The government's new department, led by Elon Musk and focused on saving money, says it found hundreds of millions of dollars lost to false unemployment claims.

One problem: Government researchers had already discovered what seemed to be the same trick many years before, and it was much bigger.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared information about a study of unemployment benefit claims since 2020. The study showed that 24,500 people who said they were over 115 years old got $59 million in benefits. It also showed that 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdays in the future got $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused a reaction that followed political lines. Some people didn't believe it, while others supported it. Musk also reacted, saying what his team found was 'so strange' that he read it many times before he understood it.

"Those figures are very concerning," he stated.

But Chavez-DeRemer can find proof of this fraud in her own department, reported by the government workers her office has criticized.

Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues for the government under the last president, said: "They are trying to make people believe the government is bad at its job. They claim they are finding mistakes the government missed. They are finding fraud that was already known and saying they found it first."

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment payments a federal law, but it allowed each state to create systems to collect unemployment taxes, process applications, and provide help.

Even though states mostly manage their own unemployment systems, special programs, like the extra money given during the COVID pandemic, bring more federal government involvement and a lot more people getting benefits.

According to expert Stephen Wandner, state systems for unemployment benefits usually work with different results, from good to very bad. When COVID started and caused a very large number of new claims, many of these systems became 'quite terrible'.

Trump approved the COVID unemployment payments on March 27, 2020, and soon after, many people tried to trick the system. About two weeks later, the government told states that these bigger payments were attracting criminals who used fake identities to claim money.

The memo also suggested a way for states to help people whose identities were stolen when someone else tried to get unemployment money illegally. To show the fraud happened but protect people who were not involved, states could create a "fake claim," the memo said.

False claims led to records showing very young and very old people getting payments. The government found nearly 5,000 unemployment claims from people over 100 years old over a two-year period. But another document from the department said these claims happened because states changed birth dates to protect people whose identities were stolen.

The 2023 memo says that many of the claims were not payments to people over 100 years old. Instead, they were 'fake records' of dishonest claims that were found earlier.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department didn't answer questions about Musk's findings. DOGE also didn't give details on how they found the possible fraud or if it was already found by someone else.

Even though DOGE looked at a longer time period than government investigators had before, it only found $382 million in false unemployment claims. This was a very small amount compared to what the investigators already knew.

In 2022, the government thought people wrongly took over $45 billion in unemployment money during COVID. But later, other reports said the real amount was much higher, maybe between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I don't think anyone is surprised," says Amy Traub, who studies unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "Many people have reported on it, and Congress has had several meetings about it."

If DOGE's newest claims sound familiar, it's because they are similar to its earlier reports about Social Security payments to people who were dead or very old. Those earlier reports were not true.

This means DOGE is not a perfect way to communicate, even when people are dishonest, for example with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, who works for a conservative group called The Manhattan Institute, is very focused on stopping the government from wasting money. She has written 600 articles about this topic. She thinks there is a lot of cheating with unemployment benefits, but she doesn't easily believe the results from DOGE. She says DOGE hasn't done its job well and might have broken the law.

"When DOGE says that very old dead people are getting unemployment money in big numbers, I don't believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE has not been right about things like that before."

Traub said the increase in unemployment fraud during the pandemic made states add new security measures. She asked why Musk's team was presenting old fraud as if it were new.

Business leaders and economic experts are worried about a recession across the country, so it's normal to think about unemployment," says Traub. "It's like damaging the reputation of a very important program and maybe trying to reduce public support for unemployment insurance when it's needed the most.