DOGE trumpets unemployment fraud that the government already found years ago

NEW YORK (AP) — The latest government waste touted by billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency is hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims it purportedly uncovered.

One problem: Federal investigators already found what appears to be the same fraud, years earlier and on a far greater scale.

In a post last week on X, the social media site Musk owns, DOGE announced “an initial survey of unemployment insurance claims since 2020” found 24,500 people over the age of 115 had claimed $59 million in benefits; 28,000 people between the ages of 1 and 5 collected $254 million; and 9,700 people with birthdates more than 15 years in the future garnered $69 million from the government.

The tweet drew a predictable party-line reaction of either skepticism or cheers, including from Musk himself, who said what his team found was “so crazy” he re-read it several times before it sank in.

“Another incredible discovery,” marveled Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who repeated DOGE’s findings to President Donald Trump in a Cabinet meeting last week.

Chavez-DeRemer’s recounting of the alleged fraud, including claims of benefits filed by unborn children, drew laughter in the Cabinet room and a reaction from Trump himself.

“Those numbers are really bad,” he said.

But Chavez-DeRemer needn't look further than her own department’s Office of the Inspector General to find such fraud had already been reported by the type of federal workers DOGE has demonized.

“They’re trying to spin this narrative of, ‘Oh, government is inefficient and government is stupid and they’re catching these things that the government didn’t catch,’” says Michele Evermore, who worked on unemployment issues at the U.S. Department of Labor during the administration of former President Joe Biden. “They’re finding fraud that was marked as fraud and saying they found out it was fraud.”

The Social Security Act of 1935 enshrined unemployment benefits in federal law but left it to individual states to set up systems to collect unemployment taxes, process applications and mete out support.

Though states have almost complete control over their own unemployment systems, special relief programs — most notably widely expanded benefits enacted by the first Trump administration at the outset of the COVID pandemic — inject more direct federal involvement and a flood of new beneficiaries into the system.

In regular times, state unemployment systems perform “very well, not so well and terribly,” according to Stephen Wandner, an economist at the National Academy of Social Insurance who authored the book “Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System.” With COVID slamming the economy and creating a flood of new claims that states couldn’t handle, Wandner says many more were “quite terrible.”

Trump signed the COVID unemployment relief into law on March 27, 2020, and from the very start it became a magnet for fraud. In a memo to state officials about two weeks later, the Department of Labor warned that the expanded benefits had made unemployment programs “a target for fraud with significant numbers of imposter claims being filed with stolen or synthetic identities.”

That same memo offered an option for states trying to protect a person whose identity was stolen to fraudulently collect unemployment benefits. To preserve a record of the fraud but keep innocent people from being linked to it, states could create a “pseudo claim,” the memo advises.

Those “pseudo claims” led to records of toddlers and centenarians getting checks. The Labor Department's inspector general tallied some 4,895 unemployment claims from people over the age of 100 between March 2020 and April 2022, but another departmental memo explained that the filings stemmed from states changing dates of birth to protect people whose identities were used.

“Many of the claims identified ... were not payments to individuals over 100 years of age, but rather ‘pseudo records’ of previously identified fraudulent claims,” the 2023 memo says.

A Labor Department spokeswoman did not respond to questions about Musk's findings and DOGE gave no details on how it came to find the supposed fraud or whether it duplicates what was already found.

Though DOGE ostensibly looked at longer timeframe than federal investigators previously had, it tallied just $382 million in fake unemployment claims, a tiny fraction of what investigators were already aware.

In 2022, the Labor Department said suspected COVID-era unemployment fraud totaled more than $45 billion. The Government Accountability Office later said it was far worse, likely $100 billion to $135 billion.

“I don't think it's news to anyone,” says Amy Traub, an expert on unemployment at the National Employment Law Project. “It's been widely reported. There've been multiple congressional hearings.”

If DOGE's newest allegations have an air of familiarity, it's because they echo its prior findings of about Social Security payments to the dead and the unbelievably old. Those were false claims.

That makes DOGE an imperfect messenger even when fraud has occurred, as with unemployment claims.

