Do you remember when o Elon Musk and President Donald Trump they said that tens of millions of dead people were receiving benefits from it Social Security Administration?

It was clear from the start that this claim, which implied that the Social Security Administration could save hundreds of billions dollars per annum merely by removing the deceased from her registers, was false.

As he had already detailed the Office of the Inspector General of the Servicein a series of reports over the past decade, tens of millions of centenarians were not recorded as dead in the record that includes everyone who has received a Social Security number, largely because they died before today’s automated death registration system was installed. However, the number of people over 100 actually receiving benefits was, by 2020, perfectly reasonable: about 44,000, about half of those estimated to be then living in the US at that age.

Lee Dudeka mid-level Service employee who was promoted to interim commander from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, acknowledged as much in March. Still, he also said the agency was making “significant progress in locating and correcting beneficiary records that are 100 years old or older,” raising hopes that the “death spiral” could still have a noticeable effect on Social Security’s rolls.

However, a small survey found that the number of retirees receiving Social Security benefits who are 99 or older increased by 2,745 from mid-2024 to mid-2025the largest such level increase in the last five years. Even more notable, the total number of beneficiaries of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program – which includes mainly retired workers, but also their spouses, dependents and survivors – increased by 1.7 million from January to August, more than in all of 2024.

This year’s sudden acceleration in the growth of beneficiaries becomes even more impressive if we look at it in percentage changes. The decline after March 2020 was due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which over the past five years or so has killed 848,503 Americans age 62 and older, the age group eligible to claim Social Security retirement benefits. This shows how large an effect removing hundreds of thousands of people from the Service’s rolls is having.

A study published this year by four economists showed that premature deaths due to the pandemic saved Social Security $156 billion.

This year’s increase in beneficiaries is not due to a sudden drop in mortality, but to a 12% increase in new Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) benefit awards. Average benefits paid have also increased by 4.5%, and the resulting increase in overall Social Security spending is one of the main reasons that federal spending has risen nearly 9% since Trump took office, despite the cancellation of grants and programs, layoffs and a government shutdown.

Far from having “discovered and fixed massive waste” at Social Security, Musk has left behind, and Trump continues to oversee, massive spending increases.

This is ironic. And it would be even more ironic if this year’s increase in Social Security claims was due to Musk and Trump themselves, and there is indeed a theory to support this. However, looking at the numbers, the estimate is that the bipartisan legislation signed by President Joe Biden on January 5and which has been widely criticized by retirement experts as “disastrous,” has played a much larger role in increasing claims for benefits.

The theory pinning the blame on Trump and Musk posits that the chaos caused by Musk’s temporary takeover of Social Security, combined with more general concern about the program’s future, has led many Americans to rush to apply for retirement benefits this year, before they run out.

There is some evidence to support that theory: In an AARP poll in June, 12 percent of respondents age 50 and older said they had “considered or decided to claim” their benefits earlier than planned in the past year, citing concerns about Social Security’s sustainability and customer service problems caused by the Musk’s involvement.

“Earlier than planned” is hard to capture in Social Security statistics. However, we can look at the number and percentage of people applying for pension benefits at ages 62, 63 and 64. There does indeed seem to be an increase, but:

The increase so far is very small, and the tipping point, after years of decline, looks set to come in 2023 or 2024, not this year.

The fact that more people are applying for Social Security in their early 60s does not have a negative long-term effect on the program’s finances because benefits are reduced depending on how early one starts receiving them (up to age 70).

However, these reduced benefits can be a problem for early beneficiaries themselves, especially since in the past they tend to be lower-income earners who are forced into early retirement because they cannot find work or because their work has become too physically demanding.

Recent increases in applications for Social Security benefits by 62-year-olds have been sharpest among high-income earners, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration (SSA) last April. (This analysis was later removed from the organization’s website, but has survived via the Wayback Machine.)

This trend is difficult to explain, although the numbers are so small that it may not need much analysis.

According to the same April analysis, the biggest percentage increases in new applications for Social Security benefits were among people age 71 and older with low Social Security contributions.

This is where the new law signed by Biden, with the Orwellian name of the Social Security Fairness Act, comes into play.

For a full breakdown of what exactly is “wrong” with this law, the columnist refers to an article by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute. In short, the new law repeals previous laws that aimed to equalize the total amount of pension benefits between two categories of people:

Those who worked primarily in state or local jobs not covered by Social Security but also had some years of Social Security contributions, and those who only had years of work covered by Social Security.

Now, a few million former state and local employees – and their spouses or widows – will receive larger pensions than people with identical incomes who worked entirely in Social Security-covered jobs.

The result? The increase in these benefits is the main reason that the administrators of the Social Security Funds (OASI and DI) announced this year that the date of depletion of reserves (and therefore the reduction of pensions) has been moved from 2035 to 2034.

Congratulations to all!

Most recipients of this “benefit” were already receiving Social Security and now just get larger monthly payments. Since the law was retroactive to 2024, many also received a one-time retroactive payment, which, as Bloomberg Opinion colleague Jonathan Levin noted in May, contributed significantly to the resilience of the U.S. economy during what could otherwise have been a difficult spring.

However, there were also Fairness Act beneficiaries who now for the first time had reason to apply for Social Security, primarily spouses and widows of former state and local employees.

As of mid-April, the Social Security Administration reported (in the document found on the Wayback Machine) that it had processed 156,528 new applications related to the Social Security Fairness Act.

The post-August data update has yet to be answered (federal government shutdown, after all), but assuming applications continued at a gradually declining pace through the end of August, the estimate comes to nearly 325,000 new applications, or about three-quarters of the total increase in new Old-Age and Survivors Insurance benefits from January to in August, compared to the same period last year.

The latest figures for pension applications through September show that from May onwards new applications have fallen to levels similar to those of 2022 and 2023.

This year’s trend in new claims seems consistent with the scenario that many claimants rushed to claim the newly available benefits as soon as they became legal in early January, with the effect waning over time.

It’s also consistent with the hypothesis that Frank Bisignano’s inauguration as Social Security administrator on May 7 and Musk’s departure from Washington on May 28 created a period of relative calm at the agency, leaving Americans less worried about their pensions.

Both scenarios can be true at the same time, but the first, the sudden rush to the new benefits, clearly has more data to support it.