Last week, DOGE posted on X, the social media site Musk owns. They shared results from a study about unemployment money claimed since 2020. The study found that 24,500 people over 115 years old asked for $59 million. Also, 28,000 people between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdates in the future received $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 before he understood it.

He expressed concern about the unfavorable figures.

But Chavez-DeRemer could just look at her department's office to see that this kind of cheating had already been reported by the government workers who DOGE said were bad.

They are saying the government is not good and not smart, and they are finding problems the government did not see. They are saying they found fraud that people already knew was fraud.

In 1935, a law called the Social Security Act said that people who lost their jobs could get money from the government. But each state had to make its own plan for collecting money, dealing with requests, and giving out the payments.

States usually manage their own unemployment systems. But special programs, like the extra money given during the COVID pandemic, add more federal help and many new people to the system.

Normally, the systems in states that help people without jobs work differently. Some work well, some not so well, and some very badly. Stephen Wandner, an expert who wrote a book about making the system better, said this. When COVID hurt the economy a lot and many people needed help, Wandner said many systems were very bad.

Trump signed a law on March 27, 2020, to give money to people who lost their jobs because of COVID. But from the start, many people tried to get the money dishonestly. About two weeks later, the government told states that the program was easy to cheat, and many people were using fake names to get the money.

The memo also said states could help people whose identity was stolen when someone else tried to get unemployment money unfairly. To show the fraud happened but not connect innocent people to it, states could make a 'fake claim,' the memo said.

Some people got money from the government by saying they were older or younger than they were. The government found that many people who were said to be over 100 years old got money. But this happened because the states changed their birth dates to keep people's information safe.

The memo from 2023 says that many claims were not payments for people over 100 years old. They were actually fake records from fraud claims that were found before.

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

DOGE looked at a longer time than the police did before. But it only found $382 million in wrong claims for jobless money. This was much less than what the police already knew.

In 2022, the government said people might have taken over $45 billion in unemployment money during the COVID time. Another government office said the real amount was much higher, maybe $100 billion to $135 billion.

Amy Traub works at a group called the National Employment Law Project. She knows a lot about people who don't have jobs. She says, "I think most people know this already. Many news reports have talked about it. And people in Congress have had many meetings about it."

If the new stories about DOGE sound familiar, it's because they are like its older reports about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. Those older reports were not true.

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

Jessica Reidl is an expert who wants the government to stop wasting money. She has written 600 articles about this. She thinks many people are cheating to get unemployment money. But she does not believe reports from DOGE because she thinks they are not doing their job well.

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

Traub said that during the pandemic, some people lied to get money from the government. Because of this, states started using new ways to stop people from lying. She asked why Musk's team was talking about the old lies as if they were new.

Business leaders and experts say the country might have money problems, so it's normal to worry about losing jobs," says Traub. "This makes a very important program look bad and maybe tries to make people not support help for those who lose their jobs when they need it most.