The Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk and focused on cutting costs, says it found hundreds of millions of dollars in fake unemployment claims. This is the newest example of government waste it has pointed out.

A notable issue arises: federal investigators previously uncovered what appears to be the same fraudulent activity, occurring years prior and on a significantly larger scale.

According to a post on the social media platform X, owned by Musk, DOGE disclosed that a preliminary examination of unemployment insurance claims since 2020 revealed some improbable findings: 24,500 individuals over 115 years old purportedly claimed $59 million in benefits, 28,000 people aged 1 to 5 allegedly received $254 million, and 9,700 individuals with future birthdates reportedly garnered $69 million from government funds.

The tweet elicited the expected partisan responses of disbelief or acclaim, including from Musk himself, who described his team's findings as "so astonishing" that he repeatedly reviewed them before fully comprehending their significance.

"The figures are truly disheartening," he commented.

Chavez-DeRemer could find reports of this kind of fraud from the federal workers DOGE has criticized, right there in her department's Office of the Inspector General.

"They are attempting to portray a narrative that suggests the government is inept and unintelligent, and that they are identifying issues the government failed to detect," states Michele Evermore, a former expert on unemployment matters at the U.S. Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. "They are uncovering fraud that was already flagged as such and claiming they discovered its fraudulent nature."

While the 1935 Social Security Act established unemployment benefits as federal law, it delegated the responsibility of establishing systems for tax collection, application processing, and benefit distribution to individual states.

Although states mostly control their own unemployment systems, special programs, like the much bigger benefits started by the first Trump government when the COVID pandemic began, bring more direct help from the federal government and many new people into the system.

According to Stephen Wandner, an economist at the National Academy of Social Insurance and author of "Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System," state unemployment systems typically exhibit a wide range of performance, from excellent to abysmal. However, the economic impact of COVID and the overwhelming surge in new claims exposed the severe inadequacies of many systems, rendering their performance considerably worse.

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020. Right away, it attracted a lot of fraud. About two weeks later, the Department of Labor sent a memo to state officials. They warned that the increased benefits made unemployment programs a target for fraud. Many fake claims were being made using stolen or made-up identities.

The memo also gave states an option to protect people whose identities were stolen to get unemployment benefits illegally. To keep a record of the fraud but prevent innocent people from being connected to it, the memo suggested states could make a "pseudo claim."

These false claims led to records showing very young children and people over 100 years old getting payments. The Labor Department's inspector general counted almost 5,000 unemployment claims from people over 100 between March 2020 and April 2022. However, another memo from the department explained that these claims happened because states changed birth dates to protect people whose identities were used.

"Numerous identified claims were not disbursements to individuals over a century old, but rather 'pseudo records' of previously uncovered fraudulent claims," the 2023 memo states.

A spokesperson for the Labor Department offered no comment concerning Musk's assertions, while the DOGE provided no specific information regarding their methodology for uncovering the purported fraud or whether their findings overlapped with previous discoveries.

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 very small part of what investigators already knew about.

In 2022, the Labor Department estimated that suspected COVID-era unemployment fraud amounted to over $45 billion; subsequently, the Government Accountability Office contended the figure was considerably higher, likely ranging from $100 billion to $135 billion.

"I don't believe this information is novel to anyone," states Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. "It has received extensive media coverage. Numerous congressional hearings have addressed the matter."

If DOGE's latest claims sound familiar, it's probably because they are similar to its earlier claims about Social Security payments to people who had died and those who were very old. Those claims were not true.

This renders DOGE an imperfect messenger, even in instances of proven fraud, such as with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl is a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank. She believes in saving government money and has written 600 articles about stopping federal waste. She thinks there is a lot of unemployment insurance fraud. However, she does not trust the findings from DOGE because she says they have not worked well and may have broken the law.

"When DOGE asserts that exceptionally elderly deceased individuals are receiving unemployment benefits in substantial figures, I find myself becoming skeptical," Reidl states. "DOGE's historical performance in that domain is not particularly credible."

Traub stated that the surge in unemployment fraud during the pandemic era prompted states to introduce novel security protocols, and she queried why Musk's group was publicizing past fraudulent activities as though they were recent occurrences.

Business leaders and economists are warning about a national recession, so it makes sense to think about unemployment, Traub says. He adds, "This is an attack on the image of a very important program and maybe an attempt to weaken public support for unemployment insurance at a time when it is most important."