The government says it found hundreds of millions of dollars in fake unemployment claims.

There's one issue: Government investigators seem to have found the same type of fraud happening years ago, and it was much bigger.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared some surprising information about unemployment claims since 2020. They said that 24,500 people over 115 years old claimed $59 million. They also said that 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old received $254 million, and 9,700 people with birthdays more than 15 years in the future got $69 million from the government.

The tweet got a typical reaction from different political groups. Some people were doubtful, while others strongly supported it, including Musk. He said his team's findings were "so surprising" that he read them several times to really understand them.

"Those figures are very concerning," he stated.

Chavez-DeRemer can find examples of this fraud in her department's reports, which were written by the same federal workers DOGE has criticized.

They are trying to make people believe the government is not good at its job and that they are discovering problems the government missed, says Michele Evermore, who dealt with unemployment issues for the U.S. government. They are finding fraud that was already identified as fraud and claiming they discovered it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 made unemployment payments a federal law, but allowed states to create their own systems to collect taxes, handle applications, and give out the money.

Even though states mostly control their unemployment systems, special programs, like the extra benefits from the first Trump government during the COVID pandemic, brought more federal help and many new people into the system.

According to expert Stephen Wandner, state unemployment systems usually work with different levels of success. Some are very good, some are okay, and some are very bad. However, when the COVID pandemic started and many people lost their jobs, there were a huge number of claims. Wandner said most systems became "quite terrible" because they couldn't handle the sudden increase.

Trump signed a law for COVID unemployment support on March 27, 2020. Soon after, it started to attract fraud. About two weeks later, the government warned states that the extra money made unemployment programs a target for criminals using stolen or fake IDs.

That memo also gave states a way to help people whose identity was stolen when someone tried to get unemployment benefits illegally. To keep a record of the crime but not connect innocent people to it, the memo said states could create a "pseudo claim."

These false claims meant that payments were sent to very young children and people over 100. The government department counted almost 4,900 unemployment claims from people over 100 between March 2020 and April 2022. However, another document from the same department explained that these claims happened because states changed birth dates to keep safe the identities of people whose information was used.

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 that were found before.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department didn't answer questions about Musk's claims, and DOGE didn't explain 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 the government investigators had before, it only found $382 million in fake unemployment claims. This amount was much less than what the investigators already knew about.

In 2022, the government said that over $45 billion might have been lost due to unemployment fraud during the COVID period. Another government report later said the amount was much higher, possibly between $100 billion and $135 billion.

Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment, says, "I think everyone knows this. Many newspapers have reported on it, and there have been several meetings in Congress about it."

If DOGE's new claims sound familiar, it's because they are like its earlier findings 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 people lie, for example with claims for unemployment benefits.

Jessica Reidl, who works for a conservative research group called The Manhattan Institute, is very focused on stopping the government from wasting money. She has written 600 articles about this topic. She thinks many people cheat to get unemployment money, but she doesn't trust the results from DOGE. She says DOGE hasn't done its job well and might have broken the law.

"When DOGE says that very old people who have died are getting unemployment money in large numbers, I start to doubt it," Reidl says. "DOGE has not been reliable when talking about things like that."

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

Business leaders and economists are saying the country might face a recession, so it's understandable to think about people losing their jobs,