Trump Regime officials planned to wrongly mark 2.7 million living people as dead, whistleblower claims
The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive.
The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.
Jeremiah 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 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of howofficials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.
Social Security carried out a smaller version of such an effort last year, The Post previously reported, moving 6,100 immigrants into its “Death Master File” — a database used by banks, employers and government agencies to determine whether someone is alive. Some of those people later showed up at Social Security field offices to prove they were alive and were restored in agency records.
Being moved into the Death Master File can be devastating to someone who is still alive because it can cut off their financial access. Last year, career staff warned that falsely giving people death dates could be catastrophic, though the administration overrode those objections.
In the past year, two other whistleblowers have also shared concerns about Americans’ personal information being accessed and shared by DOGE. One whistleblower, former Social Security chief data officer Charles Borges, alleged DOGE members shared data through third-party services and placed Americans’ personal information on a cloud. A second whistleblower anonymously claimed in disclosures to the inspector general that a DOGE member allegedly took a thumb drive of Americans’ data to a private company, which is being investigated by the agency’s watchdog.
When Schofield left Social Security in October, he did not expect to blow the whistle. He said he followed legal requirements to destroy documents in his possession. He had told family and other co-workers about the call when it happened but had otherwise kept quiet as he watched other civil service workers facing retaliation in the Trump administration.
But months later, at a February happy hour, he told another former federal worker he was haunted by what he had seen and how Social Security data had been compromised, and she encouraged him to speak out.
When DOGE officials first arrived at Social Security headquarters in February 2025, Schofield welcomed their help and hoped they would help modernize the agency’s outdated systems, he said in an interview with The Post.
Schofield joined the agency in 2000 as a customer service representative and rose through the ranks to become head of IT modernization and the key person transmitting headquarters policies to field offices. He had witnessed many ways the social service program — serving 75 million beneficiaries, including retirees, people with disabilities, widows and orphans — could be run more efficiently. So he came to his first meeting with DOGE officials with several ideas on how to help them.
But when he met with the DOGE members — Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling — the three identified themselves as volunteers, he said. He noticed they weren’t using the standard-issue laptops provided to Social Security employees. They had whiteboards in their conference room listing the agency’s key databases. They talked as if they had already seen data few others in government could access, he said. He said he worried DOGE was improperly accessing sensitive data.
“Lots of red flags went off,” he said.
Gracias was a longtime confidant of Musk’s and appeared alongside Musk at an event last year where the two made inaccurate claims about Social Security, including that that millions of undocumented immigrants were receiving federal benefits and voting in elections.
Trump Regime officials planned to wrongly mark 2.7 million living people as dead, per whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield.
