Elon Musk's team said they found a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, that the government lost. This happened because some people lied to get money for unemployment.

There is a problem: Government investigators found the same kind of fraud years before, and it was much bigger.

Last week, the government said on social media that they studied people asking for unemployment money since 2020. The study found some strange things. It showed that 24,500 people older than 115 years old asked for $59 million. It also showed that 28,000 very young children between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people who are not born yet received $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in a way you might expect. Some people did not believe it, and other people were happy about it. Musk himself said that what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it many times to understand it.

"Those figures are quite poor," he commented.

Chavez-DeRemer didn't need to look far. Her department's office had already reported this fraud. The government workers who reported it are the same ones DOGE has criticized.

Michele Evermore says some people want others to believe the government is not good or smart. She says they are finding problems the government missed. She also says they are finding fraud that was already known and saying they found it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment benefits a federal law. But it allowed each state to create their own systems to collect money, handle applications, and give out the benefits.

States usually manage their own unemployment programs. But during the COVID pandemic, the first Trump government started special programs that brought more federal help and many new people into the system.

Usually, systems that help people without jobs in different states work differently. Some work well, some not so well, and some very badly, says expert Stephen Wandner. He wrote a book about how to make the system better. When COVID happened, many more people lost their jobs, and states could not help everyone. So, he says many systems were very bad.

On March 27, 2020, Trump made the COVID money for people without jobs a law. Soon after, many people tried to get this money in a dishonest way. About two weeks later, the government department for jobs told states that because the money was easier to get, bad people were using fake names or names of other people to ask for it.

The same message said that if someone's identity was stolen to get unemployment money, states could make a special 'fake claim'. This would record the crime but not show the innocent person's name.

Checks were sent to very young and very old people because of fake claims.

The note from 2023 says that many of the claims they found were not payments for people over 100 years old. They were 'fake records' of wrong claims that were found before.

Someone from the Labor Department did not answer questions about what Musk found. DOGE did not say how they found the possible fraud or if someone else had already found it.

Even though the investigators looked at a longer time, they only found $382 million in fake unemployment claims. This was a very small amount compared to what other investigators already knew.

In 2022, the government said people might have taken more than $45 billion in unemployment money during the time of COVID. Later, another government group said the amount was probably even bigger, between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I think everyone knows this," says Amy Traub, who studies people without jobs at the National Employment Law Project. "Many people have written about it. Congress has also had meetings about it many times."

If the new claims about DOGE seem familiar, it's because they are like the old claims about payments for people who had died and people who were very old. The old claims were not true.

So, DOGE is not a perfect way to share information, even when bad things happen, like people lying to get money when they don't have a job.

Jessica Reidl works for a conservative group. She thinks the government wastes a lot of money and has written many articles about it. She believes many people cheat to get unemployment money. But she does not trust the group called DOGE. She thinks they do not work well and might do illegal things.

When DOGE says very old dead people are getting unemployment money, I don't believe it. DOGE is often wrong about things like that.

Traub said that many people lied to get money from the government during the pandemic. Because of this, states started to use new ways to check people. She asked why Musk's team was talking about these 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 it's like attacking a very important program. Maybe people are trying to stop others from supporting help for people who don't have jobs, especially now when this help is needed most.