Musk, Trump and the admin have already been pushing so many outright lies via their propaganda channels. Despite being deunked the lies are repeated nonstop.

The lie that USAID spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza (the money was for running hospitals) for example.

Or the lie about funding an opera about a transgender woman (the money was for a university in Columbia, unrelated to a performance put on at the school).

They are spewing lies left and right. Lies go twice around the block before the truth has put its pants on.

Why should we believe him on this?

https://x.com/KariLake/status/1891841704703013067

Look at the comments. They know that COBOL defaults to 1875, point is that propaganda pundits look for any reason to spew toxic misinformation and rile 99.999% of uniformed sheeple that voted for orange felon.

He qualified this claim as a “cursory examination”. It’s clearly a comment about the quality of the data and systems. That this is the kind of thing that would be prone to fraud.

Before you hit downvote, please provide evidence that you didn’t hallucinate Musk’s claims here.

There’s been no formal inquiry, there was no mention of any of the checks and balances that may have been occurring, there’s been no nuance to the argument from him at all. Okay maybe there are people that look to be 150 years old, is there a reason why? Were they actually being paid the social security or was there a legitimate exception? Maybe people were but it was so few and far between and was an internal controls issue which all governments and companies have globally or was none of it true and your team simply assumed they were being paid.

After reading an article where Gov security experts were worried because they were having to give Elon’s team access to Putty and SQL tools. It seems like people are going through this data and making inferences that may not be completely true or vetted.

Yet everyone's conclusion is, as usual, Musk bad. Nobody cares about left-wing fakes news if they are useful to the agenda being pushed forward.

Someone would have to be really incompetent to find a spike at precisely 150 years old and not investigate it further. Elon tweeted ~ 10 hours ago the age breakdown and there does not appear to be a spike at 150 so if that information is correct then this is no longer evidence of incompetence.

That's the problem with ALL the things Musk is coming out with. We just don't know! We don't know how much we are "losing" to them, we don't know know how serious these problems are. We don't know the context.

We're just getting thrown little bites of information. They sound ridiculous! They are! A lot of things can sound ridiculous if you say them out of context. He's saying a lot of stuff where the listener can go "well, yeah, obviously we should fix that". It's the "common sense" play of the right wing. Yes, it's hard to disagree with. It might be right, and we might need to fix it. It also might not be the best use of our time, energy and money to fix. We don't know what the opportunity cost is.

It doesn't mean the data is missing or inaccurate, any more than a null reference in Java means your program is going to segfault. It simply indicates that the data is not present in this scope.

If Musk was posting: "Guys I just discovered they have tons of null checks in their code here, that's obviously an indication of fraud!" — would that make any sense to you?

For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it. Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who issue birth certificates or type them up are humans. 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been born in 1958?

You can't just revoke someone's social security because someone screwed up.

As competing narratives become more compelling, people switch the stories they believe.

So if you want people to start believing in the set of facts you hold to be true, tell them a compelling story about those facts, don't just tell at them for not fact checking.

>"where it’s not recklessly incompetent it is flagrantly corrupt" //

Care to give a couple of the examples from your direct experience?

People who share your nihilist perspective combined with solutions contrived from ignorance are why we’re here. And where we are going will redefine corruption.

I'm recalling the posts about the last person claiming civil war pensions dying in 2020 (155 years after the war) and wondering if there is anything similar going on here.

Add the fact that people also move to other countries and US government may not even know somebody died, because death was not reigistered in US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...

But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any more money for any inconsistent records till the person comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records".

Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a timely manner.

All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country.

People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. Refugees by definition don't come from situations with stability.

Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.

According to the last US census that number was about 90,00.

Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20 million dead people?

What world do you people live in?

You do realise that the amount of "fraud" being discovered barely registers as a rounding error, right? That there is no significant amount being "wasted" here, right?

And none of that is about government efficiency or "saving money". Right?

Now that Elon has discovered all that fraud, how is the economy working out for you? How is the price of eggs doing? Have you finally become a millionaire now that all this red tape is gone? When is it supposed to happen? Why aren't you rich yet?

Crazy how people will believe the weirdest customer service stories (and have no problem relating because we've all been in a kafkaesque situation) but the second they can bash "the administration and civil servants" or "random people who get a little bit of help and are NOT me", all of that goes out the window and things are supposed to be perfect and run smoothly.

