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The Treasury Department announced Tuesday morning that it has successfully implemented new safeguards to prevent government payments to dead people in an effort to reduce waste and fraud.
The verification system includes screening 885 million federal payments against expanded death records, effectively auditing payments totaling nearly $2.7 trillion. It has already flagged and stopped payments totaling roughly $99 million that had been marked to be sent to dead people.
“Treasury has delivered on a key promise of President Trump’s mandate to stop improper payments and fraud before money leaves the Treasury, and strengthen the integrity of the federal payment system,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Together with Vice President Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, this new safeguard addresses a longstanding vulnerability and helps ensure every dollar the federal government spends reaches its intended recipient. Treasury will continue efforts to modernize the federal payment system, strengthen safeguards against fraud and improper payments, and protect taxpayer dollars.”
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The move tallies a victory for President Donald Trump’s March 2025 Executive Order 14249, “Protecting America’s Bank Account Against Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.”
More than 4,900 payments linked to deceased payees were returned to the federal agencies that initiated them for further review.
The effort relies in part on Treasury’s expanded access to the Social Security Administration’s Full Death Master File, which contains death information used to identify potentially ineligible recipients before payments are issued.
Congress initially gave Treasury temporary access to the database under a three-year pilot program authorized by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. Treasury projected the program would produce about $330 million in net benefits from 2024 through 2026 by reducing improper payments.
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Access was made permanent in February 2026, when Congress passed and Trump signed the Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act. introduced by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
Treasury said it will continue expanding the verification system across the federal government as part of a broader effort to prevent questionable payments before taxpayer money leaves federal accounts.
Elon Musk, when he started the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE in the first month of the second Trump administration, famously called out the more than 20 million listed on Social Security with ages 100 and higher, including more than 3.9 million in the 130-139 age range, more than 3.5 million in the 140-149 range and more than 1.3 million in the 150-159 range.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk joked on X in February 2025.
The Vance-led effort to root out government waste, fraud and abuse will have more developments to report Tuesday as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz will join leaders from the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force and the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) for an 11 a.m. news conference on new federal actions to protect taxpayer dollars.
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