Elon Musk's government department says it found hundreds of millions of dollars in fake unemployment claims.

There is one problem: government investigators already found what seems to be the same fraud, years before and much bigger.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE reported some unusual findings from a study of unemployment claims since 2020. The study found that 24,500 people over 115 years old claimed $59 million in benefits. It also showed that 28,000 children between the ages of 1 and 5 received $254 million. Additionally, 9,700 people with future birthdays got $69 million from the government.

The tweet got the usual reaction from different political groups. Some people didn't believe it, while others supported it. Musk also reacted, saying what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it many times before he understood it.

"Those figures are quite poor," he stated.

Chavez-DeRemer can find this information easily. Her department's Inspector General's office has already reported this kind of fraud. The reports came from the same government workers that DOGE has criticized.

They are trying to make people believe the government is not good at its job and not smart, and that they are finding problems the government didn't find, says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues for the U.S. Department of Labor when Joe Biden was president. She says they are finding fraud that was already known about and saying they discovered it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment benefits a federal law. However, it allowed each state to create its own systems to collect unemployment taxes, handle applications, and give support.

States have a lot of control over their unemployment systems. But special programs, like the extra money from the first Trump government when COVID started, added more federal help and many new people to the system.

Stephen Wandner, an economist, says that normally, state unemployment systems work with different results, sometimes well and sometimes terribly. But when COVID badly affected the economy and led to many new claims that states could not handle, he says many more systems were very bad.

Trump signed a law to help people who lost their jobs because of COVID on March 27, 2020. From the beginning, it attracted a lot of fraud. About two weeks later, the government department in charge of jobs told state officials that the increased benefits had made unemployment programs a target for fraud. Many false claims were being made using stolen or fake identities.

The memo also said states could help people whose identity was stolen by someone trying to get unemployment money using their name. To keep a record of the theft but not link it to people who did nothing wrong, states could make a 'fake claim,' the memo said.

These false claims meant that cheques were sent to very young children and very old people.

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 spokesperson for the Labor Department did not answer questions about Musk's findings. DOGE also did not explain how it found the fraud or if it was the same as what was already found.

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

In 2022, the Labor Department said that over $45 billion was lost because of suspected unemployment fraud during the COVID time. Later, the Government Accountability Office said the total was much higher, maybe between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I don't think this will surprise anyone," says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "It has been reported a lot, and Congress has had many meetings about it."

DOGE's newest claims seem familiar because they are like their past findings about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. But those past claims were not true.

This means DOGE is not a perfect way to communicate, even when people have been dishonest, for example with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, who works at The Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, believes in saving government money and strongly supports stopping waste. She has written 600 articles about this. She thinks there is a lot of fraud with unemployment insurance. However, she finds it hard to believe the results from DOGE. She says DOGE has not worked well and might have broken the law.

"When DOGE says that many very old people who have died are getting unemployment money, I start to doubt it," Reidl says. "DOGE has not been reliable about that."

Traub said that the increase in unemployment fraud during the pandemic made states add new security measures. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old fraud as if it was new.

When business leaders and economists say a recession might happen in the country, it's normal to worry about people losing their jobs,