Elon Musk's department says they found a lot of government money that was wasted. This money was paid to people for unemployment, but they should not have gotten it.

But government investigators found this same problem many years before, and it was much bigger.

Last week on X, a social media site, DOGE said they looked at unemployment claims since 2020. They found some strange things. For example, 24,500 people over 115 years old asked for $59 million. Also, 28,000 children from 1 to 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdays in the future received $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in a way you might expect, depending on their political group. Some were unsure, and others were happy. Even Musk, who sent the tweet, said what his team found was "so strange" that he had to read it many times to understand it.

"The figures are quite concerning," he remarked.

But Chavez-DeRemer could find proof of this fraud in her own department's office. The proof was reported by the same workers DOGE has criticized.

They are saying things like, 'The government is not good at its job and the government is not smart.' And they are finding problems that the government didn't find, even when the problems were already known.

The Social Security Act in 1935 made unemployment benefits a federal law. But it let each state create their own systems to collect taxes, handle applications, and give out money.

States usually control their own unemployment systems. But special programs, like the extra money given by the Trump government during COVID, brought more help from the government and many new people into the system.

Normally, systems that help people without jobs work okay, not so well, or very badly, says Stephen Wandner. He is an expert who wrote a book about making the system better. When COVID hurt the economy and many people lost their jobs, Wandner says many more systems were very bad.

Trump made the COVID money for unemployed people a law in March 2020. Soon after, many people tried to cheat and get the money unfairly.

The same paper said states could make a 'fake claim'. This would show the fraud but not connect it to people who did nothing wrong.

Some fake requests for money made it look like very young children and very old people were getting payments. This happened because some places changed birth dates to protect people whose information was used.

The paper from 2023 says that many claims were not for people over 100 years old. Instead, they were fake records of wrong claims that were found before.

A woman 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 as before.

But DOGE checked a longer time than government people did before. It found only $382 million in false claims for money when someone loses their job. This was a very small part of what the government people already knew.

In 2022, the government said people might have taken over $45 billion in unemployment money during COVID. Later, another government group said the amount was probably much higher, between $100 billion and $135 billion.

"I don't think people will be surprised," says Amy Traub, who works at the National Employment Law Project and knows a lot about people losing their jobs. "Many people have talked about it. There have been several meetings in Congress."

If what DOGE is saying now sounds familiar, it's because it is similar to what they said before about Social Security money going to people who were dead or very old. What they said before was not true.

This means DOGE is not a good way to share news, even when bad things happen, like people lying to get money from the government.

Jessica Reidl writes many articles about saving government money. She believes many people cheat to get unemployment money. But she does not trust the report from DOGE. She thinks DOGE does not work well and may have done things that were not legal.

"When DOGE says that very old people who have died are getting unemployment money in large numbers, I don't really believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE hasn't been right about things like that before."

Traub said that because many people cheated to get unemployment money during the pandemic, states put in place new ways to check things. She wondered why Musk's team was talking about the old cheating like it was something new.

Traub says, "Business leaders and money experts think our country might have a hard time with money. So, it's normal to think about people losing their jobs. This is bad for a very important program. It might be a way to make people not want to help those without jobs, especially now when they need help a lot."