Last week, on X, the social media site Musk owns, DOGE said they checked unemployment claims since 2020. They found that 24,500 people over 115 years old asked for $59 million. Also, 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people whose birthdays are more than 15 years in the future received $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in the way you might expect. Some people did not believe it, and others liked it. Musk also reacted and said that what his team found was "so strange" that he read it many times to understand it.

"Those figures are quite concerning," he stated.

Chavez-DeRemer can easily find information about this fraud. Her department's report shows that federal workers already reported it. These are the workers that DOGE has spoken against.

They are saying the government is not good and that they are finding mistakes the government didn't see, says Michele Evermore. She says they are finding cheating that was already known, but they are saying they found it.

In 1935, a law called the Social Security Act made unemployment benefits a federal rule. But each state had to create its own systems to collect taxes for it, handle applications, and give out the money.

States usually manage their own unemployment money. But special help programs from the government, like the big ones during the start of the COVID pandemic, brought in more federal help and many new people who needed it.

Stephen Wandner, who wrote a book about improving the unemployment system, says that normally, state unemployment systems work "well, not so well, and very badly." But when COVID-19 caused economic problems and many people lost their jobs, he says many more systems were "very bad."

Trump signed the COVID unemployment help into law on March 27, 2020. From the start, it was easy for people to cheat the system. About two weeks later, the government department for work told states that the extra money meant people would try to cheat the unemployment programs. They said many fake claims were made using stolen or fake identities.

That paper also gave an idea to states that wanted to help people whose names were used to get money they should not have. The paper said states could make a "fake claim" to show there was a problem but not connect it to the people who did nothing wrong.

Some very young and very old people seemed to get money they should not have. For example, the government saw almost 5,000 requests for money from people over 100 years old. But this happened because states changed birthdays to help keep people safe.

The 2023 memo says that many payments were not for people over 100 years old. Instead, they were fake records of claims that were wrong before.

Someone from the Labor Department did not answer questions about what Musk found. DOGE also did not say how they found the possible problem or if it was already known.

Even though the group called DOGE looked at a longer time than the police did before, they only found about $382 million in fake unemployment claims. This was a very small amount compared to what the police already knew.

In 2022, the government said people took over $45 billion in unemployment money they should not have. Later, another government group said the real amount was much higher, maybe between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I think everyone knows this," says Amy Traub, who works with people who don't have jobs at the National Employment Law Project. "Many people have talked about it, and politicians have had meetings about it."

If the new claims about DOGE sound familiar, it's because they are like earlier claims about payments to people who had died or were very old. Those claims were not true.

This means DOGE is not a good way to share news, even when bad things happen, like when people claim unemployment money.

Jessica Reidl works for a group called The Manhattan Institute. She thinks the government wastes money and should stop. She has written many articles about this. She believes some people cheat to get unemployment money. But she does not trust the group called DOGE. She says DOGE has not done its job well and maybe did illegal things.

Reidl says, "When DOGE says very old people who have died are getting unemployment money, I don't believe it. DOGE has been wrong about this before."

Traub said that because many people lied to get unemployment money during the pandemic, states started using new ways to be safe. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old lies as if they were new.

Business leaders and money experts say the country might have a recession, so it's normal to think about people losing their jobs," says Traub. "He says this is an attack on a very important program. It might be a way to make people not support help for unemployed people. This is happening now when it's really needed.