Well, the Musk rats are coders. Why don't they just fix the COBOL code?
> From: Noelle <noelle>
> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2025 06:59:28 -0800 (PST)
>
> “We're also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable
> fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors, and that our
> seniors and people that we love rely on. Believe it or not,
> government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from
> people aged 100 to 109 years old. It lists 3.6 million people from
> ages 110 to 119. I don't know any of them. I know some people that
> are rather elderly, but not quite. 3.47 million people from ages 120
> to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139, 3.5 million people
> from ages 140 to 149. …”
>
> This is false. Trump’s riff continued until he got to the end —“one
> person between the age of 240 and 249 and one person listed at 360
> years of age.” His numbers roughly mirrored figures posted on social
> media by billionaire Elon Musk, who is slashing government programs
> with a shock team of assistants that has been dubbed the Department
> of Government Efficiency.
>
> As The Washington Post has reported, this is largely a coding issue.
> The Social Security Administration maintains its databases using
> COBOL, a nearly 70-year-old computer programming language that
> doesn’t have a standardized way to store and work with dates. Often
> a default date is chosen, most commonly May 20, 1875, if no birth
> date is known.
>
> As is often the case with Trump’s claims, there is an existing
> government report that would have cleared up matters.
>
> A 2023 report from the Social Security Administration’s inspector
> general found that virtually every beneficiary who lacked a birth
> date had died. Of the 18.9 million people with Social Security
> numbers born in 1920 or earlier with no record of their deaths, the
> report said “approximately 18.4 million (98 percent) number holders
> are not currently receiving SSA payments and have not had earnings
> reported to SSA in the past 50 years.”