That wasn't the question though. There could be this verified identity, good paper trail, bank records for decades etc. And still exact date of birth can be unknown and unknowable. Data lost to the mists of time.

tl;dr - MySQL uses 1000-01-01 as the minimum value for a datetime field. Different Ruby libraries use different methods to represent dates, which can lead to situations that appear to claim that 1000-01-01 != 1000-01-01.

"In order to receive this (spousal) benefit, you must have been married for at least 10 years, and both you and your ex must be at least 62 years of age".

Basically, you could but you wouldn't get much to make it worthwhile. I do know that veterans benefits did (at one time?) payout to spouses in the way you ask, though. IIRC benefits from the American Civil War were paid out into the 21st century due to a handful of cases where old veterans married young women. The last known "civil war widow" died in 2008 having married an 86 year old at 19. A daughter received her father's benefits until 2020. There was also another spouse who died in 2020, but she never collected the pension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...

> Do you know which ones specifically? Would be interested to know this

This is the only one I've found:

https://docs.ogc.org/is/18-010r7/18-010r7.html#100

Temporal datum with Calendar ... and with TimeOrigin omitted so should be assumed to be 1875-05-20.

If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.

My speculation: there are a small handful of long dead people, for whom the SSA has never received proof of death, and they fall through some bureaucratic loophole in the "assume people over 115 are dead" rules, so the SSA is still printing them checks. But these checks haven't been deposited in a bank account in many decades, and the SSA doesn't even have a current address to send them, so it just sticks them in a filing cabinet in their basement. No fraud, the government isn't really losing any money since the checks aren't being deposited or cashed, just a little bit of bureaucratic stupidity that no doubt adds up to a rounding error in the federal budget. But you can see how Musk/Trump/et al could spin this to sound a lot worse than it really is.

It just says that basically each COBOL system will implement dates their own way.

Rather, as also mentioned in the answers, on Hollerith cards, 5-digit encoded (2 for the year, 3 for the day of year). Punch-card appliances were very much a thing. (WWII logistics were run by punch-cards.)

Instead, he raced to tweet it. This is just dumb.

There's definitely a "both sides" problem here. Many more commenters are making totally unfounded assertions about how these systems actually work for the same reason.

You yourself are pontificating about the inspector general's report at a level of expertise beyond what you likely have. I have some familiarity with IGs, though not in the SSA. It has been eye-opening to see people crawling out of the woodwork to talk about their role, their effectiveness, their "good faith attempts", etc. They don't actually know any of this: it's just ammo they found online to "get" Musk since the controversy started.

Why is it so hard to just suspend judgement about these claims, rather than attack them with little basis? Or at least go after it for solid philosophical reasons? I can't understand why the level of discourse on this subject on Hacker News, of all places, is so bad.

It could also be that entries in the DB that are complete are not exactly correct or even belong to real people and of course there is fraud and corruption going on at least somewhere.

Yeah, what I'm saying is that going through Congress such as FDR did is what would make those actions defensible. If Congress wants to be compliant, that's their prerogative. This Congress wants to be compliant, they can pass laws to do what they are.

So if Musk were doing the same as FDR, I would have much less of an objection, and not much of a Constitutional grounds to stand on. I think they aim to wield executive power, but I think trying to go around Congress is what tips the scales from "radical view of executive power" to "dictatorial view of executive power".

> Congress has for decades done it's best to do absolutely nothing.

This is false, Congress has done N things. Some guys have proclaimed the N things are insufficient, and they demand a new thing be done. Now we are doing N+1 things. Are they working? Who knows; we can't tell because they won't post sufficient details.

We do know what Congress has done is not 0% effective - oversight, whistleblowers, IGs have identified areas of waste/fraud/abuse. Of course there's room for improvement by adding other areas of feedback and DOGE could have been that, but they won't/can't be by going around Congress.

> That doesn't mean that DOGE personnel aren't looking into and finding things that perhaps we'd be better off without and which the executive has the legitimate power to correct or terminate.

I have found in my life that "the fish rots from the head" is often true. A person of such low character surrounds himself with people of similar or lower character, because they lack the temerity to say no to him. Given the recent reports on the people who are in DOGE, they seem to be DEI hires, in that they seem to have been hired due to their proximity to Musk-owned companies rather than their ability to audit federal programs.

> This is just an example.

