A Trump administration whistleblower says officials plotted to declare 2.7 million living individuals dead to push immigrants out of the country.
The scheme would have used the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) “Death Master File,” a database that flags the deceased, to wipe people off the financial grid, cutting off their pay, bank accounts, credit and benefits, the Washington Post reports.
Tech broligarch Elon Musk, who spearheaded the Trump administration’s controversial cost-cutting DOGE initiative last year, had pushed to bend the agency’s records to President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda, the newspaper notes. The SSA had separately marked 6,100 immigrants as dead last year in an earlier, smaller push.
Jeremiah Schofield, a career official at the SSA who helped run the agency’s IT modernization before leaving in October, said the plans crystallized on a single conference call last year.
A DOGE official, he said, laid out the goal bluntly: pile on enough hardship that immigrants either fled the country or walked into a field office for help and got arrested.
Schofield described it as “one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” and has now detailed the plan in a 49-page disclosure to the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, reviewed by the Post.
The Department of Homeland Security allegedly handed the list of 2.7 million names over to SSA in late April 2025. Schofield pulled a sample of 25 to check it and found many were, in fact, alive. The group turned up U.S. citizens, green card holders, teens, and elderly people, including a widow receiving survivor benefits.
He said he could not confirm the alleged links to crime or terrorism that the DHS had cited in its materials.
The agency’s own attorneys had cautioned that wrongly listing the living as deceased risked breaking federal law. Schofield said he declined to take part. The SSA says the plan was never executed. A spokesperson said the agency “did not add a list of 2.7 million names to the Death Master File.”
Three DOGE members—Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling—turned up at the agency’s Maryland headquarters that February and called themselves volunteers, Schofield said. Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Gracias, told the Post that his client knew nothing of the proposal to declare 2.7 million people deceased. Koval and Rehling did not reply to the Post.
The effort traced to two April 2025 memos from then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to then-acting commissioner Leland Dudek. Dudek told the Post he had heard the legal warnings and rebranded the file by trading the label “death” for “ineligible”—“death is a state of ineligibility,” he reasoned.
The disclosure has infuriated Senate Democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called it “an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security,” and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the episode showed an administration intent on making people suffer, immigrants most of all. Both have now sent letters to the SSA and to the trio of ex-DOGE officials.
A DHS spokeswoman did not address the plan but defended sharing data between agencies. White House spokeswoman Liz Huston sidestepped the questions, instead promoting a Trump tax break for seniors.
“President Trump will always protect and strengthen Social Security,” Huston told the Daily Beast. “President Trump proudly delivered No Tax on Social Security for nearly every senior in America despite every single Democrat in Congress voting against it.”
The administration acknowledged in court papers last month that it had revoked DOGE’s data access at the start of the year and would not be reinstating it.
The Daily Beast contacted the DHS and the SSA for comment.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the government is finally doing what it should have all along—sharing information across the federal government to solve problems,” a DHS spokesman said. “Biden not only allowed millions of illegal aliens to flood into our country, but he lost them through incompetence and improper processing.
“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.”
The SSA did not immediately respond.
