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Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base?
- muddi900 2y agoI think the way the headline is structured make it seem like this is merely a political issue. However the government staff's inability to understand the epoch in ISO standard is definitely a technical issue.
- JPLeRouzic 2y agoIf government computers were still using older than ~45 years COBOL versions with May 20 1875 as a baseline, wouldn't many more people be 150 yo than a few dozen?
- chrisandchris 2y agoFrom Musk statement: > we've got people in there that are about 150 years old From that I don't get whether it is 1 person or N people, whereas N is more probable IMHO. However, how big N is, is unknown.
- muddi900 2y agoThere are thousands, if not millions, of Americans with FNU, or First Name Unknown. And many with LNU, Last Name Unknown. Having well documented existence since birth is fairly recent. Not everyone has clear birth certificates. For example, my father and his younger brother have the same birth year. So it checks that really old people have unknown birthdate.
- rented_mule 2y agoYeah, it's a pretty obvious tell that people haven't worked in any depth with large amounts of complex data when they are surprised that there are huge anomalies. Many, many assumptions do not hold at scale. My mom's birth county's records building burned down in the 1940s. She has no birth certificate. When government agencies hear this, they ask if there are baptism records. The records from the church where she was baptized burned in the 1950s. It's been a massive pain for her, and government data systems are exposed to cases like this. Data at sufficient scale is incredibly messy because many seemingly impossible things have a reasonable probability of being present.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago'People' is plural. If he only found one he would say 'a person' or 'someone'.
- AlecSchueler 2y agoThat only works when people aren't employing hyperbolic rhetoric.
- someothherguyy 2y agoIt says when they don't know the birthdate (a empty value in the field ABS(TIMESTAMPDIFF(YEAR, NOW(), birthdate))).
- omarjobs 2y agoNo, it would be 149years now, right? It will only turn 150 on May 20th this year
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y agoDo you understand the issue? What value would you have entered into the birth date field in this situation? In the absence of a null value and proper null processing, zero seems to be the right value. It's clearly exceptional and intuitive to anyone who encounters it in the data, and it would allow the rest of the system to work correctly. Social security eligibility doesn't have a maximum age but it does have a minimum. If a person claims Social Security without proof of age then their eligibility is dealt with administratively. So the headline is right, this is 100% a political issue, since any fair minded person with relevant experience wouldn't jump to claiming fraud in this situation but rather they'd assume a data issue.
- wakawaka28 2y agoMost people don't expect modern government records to be so chaotic. If so many incomplete and even erroneous entries are allowed (they are, as the social security numbers are in fact reused or else entered wrong) then there will be some significant fraud to be uncovered. That fraud might be harder to find than simply looking for people who are too old. But it's there, no doubt, and more fraud happens every single day. If you look into this stuff you'll find dead people getting payments, and children paying social security taxes as their data is stolen.
- muddi900 2y agoIt reveals the lack of technical expertise at play for the most powerful bureaucrats in the world.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sschueller 2y agoEven if you are not at all familiar with cobalt, if you had any brains you would notice that an oddly large number of people are exactly 150 years old which should tell you that it probably means something else than age.
- someothherguyy 2y agoThey could be using BI-type dashboards and are looking at visualizations of aggregations auto flagged by outlier detection or whatever.
- someothherguyy 2y agoThis is pretty much what they are doing, building buckets for aggregation, no insight https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076#m https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076#m
- hypeatei 2y agoElon is the same person who was claiming Twitter had a "brittle stack" that needed a complete rewrite[0]. It's not surprising he's spewing complete nonsense for attention BUT it is worrying he has access to such critical government systems. [0]: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1632810081497513993 https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1632810081497513993
- retSava 2y agoI haven't seen that particular stack and build setup to dispute or support that claim. Have you? What I have seen in my part of the developer world, is very brittle stacks/setups where minor changes have butterfly effects on completely unrelated parts. Pushing straight to important branches, build depending on several pretty unrelated repos, unclear and messy dependencies, etc etc. I can totally understand such a claim.
