The purported achievement highlighted by billionaire Elon Musk's efficiency department is the alleged uncovering of hundreds of millions in fraudulent unemployment claims.

A significant challenge is that federal investigators had previously uncovered what appears to be the identical fraudulent scheme, several years prior and of a much larger magnitude.

In a recent post on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, DOGE disclosed findings from an initial survey of unemployment insurance claims since 2020, revealing that 24,500 individuals over 115 years old had claimed $59 million in benefits; 28,000 individuals aged 1 to 5 had collected $254 million; and 9,700 individuals with birthdates more than 15 years hence had garnered $69 million from the government.

The tweet caused a typical reaction from different political groups, with some people being doubtful and others cheering. Musk himself reacted, saying what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it again and again before he understood it.

"Those figures are quite unfavorable," he remarked.

However, Chavez-DeRemer can simply check her department's own Office of the Inspector General to find out that this kind of fraud had already been reported by the same federal workers DOGE has criticized.

Michele Evermore, who dealt with unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor when Joe Biden was president, says, "They are trying to create a story that the government is bad at its job and not smart, and they are finding problems that the government had already found. They are finding fraud that was already marked as fraud and saying they found it."

While the Social Security Act of 1935 codified unemployment benefits within federal law, it deferred to individual states the responsibility for establishing frameworks to gather unemployment contributions, manage claims, and distribute aid.

While states mostly manage their own unemployment systems, special aid programs, especially the much larger benefits started by the first Trump administration when the COVID pandemic began, bring more direct federal involvement and many new people receiving help into the system.

Under normal circumstances, state unemployment benefit programmes demonstrate varying degrees of effectiveness, from highly proficient to utterly inadequate, as stated by Stephen Wandner, an economist and author of "Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System" at the National Academy of Social Insurance. With the economic impact of COVID-19 generating an unprecedented surge in new applications that overwhelmed state capacity, Wandner suggests that a significantly larger proportion of these systems proved to be notably deficient.

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020. From the beginning, it attracted a lot of fraud. About two weeks later, the Department of Labor sent a memo to state officials. It warned that the extra benefits made unemployment programs easy targets for fraud. They said many fake claims were being made using stolen or made-up identities.

The memo also suggested a way for states to help people whose identities were stolen to claim unemployment benefits. To record the fraud but avoid connecting it to innocent people, states could make a 'pseudo claim,' according to the memo.

These "spurious claims" resulted in instances of very young children and the extremely elderly being registered for benefit payments.

The 2023 memo states that many of the identified claims were not payments to individuals over 100 years old, but rather 'pseudo records' of previously uncovered fraudulent claims.

A spokesperson for the Department of Labor did not answer questions about what Musk said, and the Department of Government Ethics did not give details about how they found the supposed fraud or if it was the same as what was already found.

Although DOGE appeared to look at a longer period than federal investigators had before, it only found $382 million in fake unemployment claims, which was a very small amount compared to what investigators already knew about.

In 2022, the Labor Department reported that estimated unemployment fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic exceeded $45 billion, a figure the Government Accountability Office subsequently revised upward, suggesting the true amount was significantly higher, likely ranging from $100 billion to $135 billion.

Amy Traub, who knows a lot about unemployment at the National Employment Law Project, says, "I don't think this is new information for anyone. It has been reported a lot, and there have been many meetings in Congress about it."

If the newest claims from DOGE sound familiar, it's probably because they are similar to what it said before about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. Those claims were not true.

This suggests DOGE is an inadequate gauge, even in instances of documented deception such as unemployment benefit fraud.

Jessica Reidl, who works at The Manhattan Institute, is a conservative who really wants to stop the government from wasting money. She has written 600 articles about this. She thinks there is a lot of fraud with unemployment money, but she doesn't trust the results from DOGE. She says DOGE has not worked well and may have broken the law.

"When DOGE claims that very old dead people are getting unemployment benefits in large numbers, I start to doubt it," Reidl says. "DOGE hasn't been reliable in that area."

According to Traub, the surge in unemployment fraud during the pandemic prompted states to introduce enhanced security protocols. She queried why Musk's team were presenting previously identified fraud as if it were a recent discovery.

Traub explains that because business leaders and economists are warning about a possible national recession, it makes sense to think about unemployment. He sees this as an attack on the good name of a very important program and maybe an attempt to reduce public support for unemployment benefits at a time when they are most needed.