The Social Security Administration says it has corrected records tied to nearly 15% of all active Social Security numbers, a cleanup the agency calls the largest in its 91-year history. SSA announced the figures Tuesday, saying the corrections touched roughly 330 million U.S. citizens and nearly 390 million records in total.
Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano described the database as the government’s core record-keeping system. “The Social Security Number database is our country’s books and records. The database’s accuracy is essential to maintaining integrity of government services for citizens,” Bisignano said. “This is the first time SSA has undertaken an effort of this scale.”
According to SSA, the agency added 17 million dates of death to records that had none, pulling from its own internal systems and State Department data. It also updated roughly 25 million records that were missing citizenship information, using the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) service.
Bisignano said another 8.5 million records with inaccurate citizenship status are still under correction. SSA says it has also tightened internal controls to cut down on manual-entry mistakes going forward.
The effort is part of the broader push by the Trump administration to root out fraud in federal benefits programs. Bisignano, who also heads the IRS, has framed the work as reconciling SSA’s Numident master file, telling The Baltimore Sun that some records had listed numberholders as “150 or 160 years old” — entries he said “create vulnerabilities.”
That framing echoes an earlier move by the Department of Government Efficiency, which in March 2025 flagged roughly 3.2 million numberholders aged 120 and older as deceased.
Democrats raise concerns
The handling of death records has drawn scrutiny from Democrats. A former SSA employee told Congress the agency faced pressure to assign death dates to people who were still alive, prompting Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to send Bisignano a letter demanding answers. SSA has denied adding 2.7 million names to its Death Master File.
Separately, a federal judge has blocked the administration’s use of the SAVE citizenship database earlier this year, a ruling that applies to part of the verification process SSA has relied on for the citizenship corrections.
SSA administers benefits for tens of millions of older Americans and people with disabilities, making the accuracy of its underlying records a matter of direct consequence for who receives payments and how quickly errors get fixed.
