Doge unemployment ‘fraud’ discoveries are old finds from Biden era, experts say

In a series of late-night posts on X last week, Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” revealed the seemingly startling findings of their “initial survey” into unemployment benefits.

They cited examples of claimants who were deceased, between one and five years old, or not born yet. They even cited one case of someone with a listed birthday in 2154 allegedly claiming $41,000.

News of the claims swept across rightwing media, including Fox News and Breitbart, and were attributed to Doge. They were repeated by the secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who declared during a cabinet meeting with Donald Trump that the revelations were the latest to be “exposed by our partners at Doge”.

“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote on X, his social network. “There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”

But there was, in reality, a “sanity check” of unemployment claims years before Doge launched its blitz of the federal government – including under Joe Biden. People previously involved with the process say Doge’s claims are lifted from it.

“They’re coming up like they uncovered something brand-new,” Andrew Stettner, who served as the director of unemployment insurance modernization at the US Department of Labor in the Biden administration, told the Guardian. “Going back in 2020 to say there was a lot of fraud – that’s the definition of old news.”

Though Doge and Musk failed to cite the survey, or the agency it came from, the US Department of Labor’s office of inspector general is tasked with auditing state unemployment benefit systems.

“They got some access to data from the Department of Labor and office of inspector general, and are trying to make conclusions without doing a full audit or understanding the content,” said Stettner.

Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at the economic thinktank Groundwork Collaborative, said: “What you have is the issue of an outside person who doesn’t know anything coming in and claiming that everything’s broken. The public should be really skeptical of Elon Musk’s claims.”

“For the most part, he and his gaggle of 20-year-olds are going to these federal agencies of staff who have been there for five, 10, 15, 20 years working on these programs,” added Pancotti. “For the most part, these programs work as intended.

“And now you have people coming in, spending five minutes looking at them and claiming that there’s widespread fraud, or they’re broken or they could be fixed in these ways.”

Back in 2023, the office of inspector general at the US Department of Labor identified potential fraud involving individuals over 100, or under the age of 14, receiving unemployment benefits.

Some of the claims may not actually have contained the ages of the people filing, Stettner noted, as some states created pseudo identities to protect identity-theft victims.

A 2023 Department of Labor memo found that while one state appeared to be paying benefits to scores of claimants 100 years or older, the state clarified that this was not, in fact, happening. “Rather, this was the result of how the state ensured victims of fraud were not unfairly prevented from accessing benefits,” the memo said.

“This is a risk the department has already known about,” Stettner explained. “It’s already been written about. The department has put in additional cross-checks through our department integrity data analysis to flag these claims.

“The Department of Labor has done a whole fraud-risk analysis recommended by the government accountability office.”

Under the Biden administration, $2bn was allocated to state unemployment systems to improve fraud prevention and detection.

The office of inspector general at the US Department of Labor under the Biden administration had already identified the potential fraud of unemployment insurance from March 2020 to April 2022 in areas such as multi-state claims, deceased persons, federal prisoners, claims from people under the age of 14 or claims from those older than 100, or the use of suspicious emails used in claims.

More than 2,000 convictions were secured following work by the office from April 2020 to January 2025, resulting in recovered funds of $1.1bn.

And while the federal government has spent years investigating suspected fraud, thousands of workers who file for unemployment benefits are wrongly denied each year and are required to appeal, including 286,000 workers in 2024.

“It’s really not new to anyone at this point that there were fraud issues with unemployment insurance during the pandemic,” said Amy Traub, senior researcher on social insurance at the National Employment Law Project. “I think that coming back to it now is a distraction, and it’s a distraction from the fact that unemployment insurance really is not ready for a recession.”

The Department of Labor’s office of inspector general declined to comment on the claims made by Musk and Doge, but cited unemployment benefit fraud data available on its website. The dataset was last updated in December, under the Biden administration.