It's a great example of what I'm talking about when I said "drive by posting". Why is it up to leadstories.com to bring me this very relevant context about the program? Why didn't Musk describe the nature of the program in his initial tweet?

To me this tweet is implying that the money was spent for a social engineering program that caused large scale social disruption. Is that a fair reading, or do you disagree with that? Either way, it seems like many other people interpreted it that way with my reading and became alarmed, hence the reaction.

But when you look at the added context, it becomes clear this program is about preventing large scale social disruption via social media, which seems to me like a good thing. They are apparently paying Reuters for some sort of SaaS tool. I don't know what it does but if it's waste or fraud Musk could explain exactly why/how. But he doesn't, he just tweets his indignation at some perceived abuse and that's the end of it. How is this any different or going to produce better results than "grandstanding in committees about some nakedly partisan investigation".

> The entire story is written as if Musk and Trump are deranged conspiracy theorists

Can you point out where you feel the article characterizes Musk in this way? To me, the article reads as a recitation of factual statements. Every claim is backed by supporting evidence. They describe Musk in neutral and factual terms. They accurately depict his words. It only mentions Trump in passing by way of mentioning his first term. Are you claiming it has left out factual information to slant a narrative? Or that the information is presented in a misleading way?

So where does that leave us? Is the program waste/fraud? No idea, DOGE hasn't provided enough information enough though he has it all.

https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1886647920566636637

They are basically inundating that base with tech content that only lifelong developers would be able to parse. It’s a serious propaganda effort. I’m sad right now dude.

https://www.ibm.com/history/social-security-act

https://www.ibm.com/history/punched-card#The+Social+Security...

And the SSA site mentions using IBM machines for it in 1936. IBM machines only used IBM cards:

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n2/v69n2p55.html

The checks used to pay people were also IBM punchcards.

But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad." There is no a priori reason why it's unlikely that a small amount of people are being paid benefits out of a byzantine bureaucratic system that's almost a hundred years old.

Just a few years ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about SSI fraud (also administered by the SSA) and how common it was. Now, apparently we're all convinced all government agencies contain approximately zero fraud, or at least detectable-by-Musk fraud, simply because it's the cause du jour. It's totally bizarre to read these HN stories (I flag most of them) and people are making totally unfounded claims on the processes, controls, and operation of government IT systems, apparently assuming they are just as good as what exists at Meta or Google. Well, I have personal experience, and maybe my program was an outlier, but these people seem to have extremely rosy expectations, and often have no idea how the government works even in theory ("there's an IG to find things like this!").

It's really exhausting and disappointing. DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings and will never save the amount of money promised and a lot of stuff in the government can be awful, missing even basic controls.

As to "how can he make claims at all", it's because civil servants have been told to work for him, which means he is supposed to have access to more information than actual outsiders do (everyone on this thread).

1) Take the numbers at face value. In that case, you are predicting millions of accusations of fraud and an enormous number of prosecutions in the next year or two.

2) the situation is somehow more complicated, and most of those millions of records with 140+ ages do not represent fraudulent activity.

P.S. Mentioning the blue zones is incredibly silly. Those regions have modest numbers of individuals being reported in the 100-120 age range, which probably are fraudulent. None of those areas have millions being reported to be 140+. For instance, Sardinia had 13 reported centenarians per 100,000 population, which would be equivalent to ~39,000 centenarians in the US. So it's orders of magnitude less than this database shows.

Whichever it is I would be very careful before making any grand public statements about it. And as far as fraud goes this doesn't sound anywhere near sophisticated.

This is the important missing context. Musk can and does claim a lot. He rarely, if ever, provides any evidence or context. And none of his or his team's actions can be verified or monitored.

> While we agree that adding presumed death information to these records will result in incorrect dates of death appearing on these Numident records, we do not agree it poses a significant risk of erroneously recording death information on living numberholders’ records. For example, we see little risk in adding presumed death information to the millions of Numident records belonging to individuals born in the 1800s who haven’t worked or received SSA payments in more than 50 years.

> SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs. We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse.

[0] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf#page10

Weeeeeell.... https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-03478634/document

> Why?

150. I already said this.

The children of a 150-year-old would probably be in their ~120s. The grandchildren would be in their ~90s.

You're claiming a social security account that's been passed down through multiple generations, like some kind of family heirloom.

It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.

