Elon Musk suggested Wednesday that a number of federal employees who did not respond to an email requesting a summary of their achievements from the previous week could be “dead” or “not real people,” but offered no facts to back it up.
“We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond, and — and some people who are not real people,” Musk said.
President Trump echoed Musk’s claims moments later to reporters ahead of a cabinet meeting.
“Maybe we’re paying people that don’t exist,” he said.
There is no evidence that the federal payroll includes scores of dead or non-existent people. The White House declined to provide evidence for the claim to CBS News.
Federal laws mandate audits and verification processes to maintain accurate employment records, and the lower rate of response to the email is no doubt due to multiple agencies instructing staff to not reply.
At least half of all federal employees have not responded to the email, which was sent by the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday and came with a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Monday. The heads of numerous agencies, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told employees to ignore the email.
The personnel office allowed agencies to decide how they wanted to handle the email, despite Musk warning that those who did not respond would lose their jobs.
CBS News has not received responses for requests for information about Musk’s claims from the Office of Personnel Management or the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.
How the federal government keeps track of its workers
Federal employees must verify their identity and employment authorization by filling out an I-9 before being hired and often have their fingerprints taken. Federal law requires that agencies keep “complete and accurate records” of the hours their employees work and establish work schedules.
While there are occasional instances of fraud, the Government Accountability Office found in 2020 that cases are rare. Between fiscal years 2015 to 2019, agency inspectors general substantiated only 100 allegations of employee time and attendance misconduct or fraud out of a federal workforce of around 2.1 million employees (the GAO report did not include postal workers). The report did not mention any instances of dead or fictitious employees getting paid.
The report noted several checks and balances in place to prevent and detect fraud, including the use of timesheets, badge in-out data, video surveillance, network login information and government-issued routers, GAOs report said.
Pattern of false claims about dead people
Previously, Musk and Mr. Trump had falsely claimed that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old were collecting Social Security payments.
But acting Social Security Administration commissioner Lee Dudek said people who are listed as over 100 years old in the Social Security system are “not necessarily receiving benefits.” Instead, those individuals “are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record,” Dudek said.
Unless you qualify for survivor benefits, collecting Social Security payments for a deceased person is illegal. While there have been documented instances of payments to deceased beneficiaries, they do not occur near the scale the Trump administration suggested.
In total, improper payments at the agency — including all accidental overpayments and underpayments — accounted for just under 1% of the $8.6 trillion in total payments from 2015 to 2022, according to a 2024 audit.
Mr. Trump also has a long history of making false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election by people who cast ballots in the name of dead people — claims which have been repeatedly debunked.