- hypeatei 2y agoI don't remember Twitter being known for downtime before he bought it and the claim it needed a complete rewrite indicates a lack of experience in software development. Rewriting everything rarely ends up in better software than you had before.
- GuestFAUniverse 2y agoAnybody surprised of the outcome of some juniors led by a know-it-all? My gosh, if everything they ever (wrongly) assume is that the people _actually doing their jobs_ where frauds and that it's unnecessary to _ask_... That cannot work out. And either Musk is too stupid to réalisé, or it's by intention (to destroy). Hint: the outcome is the same. Damage done.
- yapyap 2y agoMalicious juniors at that
- user3939382 2y agoWhy are you confident they don’t have any senior engineers at all?
- flohofwoe 2y agoA more senior engineer would probably have figured out that 'zero means unknown birth date' thing before rushing to his boss so that he can make a fool of himself in front of the entire world (or maybe that was the intention, in that case: props to the unknown junior engineer).
- skissane 2y agoSenior engineers sometimes jump to conclusions too, especially if they are tired or overworked or stressed out. No doubt, less frequently than junior engineers do, but I don't think from the mere fact that someone has "jumped to conclusions" on an occasion, you can draw any firm conclusions as to their seniority. ProPublica has published a list of alleged DOGE staff [0] and one of their software engineers is 37, and he previously worked as a CTO. Another DOGE staffer is 36, and she previously worked as head of engineering at a startup, and before that did software development for Goldman Sachs. So it sounds like they do have some "senior engineers" [0] https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/ https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoOne of the key problems with Elon and DOGE in general is that they keep making very confident claims without putting in any effort to verify that they have their facts in order. It's gross negligence because we know that have access to the necessary resources to verify each claim they make. The more skeptical part of me wonders if this is all part of the broader Trump strategy to flood the media with as much misinformation as possible. An adversarial party can produce bullshit at a much higher rate than it can be verified. Based on the communications we've seen so far, I find it hard to believe that these people are acting in good faith. It's not even that I'd expect perfection. If the DOGE team was producing tons of claims acting in good faith, they'd probably make some mistakes. But the failure rate smells of malicious action or incompetence.
- ahiknsr 2y ago[dead]
- tstrimple 2y agoElon has stated that you're "retarded" if you believe the government uses SQL. So it's difficult to assume any level of competence from him or his team or anyone who continues to prop him up quite frankly. This should be a blatant and obvious tell to anyone with passing technical abilities. But many seem to lose all ability to reason when it comes to supporting Trump and people around him like Elon.
- vkou 2y agoThe ability to reason isn't lost, it's replaced with motivated reasoning. They are tangentially pursing <some political goal I agree with>, thereby I will latch onto <whatever implausible deniability they have for what they are doing>.
- watwut 2y agoThe other key problem is that they knowing confidently lie on top of just not caring about the truth. Also, the strategy of "flooding the zone" is something Bannon openly talked about. When these people say they will do X and we then see them doing X, we really should stop saying things like "skeptical paranoid part of me think they might be doing X".
- fxtentacle 2y agoSince musk accurately predicted that full self-driving cars would be common by 2017, I believe we should trust him about this one ;) My guess would be that it's an error in expanding a two-digit year. But we don't know if the error is in the original application controlling the payments, or if the error was in a report made by a 19-year-old DOGE employee.
- tiernano 2y agoWait. If the issue is that birth year is missing, how is that possible?? I mean, its social security! Isn't one of the key ideas of that based on age? If its like the Irish system, a card is sent on your 18th birthday (iirc… its been a while since i got mine!) with full details. How would they know what age you are for different entitlements? Retirement? Etc? That's seems very odd…
- someothherguyy 2y agoIt could be a ETL error during ingestion into a reporting system, casting errors, all sorts of things, the speculation is endless.
