Jeremiah Schofield, a former Social Security Administration executive, says the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE team planned to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead in the government’s Death Master File to cut them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services, reports The Washington Post:
Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law.
Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive.
Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.
Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was reviewed by The Washington Post.
The disclosure offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown…
In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.
“That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told The Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
(Source: The Washington Post)