Stephen Miller Crashes Out Trying to Defend DOGE

SSA has other means of combatting this issue. Since 2015, the SSA has had a policy of automatically terminating entitlement to beneficiaries who are “age 115, or older,” “in any current continuous suspense for seven years or more” or “entitled on a record where there are no other beneficiaries in a non-terminated status younger than the age of 115.”

Experts have suggested another possible explanation for the wide-ranging ages of beneficiaries is a quirk of COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language, which might use May 20, 1875, as a reference point in its coding. A COBOL system might indicate that anyone with a missing birthdate in the SSA’s database was 150 years old, which could explain Musk’s assertion about the droves of centenarians receiving social security benefits, according to Wired.

All of these holes render Leavitt’s desperate attempts to back up Musk’s outrageous claims all the more ridiculous.