Social Security Says It Corrected 42 Million Records in Largest Database Overhaul in Agency's History

The Social Security Administration said Tuesday that it had corrected records for nearly 15 percent of all active Social Security numbers, a data-matching effort the agency called the most comprehensive overhaul of its recordkeeping system in its 91-year history. The announcement, which the agency framed as an anti-fraud measure, lands in the middle of an unresolved legal fight over whether the government can lawfully use Social Security records to check citizenship for election purposes.

Commissioner Frank Bisignano said the agency added roughly 17 million dates of death to records that had lacked them and updated about 25 million records that were missing citizenship information, cross-checking them against the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, known as SAVE. Taken together, the agency said, the corrections touch data tied to roughly 330 million U.S. citizens among nearly 390 million records in its master file, a figure first reported by The Epoch Times. SSA said it is still working through another 8.5 million records it has identified as carrying inaccurate citizenship status.

A records system built for 1936, pressed into a new role

"The Social Security Number database is our country's books and records," Bisignano said in describing the project, adding that its accuracy is "essential" to preventing fraud across federal benefit programs. Bisignano, who also serves as acting IRS commissioner, told reporters that some entries in the database had listed numberholders as 150 or 160 years old, a legacy of decades of incomplete death reporting that predates the current administration.

The cleanup did not begin in a vacuum. It follows more than a year of work by the Department of Government Efficiency and SSA staff to reconcile the agency's Numident master file, a database that traces back to the creation of the Social Security program in 1936 and that has long been flagged by the agency's own inspector general for containing millions of incomplete or outdated entries. An earlier phase of that effort, in 2025, flagged millions of numberholders over age 120 as deceased, a step the agency said was necessary given that no person verified by Social Security has lived past 120. The current round goes further, pairing death-record cleanup with a parallel citizenship-data project required by Executive Order 14399, which President Trump signed March 31 and which directs the SSA commissioner to supply "all necessary citizenship and identity data" so the Department of Homeland Security can compile a "State Citizenship List" for each state's chief election official, a roster meant to help states verify voter eligibility without creating a new centralized voter file of its own.

The legal fight over the data behind the numbers

The same SAVE system that supplied the citizenship data SSA used this month has been the subject of an unresolved court battle for months. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia ruled in a 75-page opinion that the 2025 overhaul of SAVE, which for the first time combined DHS immigration records with Social Security data on a mass scale, violated the Social Security Act's confidentiality provisions, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. She found that the government had "haphazardly" combined and repurposed citizenship data it knew to be unreliable, and pointed to Texas's experience as evidence of the risk: state officials there used the system to flag 2,724 registered voters as "potential noncitizens" and sent letters demanding proof of citizenship, a process that in at least some documented cases ensnared people who were, in fact, citizens.

That ruling did not hold. On September 25, the Supreme Court granted the administration's request for an emergency stay, allowing the expanded SAVE system to remain in use by states ahead of the November midterms while the underlying legal challenge continues in lower courts. The unsigned majority order concluded that the challengers' claims "likely lack merit" and rested on a 1996 immigration-law provision that the government says authorizes DHS to request and receive citizenship information from other federal agencies, including SSA. The Solicitor General's filing in that case said the modified system had by then been used to check more than 65 million voter registrations across 26 states and had flagged 28,635 people as potential noncitizens.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting, wrote that the majority had weighed the government's claimed harms without adequately accounting for the harms to lawful voters who could be wrongly flagged by a system built from data the government's own officials have called incomplete.

Three justices, including Jackson, would have denied the stay. DHS general counsel James Percival, by contrast, welcomed the ruling, criticizing the district court's decision and arguing that the administration was addressing problems critics prefer to deny exist. The underlying lawsuit, League of Women Voters v. Department of Homeland Security, remains pending, and a separate challenge to Texas's use of the database is still before a federal court in Austin.

Nearly every American with a Social Security number has some stake in the database's accuracy, since it underlies tax filing, bank verification and the administration of retirement, disability and survivor benefits for tens of millions of people. SSA's own figures suggest the citizenship-data gap was not trivial: roughly a quarter of records in the system previously carried no citizenship indicator at all, according to Senate correspondence reviewing the agency's data-sharing arrangements with DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services. That gap exists in part because citizenship status was never required for a number to function properly for decades after the program's creation, and because SSA has historically relied on other agencies, rather than its own verification process, to supply citizenship information when it has it at all.

The corrections have also drawn renewed attention to a narrower and more contested episode. A former SSA career official, Jeremiah Schofield, has told Congress that DOGE staff took steps to mark more than 6,000 immigrants as dead in agency records and discussed plans to do the same to roughly 2.7 million more people, with the stated goal of pressuring them to leave the country voluntarily or routing them into Social Security field offices where staff would refer them to DHS for possible detention. People wrongly marked dead lose access to banking, employment verification and benefits until the error is fixed, a process that can take weeks even once discovered. SSA has denied that it improperly added 2.7 million names to its Death Master File, and it has not addressed Schofield's specific allegations in public statements tied to this month's announcement.

Reaction on Capitol Hill

Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Bisignano in June demanding an accounting of the whistleblower's claims, along with letters to three former DOGE staffers named in his account. "This looks like an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security to carry out Trump's cruel immigration agenda," Warren said in a joint release with Blumenthal's office. Blumenthal added that "as always with the Trump Administration, cruelty is the point."

Separately, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and a group of Senate Democrats wrote to Bisignano in April urging SSA not to comply with the citizenship-verification provisions of Executive Order 14399, arguing in a letter to the commissioner that the agency's citizenship data is not reliable enough to anchor an election-integrity program and that supplying it to DHS could violate the Privacy Act. A companion letter from Senate Homeland Security Committee Democrats made a similar argument, noting that SSA's own data-sharing agreements acknowledge large gaps in citizenship records. The White House and SSA have defended the broader effort as a long-overdue correction to a database that both parties have, at various points, acknowledged is riddled with errors.

What happens next

SSA says it intends to keep working through the remaining 8.5 million records it has identified as carrying inaccurate citizenship status, without giving a timetable for completion. The litigation over the SAVE overhaul continues in the lower courts even after the Supreme Court's stay, meaning the system's long-term legal status remains unresolved heading into the first midterm elections in which it will be used at full scale. State election officials, several of whom have already used the system to flag thousands of registrations for review, are likely to face continued scrutiny over error rates as Election Day approaches, while the separate dispute over Texas's handling of flagged voters remains before a federal court in Austin. Congressional Democrats have given no indication they intend to drop their inquiry into the whistleblower's allegations, and oversight requests to Bisignano's office on that matter remain outstanding.