Whistleblower Swears Trump Officials Marked Over 6,000 Living People Dead

The Charge and Trump's Responsibility

Jeremiah Schofield, a former executive at the Social Security Administration (SSA), has sworn that in April 2025 officials gave more than 6,000 living people the same date of death: March 8, 2025.¹ He says he and other career employees had refused, and that field offices soon heard from living people whose Social Security numbers no longer worked properly and whose lives had been upended.¹ His accusation is that officials deliberately falsified federal records to disrupt people's financial lives in pursuit of deportation.¹

Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, and appointed Leland Dudek as acting Social Security commissioner.²³ In two April 7, 2025 memoranda to Dudek, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem expressly invoked Trump's direction that agencies encourage people unlawfully in the country to leave voluntarily, then sought lawful restrictions on Social Security number use.⁴ Neither those memoranda nor Schofield's declaration shows that Trump personally ordered false death entries.⁴¹

Schofield signed his declaration under penalty of perjury on May 12, 2026; Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren released it with a June 4 letter demanding answers from former DOGE staffer Antonio Gracias.¹ The Associated Press had independently reported the operation in April 2025, citing two people familiar with it.⁵

Career Staff Refused; the CIO's Office Did It

A day or two after Noem's memoranda, Schofield says, he was told to develop a way to mark more than 6,000 people dead in Numident, Social Security's database of number holders.¹ No one supplied evidence that they had died.¹ He consulted policy staff and agency lawyers; he says they agreed that entering deaths without documentation would violate the law, and his team refused.¹

Then they discovered it had been done without them: unidentified staff in the chief information officer's office had entered March 8, 2025 as the death date for everyone on the list, automatically adding them to the Death Master File.¹ The lawyers' accompanying complaint attributes the directive to Scott Coulter, the chief information officer and a former DOGE adviser at SSA.¹ It alleges that Coulter demanded same-day entries and said he was receiving direct calls from the White House about the list.¹

The complaint says staff nevertheless reviewed every record by the next morning and flagged around 40 with data discrepancies, such as names and birth dates that did not match the Social Security numbers; staff did not know what happened to the flagged records after they were sent to DHS.¹

Living People Had to Prove They Were Alive

Schofield explains what a death entry does to a living person: it freezes bank accounts and credit cards, stops benefits the person is eligible for and prevents lawful work.¹ Undoing it, he says, takes an in-person visit to a Social Security office and extensive documentation.¹

After the 6,000-plus entries, he describes an unusual increase in field-office visits from people whose lives had been upended and who were having trouble using their Social Security numbers.¹ He wrote: "These individuals were obviously very much alive".¹ He directed field offices to restore their records through the standard correction process.¹ Months later, the accompanying complaint says, the death dates were removed for all 6,000-plus people and they were taken off the Death Master File; who ordered or implemented that blanket reversal is unknown.¹

The Request for 2.7 Million More

In late April 2025, Schofield says, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) supplied a second list for death entries: 2.7 million names.¹ A colleague checked 25 records.¹ The vast majority belonged to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, and Schofield recalled only two whose immigration status required further investigation.¹ None were dead, and SSA's data could not establish whether they were terrorists or criminals.¹

Schofield told Deputy Commissioner Stephen Evangelista he would not carry out the request and insisted that DHS recheck its data.¹ They discussed a reversible flag requiring an office visit instead of a death entry; Schofield says it would still make records inaccurate.¹

In a May meeting, he says, Jon Koval, a former DOGE staffer at SSA then working at DHS, agreed to take the list back for review.¹ On a later speakerphone call, Schofield says, he heard Koval explain two desired outcomes: financial hardship would drive people to leave the country, or they would seek help at Social Security offices and be sent to DHS offices for detention and deportation.¹ SSA says the larger plan did not proceed.⁶

Public Safety Does Not Supply Proof of Death

The administration's strongest defense is public safety: restricting financial and benefit access for people without lawful immigration status.⁴ Noem's signed memoranda invoked Trump's voluntary-departure directive, targeted suspected terrorists and convicted criminals without lawful status, and required measures consistent with law.⁴

AP reported that the affected immigrants' Social Security numbers had been legally obtained; the complaint also cites reporting that some targeted people had lost legal status after Biden-era work programs ended.⁵¹

The accompanying complaint says DHS supplied no substantiation that the people on the first list were convicted criminals or suspected terrorists.¹ It cites Washington Post reporting that those marked dead included a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds, and that staff checks of some of the youngest people found no evidence of crimes or law-enforcement interactions.¹ Nor does an immigration or criminal classification supply evidence that a person died, and Schofield says DHS furnished none.¹

At a June 10, 2026 hearing, SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano, asked by Republican Representative Ron Estes, denied knowingly adding living people to the Death Master File during his tenure and denied any plans to do so, FedScoop reported.⁶ He also said new career executives overseeing risk management and cybersecurity would protect the database.⁶ But the Senate confirmed Bisignano on May 6, 2025, after the April operation Schofield describes under Dudek.⁷¹ His denial about his own tenure does not answer what happened before it.⁶⁷¹

Where It Stands on October 10, 2026

As of October 10, 2026, two outcomes are reported: the complaint says the 6,000-plus entries were reversed, without identifying who ordered or implemented the blanket reversal, and SSA says the 2.7 million-name plan did not materialize.¹⁶ Schofield's own knowledge stops in October 2025, when he left SSA; as far as he knew then, the complaint says, the 2.7 million people had not been marked dead.¹

Neither Schofield's disclosure nor SSA's response quantifies financial losses from the scheme or the deportations it allegedly sought.¹⁶ Schofield describes living people seeking help because false death entries interfered with their Social Security numbers and had upended their lives.¹

The senators' letter also demanded preservation of related records.¹ On June 26, 2026, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the District of Maryland, discussing the death-entry allegations without deciding their truth or legality, rejected the government's claim that the broader SSA data-access case was moot and denied its request to cancel an order allowing limited evidence gathering.⁸

This was one of several alleged misuses of Social Security records under Trump's DOGE.⁹

The charge is an abuse of public power: Trump's administration allegedly falsified death records for more than 6,000 living people, over career staff's objections, to make their financial lives untenable for a departure campaign Noem expressly tied to his directive.¹⁴ The reversal (the complaint does not identify who ordered or implemented it) and Schofield's refusal of the larger request limit the damage; they do not excuse the deliberate use of false records that he describes.¹