In yet more huge news about waste found by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency that he leads, DOGE announced in an explosive post on X (formerly Twitter) that it had not only discovered a whopping $400 million of unemployment insurance fraud, but had found that a number of blue states accounted for around 75% of it.
As background, DOGE has been pouring over federal spending, as most now know, to find waste, fraud, and abuse that can be cut out to save taxpayers money. While infuriating and entertaining examples, such as a plant watering contract, have drawn the most attention, what DOGE is really looking for is waste in America’s massive entitlement and welfare programs that can be cut.
Because those programs, such as Social Security, are so massive in size, even relatively small, on a percentage basis, fraud means huge amounts of money. For example, DOGE has found that foreign fraud gangs have stolen perhaps a trillion dollars from Social Security, but no one noticed because Social Security is such a huge program.
Now, DOGE is also digging into America’s unemployment insurance program, and what it found is predictably massive fraud. Announcing as much on April 9, DOGE described the pilfering of the program it found with a cursory search, noting that impossibly old and young people, including people yet to be born, have stolen benefits.
In that post, DOGE wrote, “An initial survey of Unemployment Insurance claims since 2020 revealed the following: – 24.5k people over 115 years old claimed $59M in benefits – 28k people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254M in benefits – 9.7k people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69M in benefits In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”
Elon Musk, commenting in a quote tweet about the utter absurdity and infuriating nature of what DOGE had found, said, “Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future! This is so crazy that I had to read it several times before it sank in.”
Then, DOGE, following up on its original post with a quote tweet, explained that it had found three major blue states were responsible for the vast majority of the fraud, with California having accounted for more than a supermajority of the improper payments to people on the terror watchlist and with criminal records.
It said, in that post, “California, New York, and Massachusetts accounted for most of these improper claims, totaling $305M in unemployment benefits. Additionally, California accounted for 68% of the unemployment benefits paid to parolees identified by CBP on the terrorist watchlist or with criminal records.”
A commenter on that post noted out that sanctuary cities seem to be involved in the fraud, writing, “So the 3 states with the most notorious sanctuary cities in the nation claimed the most unemployment benefits, fraudulently? I mean there is no way that’s a coincidence, it sure looks like illegal immigrants are collecting taxpayer benefits.”
Similarly, another commenter on the DOGE post noted the political makeup of those states seems relevant, writing, “Are you surprised that California, New York, and Massachusetts are leading the nation in fraudulent activities across various sectors? Who dominates the political landscape in these states?”
Watch the Labor Secretary comment on the matter here:
