Elon Musk's team said they found hundreds of millions of dollars that were paid wrongly for unemployment.

But there was a problem: Government investigators found something that looked like the same fraud a few years before, and it was much bigger that time.

Last week on the social media site X, someone named DOGE said they checked who asked for unemployment money since 2020. They found that 24,500 people who said they were older than 115 asked for $59 million. Also, 28,000 people who said they were between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdays in the future got $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in a way you might expect, depending on their political group. Some people didn't believe it, and others were happy. Elon Musk also reacted. He said what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it many times to understand it.

He expressed concern about the figures, stating they were quite unfavorable.

But Chavez-DeRemer could find reports about this type of fraud from federal workers in her department's office.

They are saying things like, 'The government is slow and not smart, and they are finding problems the government missed,' says Michele Evermore. She helped with unemployment problems for the U.S. government. 'They are saying they found fraud, but the government already knew it was fraud.'

A law from 1935, the Social Security Act, made unemployment help a national rule. But it allowed each state to create its own systems to collect money for this help, manage requests, and give people the money.

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

Normally, the systems that help people without jobs work in different ways. Some work well, some not so well, and some badly, says expert Stephen Wandner. Because of the problems from COVID and many new requests for help, he says many more systems were very bad.

Trump signed a law on March 27, 2020, to help people who lost their jobs because of COVID. But the law quickly had a problem: many people used it to get money illegally. About two weeks later, the government told states that because the payments were bigger, criminals were trying to get the money using fake names and information.

That paper also said states could help people whose identity was stolen because someone else got unemployment money using their name. To show that someone did something wrong but not connect it to people who did nothing wrong, states could make a 'fake claim,' the paper suggested.

Fake claims made it seem like very young children and very old people were getting money. The government counted many claims from people over 100 years old. But later, they found out that states changed the birth dates to protect people whose information was stolen.

The memo from 2023 says that many of the claims were not for people over 100 years old. They were 'fake records' of claims that were already found to be wrong.

Someone from the Labor Department did not answer questions about what Musk found. DOGE also did not say how they found the possible fraud or if it was the same as what was found before.

Even though DOGE looked at a longer time than the government people did before, it only found $382 million in fake claims for money when people lost their jobs. This was a very small amount compared to the money the government people already knew about.

In 2022, the government said people might have taken over $45 billion in unemployment money by mistake during the time of COVID. Another government office later said the amount was probably much more, maybe $100 billion to $135 billion.

"Most people probably know this already," says Amy Traub, who knows a lot about people not having jobs and works for a group that helps with this. "Many news places have talked about it. People in the government have talked about it many times."

If the new problems with DOGE seem familiar, it's because they are similar to what it found before about payments to people who were dead or very old. Those ideas were not true.

So, DOGE is not a good way to share information, even when bad things happen, like people lying to get money from the government.

Jessica Reidl works for a conservative group and wants the government to save money. She has written 600 articles about stopping the government from wasting money. She thinks many people cheat to get unemployment money. But she does not believe the results from DOGE. She says DOGE has not done a good job and may have broken the law.

When DOGE says many very old dead people are getting unemployment money, I don't believe it, Reidl says. DOGE is often wrong about things like that.

Traub said states put in new security rules because many people cheated to get unemployment money during the pandemic. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old cheating like it was new.

Business leaders and people who study money say the country might have money problems, so it's normal to think about people losing their jobs, Traub says. He says it's trying to make a very important program look bad. It might also be trying to stop people from supporting help for those who don't have jobs, especially when that help is needed most.