Nadia Raymond

Well, all the deaths recorded since the dawn of Social Security.

It has millions and millions of names.

People get added to it when they die, their name and their date of death.

If you get accidentally added to it when you are not dead, it can mess up your Social Security payments, sure, but also your bank accounts, all kinds of things.

So Jeremiah and everyone treated this one with extreme care.

And one day, Jeremiah says, he was summoned to a meeting.

And the first thing he sees when he enters the meeting room, handwritten on all these whiteboards, are the names of all these databases, including the Death Master file.

The whole meeting was kind of strange, actually.

Jeremiah was a boss.

At this point, he had been there 25 years, his first proper adult job.

So he'd been to a lot of meetings, but none like this.

It was not put on the official calendar, and the whole thing was very secretive.

It was in a half-used office building.

There was a guard in the hallway, almost like a bouncer.

And in the room, three people with non-government laptops.

This was February of last year, and these guys, they worked for DOGE, so-called Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk.

In the meeting, Jeremiah makes some proposals, some ways Social Security can be more efficient, better IT to update these lists quicker.

But he's almost instantly interrupted by one of the DOGE guys, Antonio Gracias, a venture capitalist, now Team Elon.

What did you say?

Around this time, Elon Musk announced on X that they might have found some fraud.