Elon Musk's team, which tries to save money for the government, recently pointed out a big waste of government money. They said they found hundreds of millions of dollars in fake unemployment claims.

One problem is that government investigators seem to have found the same fraud years ago, but it was much larger then.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared some strange results from a study about 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 people between 1 and 5 years old received $254 million. And, 9,700 people with birthdays in the future got $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused a reaction that was expected from people who support one side or the other, including Musk. He said what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it several times before he understood it.

"The figures are quite concerning," he remarked.

However, Chavez-DeRemer could easily find this dishonesty reported by the same federal employees that the office has criticized, just by looking at her own department's official reports.

Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues for the U.S. government, says some people are trying to make the government look bad. They say the government is not good at its job and missed problems that they are now finding. She also says they are claiming to find fraud that was already known about.

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment benefits a federal law, but allowed individual states to create their own systems for collecting taxes, dealing with applications, and providing support.

While states mostly control their unemployment systems, special programs, like the bigger benefits during the COVID pandemic, bring more federal help and many new people into the system.

An expert on unemployment systems said that normally they work differently: some work well, some not so well, and some very badly. When COVID strongly affected the economy and created many new claims that states could not manage, many more systems were very bad.

Trump made the COVID unemployment help law on March 27, 2020, and it quickly attracted a lot of fraud.

The same memo gave states an idea to help people whose identity was stolen to get unemployment money. The memo suggested states could make a "fake claim" to keep a record of the fraud but not link it to the person who was innocent.

These false claims showed that even very young children and very old people were receiving payments.

The 2023 memo says that many of the claims were not payments to people over 100 years old. They were actually fake records of claims that were already found to be fraudulent.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department did not reply to questions about Musk's findings. Also, DOGE did not give details on 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 period 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 Labor Department said that more than $45 billion in unemployment money may have been taken wrongly during the COVID time. Later, a government office said the real amount was probably much more, from $100 billion to $135 billion.

"I don't think anyone will be surprised by this," says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "It has been reported in many places, and Congress has held several meetings about it."

DOGE's new claims sound familiar because they are like its past reports 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 send messages, even when problems like false unemployment claims happen.

Jessica Reidl works at The Manhattan Institute, a conservative group. She believes the government should be careful with money and avoid waste, and she has written 600 articles about this. While she thinks many people are cheating with unemployment benefits, she doesn't trust the information from DOGE. She says DOGE hasn't worked well and might have broken the law.

"When DOGE says that very old dead people are getting unemployment money in large numbers, I don't believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE hasn't been trustworthy about that."

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

Business leaders and economists are worried about a recession in the country, so it's normal to think about unemployment," says Traub. "This is an attack on how important this program is and maybe an effort to reduce public support for unemployment benefits when people need them most."