Elon Musk's department, which tries to make the government work better, says it found hundreds of millions of dollars lost because of fake unemployment claims.

But here is a problem: government investigators had already found what looks like the same fraud, years before and on a much bigger scale.

Last week on X, the social media site owned by Musk, DOGE shared the results of a study about unemployment claims since 2020. They found some strange things. For example, 24,500 people over 115 years old claimed $59 million in benefits. Also, 28,000 children aged 1 to 5 received $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdays in the future got $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet differently depending on their political views. Some didn't believe it, while others were happy about it. Musk also reacted, saying what his team found was "so strange" that he read it many times to understand it.

"These numbers are quite worrying," he said.

Chavez-DeRemer can find reports of this fraud in her department, written by the same workers DOGE has criticized.

They are trying to make people believe that the government is not good and doesn't work properly. They say they are finding problems that the government missed, says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment at the US Department of Labor when Joe Biden was president.

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

Even though states mostly control their own unemployment systems, special government programs, like the extra money given at the start of the COVID pandemic, mean the national government gets more involved and many more people receive help.

Stephen Wandner, an economist, says that normally, state unemployment systems work well, sometimes not so well, and sometimes very badly. When the COVID pandemic badly affected the economy and many people lost their jobs, states received a huge number of new requests for unemployment money. Because states could not handle all these requests, Wandner says many more systems were 'quite terrible'.

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020. Right away, it started attracting a lot of fraud. About two weeks later, the Department of Labor told state officials that the extra money was a target for fraud, with many false claims using stolen or made-up identities.

The memo suggested that states could create a 'pseudo claim' to record cases where someone's identity was stolen for benefits, without linking these cases to people who were not involved.

These false claims meant that payments were sent to very young and very old people. For example, there were almost 5,000 unemployment claims for people over 100. But this happened because states changed birth dates to keep safe the people whose personal details were stolen.

The 2023 report explains that many of the claims they found were not payments to people over 100 years old. Instead, they were like fake records of claims that were found to be dishonest before.

A spokeswoman for the Labor Department did not answer questions about what Musk found. DOGE also did not give details about how it found the possible fraud or if it was the same as what was already found.

Although DOGE looked at a longer time period than government investigators had before, it only found $382 million in false unemployment claims. This was a very small amount compared to what investigators already knew about.

In 2022, the Labor Department said they thought unemployment fraud during COVID was more than $45 billion. Later, the Government Accountability Office said the actual amount was probably much higher, from $100 billion to $135 billion.

Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project, says that this information is probably already known by most people. She says it has been reported in the news many times, and there have been several meetings about it in Congress.

If DOGE's recent claims sound familiar, it's because they are similar to earlier reports it made about Social Security payments to people who had died or were very old. Those earlier reports were not true.

This means DOGE is not the best way to report fraud, even when it happens, like with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl works at The Manhattan Institute. She believes the government wastes a lot of money and has written many articles about it. She thinks many people are falsely claiming unemployment benefits. But she doesn't trust the results from DOGE because she says it hasn't worked well and might have acted against the law.

"When DOGE says that many dead people are getting unemployment benefits, I don't really believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE hasn't been right about things like that before."

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

Business leaders and economists are warning that the country might have a recession, so it makes sense to think about people losing their jobs," Traub says. "He thinks this is an attack on a very important program's image and maybe a way to lower public support for unemployment benefits when they are needed most.