Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer confirmed Thursday that the Department of Government Efficiency uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment insurance payments.
DOGE, which scrutinizes the government for waste and fraud, said Wednesday that it found $382 million in unemployment payments claimed by thousands of people over 115 years old, under six years old, and with birthdates “over 15 years in the future.”
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Chavez-DeRemer praised DOGE for finding the fraudulent claims and recovering “stolen tax dollars.”
“We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud — accountability is here,” she said in a post to X.
The fraudulent payments were found during DOGE’s survey of unemployment insurance claims dating back to 2020.
“24.5k people over 115 years old claimed $59M in benefits,” DOGE said in an update posted to X. “28k people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254M in benefits. “9.7k people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69M in benefits. In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”
In a statement responding to the findings, de facto DOGE leader Elon Musk said there were no checks or systems in place at the Labor Department to keep the fraudulent recipients from collecting the payments.
“There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance,” Musk wrote after previously saying the news was “so crazy that I had to read it several times before it sank in.”
Protests against DOGE, including demonstrations spearheaded by Democratic organizations such as MoveOn and Indivisible, have broken out nationwide as Musk’s team looks to overhaul Washington, D.C.’s bureaucracies.
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Musk and seven DOGE employees defended their actions last month during a Fox News interview, with one staffer alleging that hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud is taking place in government spending annually.
“We’re changing the culture,” Tom Krause said on Bret Baier’s Special Report. “The culture has been not a lot of caring and not a lot of commitment to doing what’s right relative to financial operations. 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.”