A government department, led by Elon Musk and created to save money, says it found that hundreds of millions of dollars were lost because of false unemployment claims.

One problem is that government investigators already found what seems to be the same fraud years ago, and it was much bigger then.

Last week, DOGE posted on X, the social media site owned by Musk. They said a study of unemployment claims since 2020 found that 24,500 people over 115 years old had claimed $59 million. The study also showed that 28,000 people between 1 and 5 years old received $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future got $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused the usual reactions from people based on their political views – they were either doubtful or happy. Even Musk reacted, saying what his team discovered was "so strange" that he read it many times before he fully understood it.

"Those figures are very concerning," he stated.

Chavez-DeRemer only needs to look at her department's own office that checks for problems. This office, run by the same government workers DOGE has criticized, already reported this kind of fraud.

"They are trying to make it seem like the government is not good at its job and not smart, and that they are finding problems the government missed," says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor when Joe Biden was president. "They are finding fraud that was already known about and saying they discovered it."

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment payments a federal law, but let individual states set up ways to collect unemployment taxes, deal with applications, and give out the money.

Although states usually manage their own unemployment systems, special programs, like the increased benefits started by the Trump administration when the COVID pandemic began, brought more direct federal involvement and a big rise in the number of people getting benefits.

Normally, state systems for unemployed people work "very well, not so well, and terribly," says Stephen Wandner, an expert who wrote a book about making the system better. When COVID strongly affected the economy and led to many new applications that states could not handle, Wandner says many more systems were "quite bad."

Trump signed a law on March 27, 2020, that gave money to people who lost their jobs because of COVID.

Soon after, many people tried to cheat the system. About two weeks later, the government department in charge of jobs told states that the extra money was causing a lot of fake applications using stolen or made-up names.

The memo also suggested a way for states to help people whose identity was stolen because someone tried to get unemployment money using their name. To keep a record of the fraud but not connect it to innocent people, states could create a "fake claim," the memo said.

These false claims led to records showing that very young children and very old people received payments.

The 2023 memo says that many of the claims were not payments to people over 100 years old. They were actually false records of claims that were already known to be fake.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department did not answer questions about Musk's findings. The department did not say how they found the possible fraud or if this information was already known.

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

In 2022, the department that deals with jobs said that over $45 billion was lost due to possible unemployment fraud during the COVID time. Later, another government office said the problem was much bigger, probably between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I think everyone knows this," says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "Many reports have said this. There have been several government 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 had died or were very old.

This means DOGE isn't a perfect way to communicate, even when people have been dishonest, like with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, a researcher at the conservative group The Manhattan Institute, believes in saving government money and strongly supports stopping waste. She has written 600 articles about this. She thinks there is a lot of fraud with unemployment benefits, but she finds it hard to trust any results from DOGE. She believes DOGE has not worked well and may have acted illegally.

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

Traub said that a lot of fraud during the pandemic made states use new security methods. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old fraud as if it was new.

Traub says, "Business leaders and economists are worried about a national recession, so it's normal to think about people losing their jobs. He says this is like attacking a very important program and maybe trying to reduce public support for unemployment insurance when it is needed most."