Elon Musk's team, which tries to save government money, says they found a lot of money that was paid wrongly for unemployment.

There is a problem: Government investigators found this same kind of fraud years ago, and it was much bigger.

Last week, DOGE posted on X, the social media site owned by Musk. They looked at unemployment claims since 2020. They found that 24,500 people over 115 years old claimed $59 million. They also found that 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people who will be born in the future received $69 million from the government.

People online reacted to the tweet in different ways, depending on their political ideas. Some people did not believe it, and others were happy. Musk, who sent the tweet, said that what his team found was very strange. He read it many times before he understood it.

He expressed concern that the figures were quite unfavorable.

Chavez-DeRemer didn't need to look far. Her department's office had already said this kind of fraud happened. The government workers, who DOGE has spoken badly about, were the ones who reported it.

They are saying the government does not work well and is not smart. They are finding problems the government did not find. They say they found fraud that was already known as fraud.

In 1935, a law called the Social Security Act said that people who lost their jobs could get money from the government. But each state had to make its own plan to collect taxes, take requests, and give the money to people.

States usually manage their own unemployment systems. But special programs, like the extra money from the government during COVID, brought more help from the government and many new people into the system.

An expert named Stephen Wandner says that usually, unemployment systems in different states work differently. Some work well, some not so well, and some very badly. When COVID arrived, many people lost their jobs, and the systems had trouble managing. Because of this, many systems became very bad.

Trump signed a law on March 27, 2020, to help people who lost their jobs because of COVID. But soon, many people tried to get this money in a dishonest way. The government told states that people might use fake names or stolen information to get the money.

The memo said states could help people whose identity was stolen by someone trying to get their unemployment money. States could make a fake claim. This would show the crime happened but not connect it to the real person.

These wrong claims meant that payments went to very young and very old people.

The memo from 2023 says that many claims were not for people over 100 years old. They were 'fake records' of fraud that they found before.

A woman from the Labor Department didn't answer questions about Musk's report. DOGE also didn't say how they found the possible fraud or if someone else had found it before.

DOGE looked at a longer time, but it only found $382 million in fake claims. This was a very small amount compared to what people already knew.

In 2022, a government group said that people might have taken more than $45 billion from money for people without jobs during the time of COVID. Another government group later said the amount was probably much bigger, between $100 billion and $135 billion.

Amy Traub, who knows a lot about people without jobs, says, "Everyone knows this. Many people have talked about it. Congress has had many meetings about it."

If the new problems with DOGE seem familiar, it is because they are like its old findings about Social Security money going to people who were dead or very old. Those old statements were not true.

So DOGE is not always the best way to share information, even when bad things happen, like when people lie to get money from the government when they don't have a job.

Jessica Reidl works for a conservative group. She believes the government should not waste money. She has written many articles about stopping waste. She thinks many people are not honest about getting unemployment money. But she does not trust the information from DOGE. She thinks they have not worked well and maybe did something wrong.

When DOGE says very old people who have died are getting a lot of unemployment money, I don't believe it, Reidl says. DOGE is often wrong about things like that.

Traub said that many people lied to get money from the government during the pandemic. Because of this, states started using new ways to stop it. She asked why Musk's team was talking about this old problem as if it was new.

Business leaders and money experts are saying our country might have economic problems, so it's normal to worry about not having a job," Traub says. "This is like attacking a very important plan and maybe trying to make people not want to help those without jobs, especially now when it's needed most.