Yes, I've encountered a person recently on this forum who had taken the position that even a single case of fraud is unacceptable; it's better to waste an infinite amount of money to catch all fraud, than to have a program at all if the alternative is to tolerate any level of fraud. I tried to engage them on the futility of this but they insisted it was a matter of morality to stamp out said fraud, because not doing so encouraged it.

(Feb 2025) Bereaved families asked to return pension overpayments

Over the past five years, the DWP mistakenly paid more than £500m in state pensions and pension credits to the deceased, recovering about half from bereaved relatives.

They can't prosecute this because it's not fraud if someone just gives you money and then later realizes it was a mistake. So they must resort to asking the families if they'd kindly return the money.

You say the age field isn't the only thing being used to determine payouts - obviously that's true, there is also the is_dead field. These systems are about giving you money after a certain age until you die. If those fields are inaccurate then the money paid out will also be inaccurate.

It's unfortunate you got so personal at the end there. There's no conspiracy being theorized anywhere here. Just a lack of care when it comes to other people's money.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5eeexex9o

The new guard are far more like the old royalty of Europe. Look at their lifestyles and riches: how could they possibly be wrong? Back then it was called the divine right of kings: they were chosen by God - the literal creator and master of the universe - and thus, by definition, could not be wrong.

Today it's the absolution of the market: how could you possibly be that wealthy if you are a screw-up? It's hard to get rich, so those who have become so must be better than the conventional wisdom and decency. Any wrong move is written off as another move in a 4D chess game that the average person just can't understand.

https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...

The only exception I'd see is if there are people who have somehow gamed the system to collect multiple payments at once.

COBOL doesn't have a default date/time type

As such implementation decisions are left to the implementor

The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the epoch date for reasons

*I made a lot of money in 1999. The original implementors of SS probably used something else ("it'll be rewritten before this is a problem" was essentially the whole raison de etre of Y2K). The 1875 thing, if it's a thing, was probably the result of Y2K work. But I have no direct knowledge of these matters.

If the claim is true and it's really a case of fraud, isn't that a case for the courts and DOJ to handle?

Or he is really trying to undermine trust in the government, like his false Gaza condom claim?

Logical theories include connected records include an age, its chaff unconnected to any money being moved retained for legal reasons, and them just making it up.

Since they won't substantiate this you can choose your own adventure whilst waiting for the boring truth which is probably on balance that all receipients have a known age but they were unable to look it up correctly and something somewhere returns default when not available i in that code path.

It's not a problem, since there are other ways of determining eligibility. If a person doesn't have proof of a birth date, what are you supposed to do? Make one up?

And the claim is that it's fraud, which requires evidence, not some anomaly which can be several things. Musk and DOGE deserve the "dunk" since they're spreading unsubstantiated BS.

There's slippage of claims here, maybe. It's clearly not the case that every record with wrong data is fraudulent, and I don't think Musk believes or said that (though maybe he did, the dude tweets all the time). We certainly agree that it isn't the case.

The claims being made as I understand it are that the US SSDB has a lot of obviously wrong data in it, that bad age data is frequently a sign of fraud as proven by the audits of other countries, the age data is genuinely bad and not a result of misunderstandings, and therefore that Musk is likely correct when he argues there is a lot of fraud in the system.

What does "a lot" mean? It's vague but clearly not 100%. At the same time, if the numbers do transfer then less than half a million people fraudulently claiming pensions is quite a lot! And that would be just one source of fraud, one of the easiest to detect without effort. There will be plenty of people under the age of 100 who have died and weren't registered either, or people who never existed and so on. So whether we're talking millions, or a million, or even with a very restricted criteria less than half a million. In ordinary English, it's a lot.

The IG report you link is very useful! It confirms a lot of what Musk has posted about the age buckets in the database, proving there was never any misunderstanding of the schema or epochs.

It does also say that many of the numbers without accurate death data aren't being used to pay out, which is why the SSA doesn't bother fixing them (which leads to the question of what did cause the payouts to stop?). So, the bad age/death data doesn't automatically imply pensions fraud.

Nonetheless the OIG is in Musk's corner here (as of July 2023). The reason is that even if SSA isn't paying out their death data is used by the rest of the US government to stop fraudulent payouts for benefits programmes after death, and so the SSA not bothering to ensure data quality opens up the rest of the government to fraud even if we accept their claim that it's not causing them problems directly. The OIG writes, "SSA has not established controls to annotate death information on the Numident records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies ... Death information missing from the Numident and the [death master file] hampers both SSA and Government-wide efforts to prevent and detect fraud and misuse".

