A new government group says it found many false requests for unemployment money. These requests were for hundreds of millions of dollars.

There is one problem: Government investigators found something that looks like the same fraud a long time ago, and it was much bigger.

Last week on X, the social media site Musk owns, a report looked at claims for unemployment money since 2020. It said 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 birth dates in the future got $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in a way that was expected from their political group. Some people didn't believe it, and some were happy. Even Musk, who wrote the tweet, said it was "so crazy" that he had to read it many times to understand it.

"Those figures are quite concerning," he stated.

But Chavez-DeRemer could find reports of this fraud in her department's office.

They are saying the government is not good or smart, and they are finding problems the government missed, says Michele Evermore. She worked on unemployment problems for the U.S. government when Joe Biden was president. 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 let each state create its own system to collect money, handle requests, and give out the help.

States usually manage their own unemployment systems. But during the COVID pandemic, the government made special programs. These programs gave more money to people. This meant the national government got more involved, and many more people got help.

Usually, the systems that help people who lose their jobs work well, okay, or badly, says Stephen Wandner. He is a money expert and wrote a book about making the system better. But when COVID came and many people lost their jobs quickly, he says many more systems were very bad.

Trump signed the COVID money for jobless people into law on March 27, 2020. Soon after, many people tried to cheat the system. About two weeks later, the government department for jobs warned states that the extra money meant people were using stolen or fake identities to get it.

The same paper also gave an idea to states that wanted to help people whose names were stolen to get jobless money unfairly. To show there was cheating but not connect it to people who did nothing wrong, states could make a fake claim, the paper said.

These fake claims meant that even very young children and very old people got money. The government counted about 4,895 claims from people over 100 years old. But another government paper said this happened because some states changed birth dates to keep people's information safe.

The memo from 2023 says that many claims were not payments to people over 100 years old. They were not real records, but fake records of fraud claims found earlier.

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 they found the same things that were found before.

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

In 2022, the government said that people might have taken more than $45 billion in unemployment money they should not have had during the COVID time. Later, another government group said the real amount was probably much more, maybe from $100 billion to $135 billion.

"Most people already know this," says Amy Traub. She works at the National Employment Law Project and studies why people don't have jobs. "Many news stories have said this. And members of Congress have had meetings about it."

If the new things said about DOGE sound familiar, it's because they are like things said before. Before, people said that Social Security was paid to people who were dead and people who were very, very old. But what was said before was not true.

So, even when bad things happened, like people lying to get money when they didn't have jobs, DOGE was not the best way to share that information.

Jessica Reidl works for a conservative group. She wants to stop the government from wasting money and has written many articles about it. She thinks many people are cheating to get unemployment money. But she doesn't trust the reports from DOGE because she says they haven't worked well and might have done bad things.

When DOGE says that very old dead people are getting unemployment money, I don't believe it, Reidl says. 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 using new ways to stop people from lying. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old lies as if they were new.

Business experts say a recession is coming, so it's normal to worry about losing your job.