DOGE just announced that the Department of Labor handed out $382 million in fraudulent unemployment payments to people who are either under 5 years old, over 115 years old, or — and we want to make sure you’re sitting down for this one — not yet born. One lucky claimant listed their birthday as 2154 and collected $41,000 in benefits. Your tax dollars, hard at work funding unemployment insurance for people who won’t exist for another 130 years.
Elon Musk said he had to read the findings “several times before it sank in.” Completely understandable. Most of us had to read them several times before we stopped laughing long enough to get angry.
Here’s the breakdown DOGE dropped on April 9th: 24,500 people over the age of 115 collected $59 million in unemployment benefits. The oldest living American is 114, which means every single one of those claimants is dead. Twenty-eight thousand children between the ages of 1 and 5 somehow filed for and received $254 million — which is impressive, because most of them can’t tie their shoes yet. And 9,700 people with birth dates more than 15 years in the future collected $69 million, because apparently the federal government’s fraud detection system never got around to asking, “Wait, is this person actually alive?”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer confirmed the findings on April 10th. “This is another incredible discovery by the DOGE team,” she said, promising to “catch these thieves.” That’s great. We’d also love to know why it took until 2025 for anyone to notice that a toddler was filing unemployment claims.
California, New York, and Massachusetts — three states that have never met a tax dollar they couldn’t light on fire — accounted for $305 million of the $382 million total. That’s 80% of the fraud concentrated in three Democrat-run states. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields had a simple explanation: “High taxes, poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars, and progressive policies continue to yield negative results.”
Big of him to put it so diplomatically.
Here’s what makes this truly spectacular. The pandemic unemployment program was designed so that applicants could simply self-certify their eligibility. No identity check. No employment verification. Nothing. Blake Hall, co-founder of ID.me, described it charitably as applicants getting to “pinky promise” that they were out of work. The government essentially set a pile of cash on the sidewalk with a sign that said “HONOR SYSTEM” and then acted shocked when it disappeared.
Democrats had the chance to add safeguards in April 2021. They rejected them. They were too busy extending the supplemental unemployment benefits that paid people more to sit at home than to work. It would have been rude to ask a 2-year-old for a pay stub while all that was going on.
DOGE staffer Tom Krause put the broader picture plainly on Bret Baier’s show: “There’s $500 billion of fraud every year. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of improper payments, and we can’t pass an audit. If I was a public company CFO, I would effectively be removed.” Right. Any CFO who let someone born in the year 2154 collect unemployment would be removed — from the building, by security, immediately.
The $382 million DOGE found is, by the way, roughly one-tenth of one percent of what experts estimate was stolen from pandemic unemployment programs. The GAO puts total UI fraud during COVID somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion. A DOL Inspector General report found $36.9 billion in identified overpayments, with another $81 billion that was never even pursued for collection. Veteran lawmakers have called it “the greatest theft of tax dollars in US history.” Most of it is gone forever. The government has quietly moved on because, according to one expert, of “embarrassment and desire to move on.”
The embarrassment is understandable. The moving on is not.
As for the media? In the 15 hours after DOGE published its findings, Fox News, the New York Post, and Breitbart covered the story. The New York Times, the Associated Press, NBC, CBS, and ABC had published nothing. A 2-year-old defrauded the federal government of a quarter-billion dollars and the paper of record couldn’t find space for it between their Trump-is-Hitler pieces.
One of the big reforms the SBA announced after DOGE exposed similar fraud on their end? Going forward, loan applications will now include “a process to verify applicant age and date of birth.” They didn’t do that before. They were giving out $333 million in business loans to people listed as 115 years old, and no one thought to check if the borrower was alive.
So the next time someone tells you the federal government just needs more funding to function properly — remind them that it took DOGE to notice they were sending unemployment checks to someone whose birthday is 130 years away.
These people are running a $36 trillion tab in your name. Maybe let the adults handle the checkbook for a while.