine being a retired veteran trying to make ends meet while Uncle Sam is sending checks to a guy who “died” during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
This isn’t just a glitch. It’s a flashing neon sign of systemic incompetence, brought to you by the same folks who once thought giving the IRS militarized equipment was a good idea.
Fortunately, someone’s finally blowing the dust off the server room.
President Donald Trump, in typical no-nonsense fashion, signed an executive order in April 2025 aimed at cutting off illegal immigrants from accessing Social Security benefits. Radical, right? A government program for citizens being used only by citizens. What a concept!
The order directed federal agencies to ensure “ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from Social Security Act programs.” And while this sent the usual suspects into a full-blown meltdown on cable news, regular Americans cheered the return of sanity.
Pair that move with the DOGE-led cleanup, and you begin to see a theme. This administration isn’t interested in winning popularity contests among lobbyists. They’re interested in yanking the wires out of broken systems and, dare we say, plugging the leaks. Even if that means deleting a few dozen nonagenarian vampires from the payroll.
Because let’s be honest—if 12 million ghost entries were sitting in one department’s spreadsheet, what else is lurking in the digital shadows of the federal government? Dead people with pensions? Duplicate IDs? Rogue bots with Medicare cards?
Every dollar wasted on these ghost accounts is a dollar not going to someone who earned it. A widow in Nebraska, a veteran in Arizona, a retired couple trying to survive the rising cost of eggs—these are the people being cheated when the government treats its own records like a choose-your-own-adventure novel.
This isn’t just a clerical cleanup; it’s a battle for trust. The government can’t keep operating like your great-aunt’s attic: full of things nobody has touched since 1943 but still somehow collecting dust—and checks.
So if 2025 becomes the year we finally kick the undead off the dole, good. Let’s drain the digital swamp and return Social Security to the living. No offense to the immortal spreadsheet vampires, but your free ride’s over.