- XorNot 2y agoWhat makes you think people with no known age are receiving benefits? This entire tangent is based off Elon Musk not understanding COBOL or the thing he's looking at before he started ranting on X. There's literally not enough information about anything, it's just anything which can be spun to fit the narrative he's already determined.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y agoThere are other ways to prove eligibility. For instance if you've been working for 50 or more years then you're likely to be eligible. Or you might have school or other records that give you an approximate age. Or your children may have birth certificates that give you a minimum age. The real world is full of anomalies and missing data, the system deals with it according to the law and administrative precedent. Edit: here you go: https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html
- Volundr 2y agoAlso: https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendocument https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo... When dealing with a population the size of the USA, and edge case you can imagine will be hit. Dealing with uncertainty is a must.
- 2y ago
- readthenotes1 2y agoSince you have to be at least 62 years old to collect social security, I would think that every eligible person would have a verified birthdate in the system. So it seems that not having a birthday, or having one that's a default, should be a red flag.
- seszett 2y agoYou can very well have no known birthdate but documents that do prove that you are over 62 years old.
- cm2187 2y agoor at the very least an estimated birth date. If people are claiming money, that's the very least they can provide.
- shapefrog 2y agostrangely, that is exactly how the system works.
- Volundr 2y agoThere are procedures for people whose birthdate is unknown [1][2] Without it a lot of people born during the great depression, born in other countries, abandoned, etc would never be eligible for social security. Even today it's entirely possible for a child to be born in the US without their birth being documented. [1] https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html https://www.ssa.gov/help/iClaim_poa.html [2] https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendocument https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0200302000!opendo...
- xboxnolifes 2y agoYou're assuming there isn't a contingency process for people without a recorded birthdate.
- padolsey 2y agoSaddening. The gall to assume they can walk into a large institution with computing infrastructure older than them and start poking and pulling cables out without thinking for a moment. The arrogance it takes to not stop, to not doubt, to not take the time to understand, but instead to make pronouncements of inefficiency or errors when it is _you_ who is erroneous. Beyond the technical ignorance and arrogance, it is sickening because of how fundamental a safety net social security is for peoples' literal survival. Sociopaths should not be sent into these places.
- Yeul 2y agoIn fairness I don't think Musk and the rest of the tech bro Illuminati want poor people to survive.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoI'd say that they're more likely to want poor people to feel extremely vulnerable and utterly reliant on being employed. That makes for a very compliant and docile workforce that can be exploited extremely easily.
- archagon 2y agoAt least until they can be replaced by AI, at which point they can be turned into biofuel.
- darthrupert 2y ago[flagged]
- flohofwoe 2y agoWhy? That Cobol code has decades of bug fixing in it, and obviously it works. Rewriting it in another language needs to be "bug by bug" compatible anyway (eg "use zero for unknown birthday") and it will most likely introduce new bugs. In the end the language isn't as important as the tooling around it, and I bet there are modern compilers and debuggers available.
- blitzar 2y agoAhh I remember my first corporate rewrite. $6 mil, 12 months, the legacy systems will be all gone. 7 years later, $140mil spent (dozens of junior worker lambs fed to the slaughter for the good of the bosses) and now there are two systems running in parallel - the new and the old both fully staffed and supported. It's time to consider upgrading the new legacy system. Cutting waste was the mantra then too.
- darthrupert 2y agoRewrites definitely need skills and good processes. And most of all, they need support from all levels and the original team. For most things we of course have the free markets for doing the culling: old things die completely and are replaced with new ones without any connection to the old ones. But some of these systems aren't in that world and cannot benefit from those processes.
- darthrupert 2y agoAnswer to why is so that we don't end up with systems that need can only be replaced by a phoenix process. I.e. let it burn and hope something rises from the ashes.
- flohofwoe 2y agoThe alternative is to just simply continue maintaining the working COBOL system. If a programmer can't find their way around in a different programming language then they really shouldn't call themselves programmers. The original COBOL system most likely has a much simpler structure than any modern rewrite would have (if the modern rewrite follows modern 'best practices' which tends to obscure the actual work under layers and layers of abstraction). Instead migrate that old COBOL system to new hardware (in emulators if needed), put a modern web-based UI on top of it, keep adding to the documentation and maintenance procedures, add tests written in modern languages, add a modern build infrastructure, etc etc... but think twice before replacing the part that does the actual work (there is actually a good chance the 'bug' is just in an UI layer that was added later, it may not know that a zero-birthdate should be displayed as 'unknown birthdate'). > I.e. let it burn and hope something rises from the ashes. That's exactly what a rewrite in another language would be.
