
I found a ‘dead’ person collecting Social Security in Seattle
“Dead” Ned Johnson turns out to be very much alive. It took him weeks to convince the system he was breathing and to start clawing his benefits back.

What’s concerning is that no one has been able to tell him how he ended up in the agency’s “death master file.” Had he been conflated with some other poor Leonard Johnson? Was he flagged as dead by a credit agency or the electronic funds transfer system, which then ricocheted back to Social Security? Was it simple input error? Nobody knows. Or nobody’s saying.
Social Security blandly labels this sort of event an “erroneous death determination.”
Johnson said his takeaway is that Social Security needs help — with its databases, but especially with enough staffing to answer the phones. The announced plan from the new administration is to cut 7,000 employees. This past week, the news outlet ProPublica reported on a recording of a meeting in which the director, a Trump appointee, suggested ominously that DOGE’s suggested changes could cause the agency to collapse.
