Donald Trump told many lies in his address to Congress last night, but the one I found especially galling was when he repeated the absurd claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. My anger probably is part due to the fact that I spent many years studying and defending the program. Part of the story is that I look to soon be getting benefits from the program myself.

But a big part of the story is that it is just such an obvious lie. It is infuriating to see Trump keep repeating it and then have all his MAGA cronies nod their heads like it somehow makes sense.

There have been extensive analyses of the problem of people continuing to get checks after they are dead by the Social Security Administration (SSA) itself. It does happen occasionally, largely because families often don’t contact the SSA immediately after a person has died. But in almost all cases, the checks are stopped a month or two after death and most of the money paid out is returned.

The biggest obstacle to ensuring that payments don’t go to dead people is that we don’t have a centralized national death registry. The reason we don’t have such a system is that Republicans would block it as an intrusion of the deep state. So, in keeping with that great Republican tradition, they blame the government for a problem they themselves created.

But we don’t need to trust the work done by the SSA or outside investigators to know that millions of dead people are not getting Social Security. As I showed a few weeks back, we just need to trust arithmetic.

Mr. Arithmetic Shows Donald Trump is Lying

The basis point is very simple. The SSA gives us very good data on the number of people getting benefits by age, as well as their average benefit. We can add that up (even the “super high IQ” DOGE boys should be able to do this) and calculate how much Social Security is paying out to people who are alive, or at least who are at ages where we expect them to be alive.

When we add up the numbers, we find that the payments we can identify as going to living people come out to be pretty much exactly the amount of spending in the budget reported for Social Security. In other words, there is no room for the checks that are supposedly going to millions of dead people.

Let me try to explain this point so that even Donald Trump might be able to understand. The SSA can identify real living people getting Social Security benefits. They also know how much money they get in benefits.

We can check the SSA data against other sources. The Census gives us good data on how many people are in each group. For example, we can use the Census data to see how many people in the country are between ages 70 to 74 or  75 to 79. We can see that these data pretty much align with how many people SSA tells us are getting benefits in these age groups.

We also know roughly how much these people should be getting in benefits. Social Security has a well-defined benefit formula, so we know roughly what we would expect an average 75-year-old or 80-year-old to be getting in benefits. There are also surveys that tell us how much people report getting in Social Security benefits each year. We could see if SSA was putting out obviously bogus numbers for the average benefit size.

This means that we can be fairly confident that the SSA numbers on the total number of living people getting benefits are close to the mark. We also can be fairly confident that the number they are reporting for the amount of benefits they are getting is close to the mark.

Since this total is equal to the amount of money that the government reports it pays out for Social Security each year, there is no room for the benefits going to Donald Trump’s millions of dead people. And just to be clear, there is no room for a hidden pool of money being paid to dead people.

If there were hundreds of billions of dollars of unreported payments, they wouldn’t be in the budget by definition – they are unreported. So, Elon Musk, the DOGE boys, and Donald Trump would not be finding fraud in the budget.

They would then be claiming that the government is making hundreds of billions in payments that no one knows about, and the deficit is far larger than anyone realized. Maybe this somehow makes sense in Trump World, but it is getting outside the bounds even allowed for the Twilight Zone.

Repeating the Social Security Zombie Lie

Given its obvious absurdity, the repetition of the lie about Social Security zombies has the same function as asserting the 2020 election was stolen or that Ukraine started the war with Russia. It’s Trump asserting the right to create his own reality in obvious defiance of the facts.

It speaks volumes about the Republican Party that almost all of them are willing to go along with this obvious lie. Unfortunately, the media have largely given in at this point. The fact that Trump would tell an outlandish lie about the country’s most important social program, on which tens of millions of people depend for their livelihood, is barely even news.