WASHINGTON — The plan did not begin with a court order, a statute, or a formal rulemaking. It began with a phone call. On the other end was a Department of Government Efficiency official who, by Jeremiah Schofield’s account, proposed something that stopped the 25-year Social Security veteran cold: enter the names of 2.7 million living people into a federal death registry and watch the consequences cascade.
The Social Security Administration’s “Death Master File” is one of the most consequential databases in American life. Banks check it before approving loans. Employers run payroll against it. Government agencies use it to determine who is alive and therefore eligible for benefits. Once your name appears in it, a chain of automated systems across the private and public sector begins treating you as a non-person — no wages, no bank account, no insurance, no way to rent an apartment or prove you exist. The DOGE official Schofield described in his Senate disclosure, identified by other reporting as Jon Koval, said that was precisely the point.
The scheme, reported Friday by The Washington Post after the outlet reviewed a 49-page whistleblower disclosure Schofield filed with two Senate committees, was framed in terms Schofield found unambiguous. The Washington Post reported that the DOGE official explained the logic plainly: people on the file would either self-deport or walk into a Social Security field office to prove they were alive — at which point Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could arrest them. Either outcome served the administration’s mass deportation agenda.
“That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”
The 2.7 million figure did not materialize out of thin air. The list Schofield described was built from a data-sharing arrangement between the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security — rooted in two April 2025 memos signed by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to then-acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek. The overlap identified individuals in SSA records who also appeared in DHS immigration databases, creating a target list that included, by Schofield’s account, not only undocumented immigrants but also some US citizens and lawful permanent residents. Teenagers were on it too.
Schofield said he refused to carry out the plan. SSA attorneys had warned him that falsely designating a living person as deceased could violate federal law, and when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names to verify, every person he checked was alive. He left the agency in October 2025. He is now represented by Whistleblower Aid and the firm Katz Banks Kumin, which assisted in drafting the Senate disclosure sent to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
But a smaller version of the plan was not stopped. The Post reported last year that the SSA had already moved 6,100 immigrants into the Death Master File in what amounted to a pilot. Some of those individuals subsequently showed up at Social Security offices to demonstrate they were still breathing, and their records were eventually corrected. The new disclosure suggests that episode was not an anomaly but a proof-of-concept for something far broader.
Three DOGE members — Antonio Gracias, a longtime Elon Musk confidant; Jon Koval; and Payton Rehling — arrived at the agency’s Maryland headquarters in February 2025, identifying themselves as volunteers. Schofield said they were not using standard SSA-issued laptops and that whiteboards in their conference room listed the agency’s most sensitive databases. Alex Spiro, an attorney for Gracias, told the Post that his client had no knowledge of the proposal to falsely declare 2.7 million people deceased. Koval and Rehling did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.
Dudek, the former acting commissioner, offered a semantic rationale to the Post for how he had addressed the legal problem. He said he rebranded the relevant classification, swapping the word “death” for “ineligible.” His reasoning: “Death is a state of ineligibility.” Whether the rebrand protected the agency from legal exposure or simply obscured its intent is a question Senators Warren and Blumenthal are now pressing in letters to former DOGE officials and to current SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano.
The SSA disputed Schofield’s account in a statement that stopped short of addressing the pilot program. “SSA did not add a list of 2.7 million names to the Death Master File,” a spokesperson said, adding that the agency “maintains the highest level of internal controls.” The White House, according to the Post, did not directly respond to questions about the plan. Spokeswoman Liz Huston instead promoted a Trump administration tax benefit for senior citizens.
The legal exposure for anyone misclassified as deceased is not theoretical. As one anonymous former SSA employee described to the Post, the consequences begin immediately: no bank account, no credit, no apartment, no way to receive wages or maintain health insurance. The process of reversing a false death designation — even in normal circumstances — can take months and requires navigating multiple federal agencies simultaneously. For immigrants with limited English proficiency or uncertain legal status, the practical barrier to correction was, in the DOGE framing, the feature rather than the bug.
Schofield’s disclosure arrives as the administration faces intensifying congressional scrutiny over DOGE’s access to federal databases containing some of the most sensitive personal information held by the government. The Senate Finance Committee, on which Warren sits, has jurisdiction over the SSA; the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where Blumenthal serves as ranking member, has historically served as the chamber’s premier investigative body on government misconduct.
Blumenthal did not mince words in a statement provided to the Post. “As always with the Trump Administration, cruelty is the point,” he said, adding that the disclosure offered “more evidence that the Trump Administration used DOGE not just to recklessly slash government programs — they were looking for ways to purposefully hurt people, especially immigrants.” Warren called the effort “an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security.”
The administration’s immigration crackdown has relied on a range of pressure tactics since Trump took office in January 2025 and declared a national emergency at the southern border. Eastern Herald previously reported that the administration moved to deny asylum applications without interviews, a policy that legal advocates argued stripped applicants of due process. In a parallel effort, the administration rejected a UN migration declaration, accusing global bodies of fueling what officials called “replacement migration.” The Death Master File scheme, had it been fully executed, would have marked a qualitatively different escalation — not a restriction on legal process but the elimination of economic existence.
Schofield said he is speaking publicly now because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused. What remains unclear is the extent to which the 6,100-person pilot — which was carried out — produced lasting harm for individuals whose records were altered, and whether any similar operations occurred in the gap between the smaller experiment and his departure from the agency. Those questions, he indicated, are among the things the Senate disclosure is meant to surface. The answers, if they come, will depend on whether the committees have the will to compel them.
