Elon Musk's government department, which is trying to save money, says it found hundreds of millions of dollars lost because of fake unemployment claims.

There's one problem: Government investigators had already found similar fraud, years before and on a much bigger scale.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared information about a study on unemployment insurance claims since 2020. The study showed that 24,500 people over 115 years old asked for $59 million in benefits. It also showed that 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old were given $254 million, and 9,700 people with birth dates in the future received $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused the usual reactions depending on people's political opinions. Some people didn't believe it, while others were happy about it. Musk also reacted, saying what his team discovered was "so unbelievable" that he read it many times before he understood it.

"Those numbers are truly awful," he said.

But Chavez-DeRemer can find reports of this fraud in her own department, written by the same kind of government workers that DOGE has criticized.

They are trying to make it look like the government is bad at its job and makes mistakes, and that they are finding problems the government did not find, says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues for the U.S. government. They are finding fraud that was already known about and saying they found it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment benefits a federal law, but it was up to each state to create systems for collecting taxes, handling applications, and giving out money.

Although states usually control their own unemployment systems, special programs, like the extra payments introduced by the Trump administration at the start of the COVID pandemic, brought more federal involvement and many new people into the system.

Stephen Wandner, an economist, says that state unemployment systems usually work in different ways, from good to bad. But when COVID hit and many people lost their jobs, he says many of these systems became very bad.

When President Trump signed the law to help people who lost their jobs because of COVID-19 on March 27, 2020, it quickly attracted criminals. About two weeks later, the government warned that these extra payments were making unemployment programs an easy target for fraud, with many fake claims using stolen or made-up identities.

That same memo gave states a way to help people whose identity was stolen by someone trying to get unemployment money. To record the fraud but keep innocent people separate from it, states could make a 'fake claim,' the memo suggested.

These false claims meant that checks were sent to very young children and people over 100 years old.

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

A spokeswoman for the Labor Department did not answer questions about Musk's findings. The department also did not say how they found the possible fraud or if it was the same as what was already found.

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

In 2022, the government said that possible fraud with unemployment money during COVID was more than $45 billion. Another government group later said the amount was much higher, probably between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I don't think this is new information for anyone," says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "It has been reported a lot. There have been many meetings in Congress about it."

If DOGE's newest claims sound familiar, it's because they are similar to its earlier claims about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. Those earlier claims were false.

This means DOGE isn't the best way to share information, even when dishonest things happen, like people making false claims for unemployment money.

Jessica Reidl, a senior researcher at a conservative group, believes the government wastes money and has written many articles about stopping it. She thinks people often cheat to get unemployment benefits, but she doesn't trust the results from a group called DOGE. She says DOGE has not worked well and might have broken the law.

"When DOGE says dead people are getting unemployment money, I don't really believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE hasn't 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 was a new issue.

Traub says that business leaders and economists are worried about a recession, so it's normal to think about losing your job. He thinks this is an attack on a very important program and maybe an attempt to make people lose trust in unemployment benefits when they are needed most.