But this isn’t true. COBOL 85 has builtin functions for representing dates as an integer from 1601 epoch. IBM mainframe COBOL supports two operation modes, ANSI-compatible mode in which those functions use the 1601 epoch, and IBM-compatible mode which use a 1582 epoch instead - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.4?topic=options-intd...

A lot of COBOL software didn’t use the COBOL 85 date functions because it is so old it long predates COBOL 85, and also because old habits die hard and some COBOL programmers avoided using them.

COBOL 85 doesn’t have a date type per se, dates are either integers (count of days since epoch) or strings (YYYYMMDD). But, C’s ‘time_t’ isn’t really a separate type (in the sense that many other languages have them) it is just an alias for an integer type. So COBOL is closer to C on this than you might think

It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.

Another episode from Odd Lots, "Why Corporate America Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks", with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 here at HN):

> Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season, thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest isn't alone in having software in the headlines lately. The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this month. So what's the deal with corporate software? Why do these crashes happen? And why does the user experience typically leave something to be desired? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Patrick McKenzie, an expert on engineering and infrastructure, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter and recently left payments company Stripe after six years. We talked about the challenges of keeping any software system alive after years of upgrades and updates, the distribution of tech talent across industries, and whether non-tech companies can close the gap with Silicon Valley.

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-corporate-america-...

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-still-r...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UQaXpzwQA

Now you could motte-and-bailey the sentence "the technical details are irrelevant if there are people getting payments with those attributes it's a problem" by saying oh if any accounts in this group are getting payments, even if it's just a handful of them, that's a problem. But if we're talking about the number of these accounts being representative of the amount of fraud, there's no way that's true.

Is it plausible that, given the claim is that people currently >150 years old are receiving money, in the previous 40 years of audits, etc., no-one has noticed that people >110 (vanishingly rare in the US) were getting money? That it took the arrival of Elon and his Special Boys with their cursory glance to immediately spot this problem that must have been missed by every other developer, tested, auditor, etc. for AT LEAST 40 years? Or that there has been some vast conspiracy - on both sides of the US political aisle - to keep paying out this money to clearly ineligible people without a single person ever whistleblowing?

My money is on the vastly simpler "Elon and his Special Boys[0] have misunderstood" hypothesis.

[0] who have not demonstrated a great acumen for being correct at any point, let's be honest.

[0] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/02/doge-fired-hundreds-of-us...

I was arguing it should be yours as well.

And you seem to want to go off-topic, again, but what idiot would believe the U.S. government doesn't use SQL? The U.S. government is the direct cause of the creation of SQL.

Domain names have been seized in the past.

FWIW, it would be far from the first time that’s happened (including for sensitive US issues).

In the context you're referring to it is essentially an accusation of certain ideological ulterior motives in communication.

Regarding your reference to Google's search results. I have no idea what the current behavior is. However a couple of years ago there were some remarkable differences for certain search terms between different geographical versions of the website. It certainly had the appearance of pushing an agenda at the time.

It is a mistake to think that negative uses of “woke” are an exclusively right-of-centre thing.

Rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to this comment I posted a bit over a month back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695516 - in which I cite several unabashed Marxists using the word negatively (including Adolph L Reed Jr, and the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International).

If you read Reed, he actually means something rather specific by “woke” - whereas classical/orthodox Marxism views non-class-based oppression (race, gender, sexuality, etc) as downstream consequences of class-based oppression, “wokeness” treats them as if they exist independently of class-based oppression, or as upstream of it, or as a higher priority than it

Just the other day, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was quoted as saying, regarding his own Democratic Party, that “I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack” - https://www.politico.eu/article/us-senator-mark-warner-democ... - Warner may well be a moderate or centrist Democrat, but I don’t think it makes sense to label him as “conservative” or “right-wing”. He’s not a “conservative Democrat”, in the sense that there was such a thing a decade or two ago [edit: I made some comment here about him not being a member of the Blue Dog caucus, but I’ve removed it because what I was saying didn’t really make sense-the Blue Dog caucus is and was a House caucus, while Warner is a Senator]

I don’t think Warner’s definition of “woke” is as precise as Reed’s, but essentially what he means by it is a form of progressivism which prioritises ideological purity over winning the battle for the median voter’s heart and mind