The Social Security Administration announced Tuesday a massive overhaul to its records system, correcting death and citizenship information for nearly 15% of all active Social Security numbers.
The data cleanup — which stems from claims that millions of long-dead Americans and noncitizens may have been receiving benefit checks from the government — added 17 million missing death dates as part of an effort to modernize the agency’s antiquated bookkeeping system.
“This work represents the most comprehensive SSN record clean‑up in the agency’s 91-year history,” said a news release announcing the cleanup.
Elon Musk and President Donald Trump asserted in February 2025 that millions of people in the government’s databases were improperly getting Social Security checks — claims that were debunked when Trump’s own acting commissioner, Lee Dudek, clarified that those individuals were simply listed in historical databases without a death date and did not necessarily receive benefits.
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The president has since dropped the talking point, but the data-cleaning campaign endured behind the scenes.
SSA officials did not state Tuesday whether the corrective measures stopped or reversed any improper payments, nor did they specify how much money — if any — these changes have saved the government.
The changes are also connected to the administration’s fight to combat noncitizen participation in elections, which is an extremely rare occurrence. The agency said it updated 25 million records lacking citizenship details and will correct another 8.5 million records with “inaccurate citizenship status.”
Those data corrections come from the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. The administration recently expanded that program to incorporate SSA records to allow federal and state officials to facilitate citizenship checks before the midterms.
It is unclear whether election officials will be able to access the updated voter data just weeks ahead of the midterms, though SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, who was appointed in May 2025, said the records will improve fraud prevention.
“Accurate SSN records prevent fraud across federal programs and support the proper administration of benefits,” Bisignano said in Tuesday’s announcement.
In June 2025, DOGE team members copied a massive Social Security database containing the personal information of nearly every American citizen to an unapproved, third-party Cloudflare server operated entirely “outside SSA’s security protocols,” according to court records.
The staffers later agreed to share voter data from that repository with a political advocacy group in an attempt to match SSA records against state voter rolls.
In a federal court filing, the SSA admitted it “doesn’t know what information was shared or if it still exists on the server.” The Justice Department chose not to pursue a criminal investigation into the unnamed DOGE appointees.
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