- bastardoperator 2y agoIs this like his level 97 character on POE2? He's a sociopathic liar.
- blitzar 2y agoI am uniquely unqualified to work at DOGE. I would not be able to tweet without first having a look and trying for more than 12 seconds to understand why this anomaly existed.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y agoMaybe not "uniquely" - there are literally several of us
- ALittleLight 2y agoDon't doubt yourself. You're commenting on hackernews without verifying that the "COBOL defaults to random date in 1875" thing is true. A 12 second google search for use of the word "COBOL" with this 1875 date from before the viral tweet doesn't turn up any results, ChatGPT et al don't know about this COBOL default date thing, having a datetype that defaults to a random date in 1875 wouldn't make any sense, nobody has linked to any documentation supporting this claim, there's no reason to believe it etc. I think you have exactly what it takes to uncritically accept whatever you see at first glance and comment about it on social media. You're doing it right now!
- Fruitmaniac 2y agoYou may be right about COBOL and 1875 but "a datetype that defaults to a random date" is literally how epoch dates work. Except it's not random.
- deleted 2y ago
- metalman 2y ago[flagged]
- Yeul 2y agoThe greatest economic empire the world has ever seen cannot afford social security please understand. Now please vote for the party that gives tax cuts to corporations.
- wakawaka28 2y agoThe reason people invest here is because our government doesn't try as hard to steal all their money as other countries in the world. It's not the fault of any business that this country misspent all the tax money up to now and got into debt. If businesses are taxed too severely, the small amount of production that happens here will be further reduced, and our downfall will be guaranteed.
- sidibe 2y ago"Tax cuts to corporations" maybe makes for a good sound byte in some crowds but what they're really after and benefits them way more and will cause way more deficits is the income tax.
- throwopo 2y ago[flagged]
- blitzar 2y agoSo why not get on to that part? So far all they have uncovered is evidence there isn't much waste.
- vkou 2y agoWhen Elon Musk says something that sounds insane, the only reasonable thing to assume, without further information, is that he's just making it up. The man has a very complicated relationship with honesty.
- locopati 2y agoWhy on earth would anyone believe what the DOGE people are saying? And even if what they said was true (because a stopped clock is right twice a day), why would we believe their reasoning as to why? Nothing they have done suggests competence, reliability, or honesty.
- jeltz 2y agoThey seem to be just some average junior engineers but with huge hubris. I have worked with junior engineers better than them.
- sys_64738 2y agoAbout these DOGE people, I'll be more interested to see the next Democrat DoJ filing criminal charges against them all. I expect they'll each spend life in prison in some form, especially Felon Musk.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoWishful thinking. Even in a world where the US wants to (and will be allowed to) vote democrats in power again, they have proven themselves incapable of bringing GOP criminal operatives to justice. They delay and ponder whether it would be a bad look or set a bad precedent. Mostly they just don't have the will.
- relaxing 2y agoOptimistic of you to assume those who are setting up a regime of unchecked power will simply give it up in 4 years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 28304283409234 2y agoBecause running systems for entire countries for decades is complex. And bugs and problems arise. This is normal behaviour of complex systems.
- bdangubic 2y agoUS life expectancy is like 53, they should flag any payment for anyone over that age :)
- binary132 2y agoBetteridge’s Law of Headlines strikes again.
- ModernMech 2y agoThe concerning thing about this is in Conservative circles, now it’s essentially a “fact” that Social Security has been paying 150 year olds, and they use it to justify DOGE’s existence. They are incentivized to lie. Has Musk made a public retraction on this? We know a lie spreads faster than the truth, and given how loudly he crowed about finding 150 year olds, he should be at least as loud correcting himself.
- rasz 2y ago>now it’s essentially a “fact” that Social Security has been paying 150 year olds From yesterdays submission "The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oligarchs-hugenberg-nazi/681584/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oli... : > To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. mmm sounds familiar
- whosaid 2y agoA lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by the majority quote by Booker T. Washington. A better question would be why does Elon Musk have access to Social Security information? That’s not one of the agencies he’s supposed to be looking at is it?
