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thank you Mr President, Mr President with me today um are two of my colleagues uh from my Senate Office Mr John Lowry and Mr Jackson buy I’m grateful for their good judgment counsel and advice I am delighted uh Mr President to see uh so many members of Congress and I mean this sincerely so many me members of Congress uh embrace the call for a less wasteful less wasteful federal government for a more efficient federal government we spend a little over $6 trillion a year as Senator Sanders so eloquently pointed out when you spend $6 trillion a year somebody’s getting $6 trillion a year every penny in our budget has a constituency and that constituency U will fight us they will fight us um and I I I recognize that and uh it’s something that as we go about uh downsizing government we uh we have to be mindful of however there is one constituency um that is not going to be able to fight us for in our quest to scrutinize federal spending and I’m referring to dead people and that’s what I want to talk about today I want to talk about dead people and the fact that they’re getting money from the federal government in fiscal year 20 23 alone this is just one year our government sent 1.3 billion not $1.3 million we sent $1.3 billion in checks to dead people those aren’t my numbers those numbers come from The Office of Management and budget that’s just one year not only is the federal government sending checks to dead people those checks are being cashed now I have heard Mr President of dead people voting but uh cashing the checks you you don’t have to be God’s perfect idiot to realize that there’s fraud happening with respect to all this money um here’s how this this problem arises when you die in America your name is sent to the Vital Records Office in your state and at that point the Social Security Administration pays each state to get a an ongoing list of deceased Americans in that state so far so good the Social Security Administration takes this data this list of deceased people and they compile on an ongoing basis a list called the U the death master file the death Master file that’s just a list of everybody updated daily of people in the United States who are deceased why does the Social Security Administration do this well so the SSA Social Security Administration can stop sending uh people who have died checks so far so good there’s just one problem I discovered this about seven years ago the Social Security Administration refuses to share that list with anybody else in the federal government they won’t they won’t share it with any other Federal agency agencies many of which send out checks um the Department of Treasury for example sends out checks SSA won’t share the information with them the uh small business administration sends out a lot of checks the Social Security Administration has a list of all deceased Americans but SSA will not share that information with the SBA I’ll give you some examples uh you remember Mr President when we uh we were in the Corona virus crisis we have an economic meltdown we uh we sent stimulus checks to Americans to try to keep the economy on its feet we paid $1.4 billion to dead people and they cash the checks um the paycheck Protection Program which was a part of our uh our stimulus program paid out $38 million alone to dead people um these were people who were using live people obviously who were using dead people’s Social Security numbers to collect payments uh the covid-19 economic disaster injury disaster Loan Fund another culprit was involved in sending checks to dead people the the the Department of Veterans Affairs and I’m not blaming them in many respects it’s not their fault uh um a couple of years ago a scam artist stole the social security number of a deceased person deceased veteran and received about $825,000 in checks uh from 1997 to 2024 now the the uh the person committing this fraud was just quietly accepting the checks somehow the Department of Veterans Affairs and for some reason stopped sending that person the checks so the fraudster just picked up the phone and and called the Department of Veterans Affairs he impersonated the dead person and convinced them to start sending the checks again again not necessarily the faults of the Department of Veterans Affairs uh the VA didn’t know that the uh the the social security number belonged to a deceased person um a another example a a a person in Ohio was able to collect her deceased mother’s Veterans Affairs benefits for 48 years 48 years before she was called we don’t the truth is Mr President it it’s sort of like it’s sort of like saying being asked um you didn’t go you didn’t go fishing on Saturday how many fish to you think you didn’t catch we don’t know how much money we’re sending out every year uh to to to dead people um let me give you an example of of how screwed up the data is Mr President this is a strong indicator of what’s wrong the Social Security Administration if you ask them will tell you that there are according to their records there are 6.5 million Americans living today in America who are 112 years of age or older they say there’s 6.5 million Americans who are at least 112 years old or older now I don’t know about you Mr President but I don’t know anybody who’s 112 years old and I checked at any given time there are about 40 people on an ongoing basis in the world who are fortunate enough to live to be 112 but according the data is so screwed up that according to SSA 6 and half million people are 112 years old um a number of years ago s years ago uh I started working with Senator Tom Carper a fine American if if there ever was one I started working with Tom on this issue I went to Social Security and I said look this problem is is easily solved just share the death Master file with other agencies and especially share it with the Department of Treasury I don’t want to confuse anyone but the Department of Treasury has a do not pay Li of people who aren’t supposed to receive checks for a variety of reasons the other agencies consult but I said so to my friends at Social Security why don’t you just give the the death Master file to other agencies they said we can’t it’s illegal the way we conr construe our enabling statutes uh we don’t have the authority well I I said okay I’m not not going to argue with them um we’ll just go pass a law it was harder than I thought but um we did in 2020 Senator carpent and I passed the bill the bill was called stopping improper payments to deceased people act and it gave the Social Security Administration permission and indeed directed The Social Security Administration uh to to start sharing its list of dead people with other agencies in the federal government I don’t want to get down in the weeds but believe it or not we had people oppos legislation and and many people within the federal government so in order to get our bill pass we had to compromise we had to agree to only implement this requirement that Social Security share the list of dead people with everybody else we we could only get them to agree to do it for three years for a trial Pro in a trial program uh this clock started ticking on our three-year period in December of 2023 so obviously uh three years is Right upon us and if we don’t make this program permanent um it’s going to expire in 20 2026 so s Mr Carper and I have introduced another bill um it it uh does basically the same thing as the 2020 bill but it makes the program per permanent this new bill is called uh ending improper Pavements to De to deceased people act and we need to pass it it uh there’s been a lot of squabbling back and forth I don’t want to do anything to step on too many toes to jeopardize my bill but about how much the states are going to be paid and who’s going to pay social security for sharing their their dead persons list with the rest of the government um I think we have a lot of it worked out but we need to go past this bill I mean this makes no sense whatsoever I can understand if we talk about uh changing the Medicaid Program for example what’s fair what’s unfair I can understand debating that and I can understand reasonable people disagreeing over what changes if any we ought to make to the Medicaid Program I get it I just listened to Senator Sanders once again speak very eloquently about the waste at the Department of Defense that’s something that reasonable people all of whom agree that we ought to have a strong defense but reasonable PE people people can disagree over uh o o over how to achieve that but my God you you don’t you don’t have to be uid to figure out that this is just fraud it’s abuse it’s loow hanging fruit and it’s so easily soloft all we have to do is direct the Social Security Administration on a permanent basis not a three-year trial Rec uh uh three-year trial basis on a permanent basis to start sharing the list of dead people with the Department of Treasury and everybody else in federal government who wants it and then everybody’s on the same page and we know who’s deceased and we can stop sending the money to dead people who cash the checks now I’m talking about this now Mr President I’ve talked about it uh before on the floor I’m not going to try to pass this this the bill this year I’m not uh we’re running up against the clock and we have the ndaa we have a CR to pass and we’ve got to keep government open we’ve got to renew the flood insurance program and you know all that Mr President but I’m going to be back I’m like the Terminator I will be back as soon as a new Congress is sworn in uh it my many of my colleagues have said to me you know it’s time we stop talking about he who needs to pay more in taxes and start talking about and asking the question with respect to what the hell happened to the money and I agree with them I can’t think of an easier place to start let’s just pass the simple Bill let’s stop sending money to dead people again we can debate about the wisdom of dead people voting we all know what happens but cashing checks that’s a bridge too far thank you Mr President for your time and attention I suggest the absence of a corn CL call the rooll this B…