Firehose #3

8 Million not 8 Billion

DOGE on Monday Feb 17 published a list of contracts that it cancelled claiming to have saved $16 billion. Half of that was a single contract worth $8 billion for technical support services for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Turns out that that figure was an error in an old government database and that the revised (January 2025) figure was $8 million, of which 2.5 million had been spent. So the amount saved was closer to $5.5 million. DOGE did correct its listing to show $8 million saved but did not subtract the amount already spent and left the total saved at $16 billion. Clearly the DOGE people are not accountants.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-musk-trump.html

 

Dead people on Social Security

Here’s another whopper. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been trumpeting on social media that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving social security payments.

What was found was a large number of people in the Social Security Administration (SSA) database with a social security number but without a date of death, many of them born more than 100 years ago. How is that? One reason is the Cobol programming language used in the database which, if a birthdate is missing or incomplete, defaults to 150 years ago. Another is that deaths of nearly 19 million people prior to 1920 have not been entered so the database does not show them as deceased.

 But that does not mean that these people are still getting benefits. Previous reports from the Social Security’s inspector general found $71.8 billion (less than 1%) in improper payments over the 8 year period 2015-2022. Most of this was overpayments to living, not dead, people. In January of this year the US Treasury clawed back more than $31 million from overpayments from a number of federal agencies, not just SSA.

With adequate funding the SSA could update its database and find and recover more improper payments. But that won’t happen with this regime in power. The Republicans want to cancel Social Security completely.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-social-security-payments-dead-people

 

Poor Journalism or Pure Propaganda?

Stories like these illustrate, at best, poor journalism.  The purveyors of disinformation are too eager to get their story out and don’t take the time to verify the facts. At worst, it is pure propaganda. They don’t care if it’s true or not and even if they knew it was not true they would spread it anyway. Lies work as well as or better than the truth if the recipients don’t know the difference and are unlikely to find out.