Two security guards in Woodlawn, MD physically walked out Greg Pearre, a staffer at the U.S. Social Security Administration who pushed back against a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) scheme to falsely label “6,100 living immigrants as dead,” the Washington Post reports.
According to the report, Pearre “had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk.”
“Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events,” the Post reports. “But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.”
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The Post described Pearre’s walkout as “capping a momentous internal battle over the novel strategy — pushed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security — to add thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File.”
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities senior fellow Devin O’Connor called the move “an unprecedented step.”
“The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences,” O’Connor told the Post.
According to the Post, the Trump administration “exploited” a “flaw in the agency’s deaths database,” which Social Security staffers had raised alarms about since February.
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“Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records,” the Post reports.
Jim Francis, a consumer law attorney, warned “entry into the Death Master File has potentially severe consequences, effectively erasing a person’s ability to live and draw wages in the United States,” the Post reports.
“It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” Francis said. “Overnight you literally become financially paralyzed.”
90-year-old retiree Tom Kind experienced the “nightmare” of being wrongly declared dead firsthand, the Post reports.
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“He was wrongly added to the deaths database without his knowledge,” according to the report. “He lost his health-care coverage and Social Security benefits and struggled to navigate a bureaucratic maze, learning he needed to prove he was still alive to the agency by completing an in-person interview at a field office.”
“That’s not any fun,” Kind told the Post.
Read the full report at the Washington Post.
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