Jessica Reidl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, is a fiscal conservative who so champions rooting out federal waste she has written 600 articles on the subject. Though she believes unemployment insurance fraud is rife, she has trouble accepting any findings from DOGE, which she says has acted ineffectively and possibly illegally.

“When DOGE says impossibly old dead people are collecting unemployment in huge numbers, I become skeptical,” Reidl says. “DOGE does not have a good track record in that area.”

Traub said the burst of pandemic-era unemployment fraud led states to implement new security measures. She questioned why Musk’s team was trumpeting old fraud as if it’s new.

“Business leaders and economists are warning about a national recession, so it’s natural to think about unemployment,” says Traub. “It’s an attack on the image of a critically important program and perhaps an attempt to undermine public support on unemployment insurance when it couldn’t be more important.”

Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky.

FILE - Elon Musk speaks during an event with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department does not believe there is currently any basis to open a criminal civil rights investigation into the killing of a woman by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis, a top department official said Tuesday.

The decision to keep the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division out of the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Good marks a sharp departure from past administrations, which have moved quickly to probe shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials for potential civil rights offenses.

While an FBI probe is ongoing, lawyers in the Civil Rights Division were informed last week that they would not play a role in the investigation at this time, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department deliberations.

And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation.” The statement, first reported by CNN, did not elaborate on how the department had reached a conclusion that no investigation was warranted.

Federal officials have said that the officer acted in self-defense and that the driver of the Honda was engaging in “an act of domestic terrorism” when she pulled forward toward him.

The quick pronouncement by administration officials before any meaningful investigation could be completed has raised concerns about the federal government’s determination to conduct a thorough review of the chain of events precipitating the shooting. Minnesota officials have also raised alarm after federal officials blocked state investigators from accessing evidence and declared that Minnesota has no jurisdiction to investigate the killing.

Also this week, roughly half a dozen federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned and several supervisors in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in Washington gave notice of their departures amid turmoil over the federal probe, according to people familiar with the matter.

Among the departures in Minnesota is First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who had been leading the sprawling investigation and prosecution of fraud schemes in the state, two other people said. At least four other prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. attorney's office joined Thompson in resigning amid a period of tension in the office, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

They are the latest in an exodus of career Justice Department attorneys who have resigned or been forced out over concerns over political pressure or shifting priorities under the Trump administration. Hundreds of Justice Department lawyers have been fired or have left voluntarily over the last year.

Minnesota Democratic lawmakers criticized the departures, with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling the resignations “a loss for our state and for public safety” and warning that prosecutions should not be driven by politics. Gov. Tim Walz said the departures raised concerns about political pressure on career Justice Department officials.

The resignations of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division's criminal section, including its chief, were announced to staff on Monday, days after lawyers were told the section would not be involved in the probe. The Justice Department on Tuesday said those prosecutors had requested to participate in an early retirement program “well before the events in Minnesota,” and added that “any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

Founded nearly 70 years ago, the Civil Rights Division has a long history of investigating shootings by law enforcement even though prosecutors typically need to clear a high bar to mount a criminal prosecution.

In prior administrations, the division has moved quickly to open and publicly announce such investigations, not only to reflect federal jurisdiction over potential civil rights violations but also in hopes of soothing community angst that sometimes accompanies shootings involving law enforcement.

“The level of grief, tension and anxiety on the ground in Minnesota is not surprising,” said Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under the Biden administration. “And historically the federal government has played an important role by being a neutral and impartial agency committing its resources to conducting a full and fair investigation, and the public loses out when that doesn’t happen,” she said.

In Minneapolis, for instance, the Justice Department during the first Trump administration opened a civil rights investigation into the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of city police officers that resulted in criminal charges. The Minneapolis Police Department was separately scrutinized by the Biden administration for potential systemic civil rights violations through what’s known as a “pattern or practice” investigation, a type of police reform inquiry that is out of favor in the current Trump administration Justice Department.

Protesters demonstrate against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer last week, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Jen Golbeck)