Are DOGE's Claims of Social Security Payments to 150-Year-Olds Way Off Base?

Technical Explanations for “150-Year-Olds”

• Many commenters argue this is almost certainly a data/ETL/reporting issue, not evidence of benefits actually being paid to 150‑year‑olds.
• A common hypothesis: a birthdate field uses a sentinel or epoch value (e.g., 0 or a fixed historical date) to represent “unknown/unchecked” rather than real age.
• Others note SSA has formal procedures for people without birth certificates; age can be established via work history, children’s records, or other documents, and the system may use estimated or special-coded dates internally.
• Several point out that at large scale, data is messy: FNU/LNU names, lost or burned records, foreign births, undocumented people, and contradictory dates are normal.
• Some suggest the anomaly could arise in a downstream reporting system (casting error, missing joins, treating text dates as numeric, etc.) rather than in the core SSA database.

Debate Over the “1875 COBOL Epoch” Story

• A widely repeated story claims a COBOL/ISO epoch of May 20, 1875 explains the “150 years” figure.
• Others are skeptical: no clear preexisting documentation of that epoch is produced; COBOL implementations use various epochs, but 1875 as a standard is unproven.
• One commenter cites SSA NUMIDENT documentation suggesting dates are stored as strings (YYYYMMDD / MMDDYYYY), making a 1875 epoch less likely.
• Conclusion in the thread: some legacy system might use 1875 as a sentinel, but this is unverified and possibly internet folklore.

Fraud vs. Anomaly

• Several participants stress that “very old” entries are expected anomalies in such a huge system; they do not imply payments or fraud by themselves.
• Others note that real fraud exists (dead people paid, SSNs misused), but that finding outliers by naive “age > X” queries is not a serious fraud analysis method.

Criticism of DOGE / Musk

• Repeated criticism that DOGE and its leader make confident, public claims without basic verification, treating technical anomalies as political ammunition.
• Some see this as part of a broader strategy to flood media with misinformation and to delegitimize Social Security.
• There is concern about unqualified or junior staff misinterpreting complex legacy systems, and about how they obtained such deep access to sensitive government data.

Broader Context and Concerns

• Commenters emphasize that long‑running national systems are inherently complex, with decades of ad‑hoc decisions and edge cases.
• Several are alarmed that, regardless of the technical details, the episode will harden into a “fact” in certain political circles that Social Security pays 150‑year‑olds, with little incentive for public retractions.