The Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has purportedly identified hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims, which it highlights as a key example of government waste.

However, there is a big problem: federal investigators had already discovered what seems to be the same fraud, years before and much bigger.

In a recent post on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared the results of a first study of unemployment insurance claims since 2020. The study found that 24,500 people over 115 years old had claimed $59 million in benefits, 28,000 people between the ages of one and five had collected $254 million, and 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future had received $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused a reaction that was expected from different political groups, with some being doubtful and others cheering. Even Musk himself reacted, saying what his team discovered was so surprising that he read it many times before he understood it.

"Those figures are exceptionally poor," he stated.

However, Chavez-DeRemer can simply check her department's Office of the Inspector General to find out that this kind of fraud was already reported by the same federal workers DOGE has criticized.

They are trying to create a story that says the government is not good at its job and is not smart, and they are saying they found problems that the government missed, says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor during the time of former President Joe Biden. "They are finding fraud that was already known to be fraud and saying they discovered it was fraud."

The Social Security Act of 1935 embedded unemployment benefits within federal legislation, while simultaneously delegating to individual states the responsibility for establishing systems to gather unemployment taxes, handle applications, and distribute aid.

Although states mostly control their unemployment systems, special aid programs, especially the bigger benefits started by the first Trump administration early in the COVID pandemic, bring more direct federal involvement and many new people into the system.

Under typical circumstances, state unemployment systems exhibit varied performance levels, spanning from highly effective to utterly inadequate, according to Stephen Wandner, an economist at the National Academy of Social Insurance and author of "Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System." The profound economic disruption caused by COVID-19, which overwhelmed states with unprecedented claims, exacerbated these deficiencies, leading to widespread systemic failures, Wandner notes.

The COVID unemployment relief bill, enacted by Trump on March 27, 2020, quickly proved susceptible to fraudulent activity. Within two weeks of its implementation, the Department of Labor cautioned state authorities about the heightened risk of fraud stemming from the expanded benefits, noting a substantial volume of fraudulent claims submitted using stolen or fabricated identities.

The memo also gave states an idea for protecting people whose identities were stolen to get unemployment money illegally. To keep a record of the fraud but not connect it to innocent people, states could make a 'pseudo claim,' the memo said.

These specious claims resulted in records indicating that both toddlers and individuals over one hundred years old received unemployment benefits. While the Labor Department's inspector general documented approximately 4,895 unemployment claims from individuals over 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, a subsequent departmental memo clarified that these submissions arose from states modifying dates of birth to safeguard individuals whose identities had been compromised.

The 2023 memo states that many of the identified claims were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather 'pseudo records' of fraudulent claims previously uncovered.

A spokesperson for the Department of Labor did not answer questions about Musk's claims, and DOGE did not give details on how it found the supposed fraud or if it found the same things as others.

Although DOGE seemed to look at a longer period than federal investigators had before, it only counted $382 million in fake unemployment claims, which was a very small part of what investigators already knew about.

In 2022, the Labor Department estimated that suspected unemployment fraud during the COVID era amounted to over $45 billion; however, the Government Accountability Office subsequently suggested the scale of the issue was significantly greater, probably in the range of $100 billion to $135 billion.

"I don't believe this comes as a surprise to anyone," asserts Amy Traub, a specialist in unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "It has been extensively documented, and numerous congressional inquiries have been conducted."

If DOGE's new claims sound familiar, it's because they are similar to what they said before about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. Those earlier claims were not true.

This renders DOGE an unsuitable vehicle for communication, even in instances of fraud, such as with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, is a fiscal conservative who champions the elimination of federal waste, having written 600 articles on the subject. Although she considers unemployment insurance fraud prevalent, she struggles to credit any findings from DOGE, which she asserts has acted inadequately and potentially unlawfully.

"When DOGE suggests an implausible number of deceased individuals are fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits, I tend to be skeptical," Reidl states. "DOGE's history in this domain is not particularly reliable."

Traub stated that the surge in unemployment fraud during the pandemic prompted states to enact enhanced security protocols, and she queried why Musk's team was publicizing past fraud as if it were a recent occurrence.

Business leaders and economists are forecasting a national recession, which naturally leads to concerns about unemployment," states Traub. "This represents an assault on the credibility of a vital program and potentially a bid to erode public confidence in unemployment insurance at a moment when its significance is paramount."