- Clouseau2 2y agoAllow me to present a possible theory: 1) Assume Social Security has a field called "verified birthday by US birth certificate" which is a timestamp measured in days. 2) Assume this timestamp starts on May 20, 1875 which was once a COBOL epoch standard. 3) Assume if someone does not have a verified birth certificate that field will be 0. 3) Assume one of Musk's junior engineers runs a query against the SS database on this field. 4) Assume said engineer runs the results through an AI trained to spot various kinds of fraud and asks it to spot anything unusual. 5) Assume the AI spits out "We have found X million records matching fraud parameters since ages are over 120 years old." 6) Assume said engineer excitedly runs over to Musk with the results and Musk does not bother contacting anyone at the Social Security Administration to see if there is a logical alternative explanation other than fraud since he never bothered to check the $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza claim.
- skissane 2y ago> 2) Assume this timestamp starts on May 20, 1875 which was once a COBOL epoch standard. Was it? I've never heard of that date in connection with COBOL before. I've heard some people try to connect it to ISO 8601, but I think that's a misinterpretation – yes, the text of some versions of the ISO 8601 standard refers to that date, but only as a fixed point of reference to formally define the ISO 8601 timescale – really an editorial choice which makes no difference to implementations of the standard, which aren't supposed to treat that date in any way specially, and I'm not aware of any that actually do. Furthermore, the reference to this date in ISO 8601 was apparently only inserted in its 2004 revision, while surely this system is much older than that Now, it isn't impossible that some SSA computer system actually does use "1875-05-20" as some kind of "sentinel" value. Sentinel values like that are actually quite common in legacy systems. But if it does, I don't think it is because it is following any kind of widespread standard (whether COBOL or ISO 8601), I think it may just be an idiosyncrasy of the SSA or of that particular computer system. But, here's my own guess as to what is happening here: some random anonymous DailyKos commenter has come up with a speculative, and ultimately incorrect, guess as to why DOGE is wrong – and people all over the Internet are now repeating it, because they like what it says, and don't know enough about the technical details involved to realise it is likely wrong. It wouldn't surprise me if SSA computers don't treat the date "1875-05-20" specially at all, and that is just an invention of this commenter Which is not to say DOGE's claims are right – it is entirely possible that they are wrong – just not for this reason, for some other reason instead...
- Aloisius 2y agoThe 1875 thing seems... unlikely. While it is possible that the SSA decided to create an epoch of 1875, I don't believe COBOL itself has such an epoch. Moreover, the SSA's actual Numerical Identification (NUMIDENT) files, the master records for applications/deaths/claims, appears to stored dates in text as either YYYYMMDD or MMDDYYYY strings according to their archived versions. https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/ https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/207202/ I think it's more likely that there are missing death records for some entries (which isn't really a problem unless there are active claims), data entry error, someone didn't get the most recent NUMIDENT iteration (the records are essentially append-only) or did something silly like tried to treat social security numbers as unique ids.
- SirBill 2y agoWelcome to the only person in this thread that actually knows something real!
- kenscole 2y agoWhat you're missing is that the system was created around 1935, and at that time the eligibility age was 60, so it seems possible that the default entry would be 1875, or the initial youngest year of eligibility for the system.
- tekkiequeen 2y agoGuys, just an American peasant asking a question. My mama never knew the day she was born. I'm 70 and once did a little tech work.Mama drew Social Security off my daddy's account after he died. I also thought about how Census records of say the 1920s have a blank for unknowns like my mom's.
- Sparkyte 2y agoWhile Elon is known to bullshit I do not doubt that the system was being drained with corruption. Social Security kept falling short, but there was no reason for it to. As people die and fall off social security which is designed to last till a person is 90 should be able to gracefully adjust to inflation.
- PHGamer 2y agothe cobalt thing would only explain the 150 years but what about the ranges after that including 1 at 300? clearly something wierd going.