Elon Musk's team found that a lot of money was paid by mistake for unemployment help.

There is one problem: Government investigators found the same fraud years ago, and it was much bigger.

Last week on X, the social media site Musk has, DOGE said they looked at claims for unemployment money since 2020. They found that 24,500 people over 115 years old asked for $59 million. Also, 28,000 children between 1 and 5 years old got $254 million. And 9,700 people with birthdays far in the future received $69 million from the government.

People reacted to the tweet in ways you could expect. Some people did not believe it, and others were happy. Musk himself tweeted that what his team found was "so crazy" that he read it many times to understand it.

He commented that the figures were quite concerning.

Chavez-DeRemer can find reports about this kind of fraud in her department's office. Government workers who DOGE has criticized made these reports.

Michele Evermore says some people are trying to make the government look bad. She says they are finding mistakes the government did not see. She also says they are finding fraud that was already known, but they are saying they found it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 said that people who lost their jobs should get money from the government. But it also said that each state could decide how to get the money, look at the requests, and give the money to people.

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

Normally, the systems states use to help people who lose their jobs work "very well, okay, and really badly," says Stephen Wandner, an expert. When COVID hurt the economy and many people needed help, Wandner says more systems were "quite bad."

Trump made the COVID unemployment help a law on March 27, 2020. Soon after, many people tried to get money they should not have. About two weeks later, the government warned that more people were using fake names and stolen information to get the money.

The same paper said that if someone's name was used to get money they should not have, the state could make a fake claim. This would show the crime but not connect it to people who did nothing wrong.

False claims caused money to be sent to very young children and very old people. Between March 2020 and April 2022, about 4,895 claims for unemployment money were made for people over 100 years old. But this happened because states changed the birth dates to protect people whose information was used.

The note from 2023 says that many claims were not for people over 100 years old. They were like 'fake records' of claims that were already known to be wrong.

Someone from the Labor Department did not answer questions about what Mr. Musk found. DOGE did not say how it found the possible fraud or if it found the same things that others already found.

Even though DOGE looked at a longer time, they only found $382 million in false claims. This was much less than the police already knew about.

In 2022, a government office said that people might have lied to get money for not working during COVID. They thought it was more than 45 billion dollars. Later, another government office said the amount was probably much more, maybe from 100 billion to 135 billion dollars.

"I think most people know this," says Amy Traub, who works with people who don't have jobs. "Many people have written about it. People in the government have talked about it many times."

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

So, DOGE is not a good way to share information, even when bad things have happened, like people lying to get money for not having a job.

Jessica Reidl works for a group that studies how the government spends money. She thinks the government wastes a lot of money and has written many articles about it. She believes many people are cheating to get unemployment money. But she does not trust information from a group called DOGE. She thinks DOGE has not worked well and may have broken the law.

"When DOGE says very old people who have died are getting unemployment money, I don't believe it," Reidl says. "DOGE is often wrong about things like that."

Traub said that the big increase in cheating to get money when people lost their jobs during the pandemic caused states to start using new safety rules. She asked why Musk's team was talking about old cheating as if it was new.

Business leaders and economists say the country might have a recession, so it's normal to think about people losing their jobs, says Traub. He says it's like attacking a very important program and maybe trying to make people not support help for those without jobs, especially when they need it most.