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| “Dead” Ned Johnson turns out to be very much alive. It took him and his wife, Pam, three weeks to convince the system he was breathing and to start clawing his benefits back. |
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Here’s a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say
Seattle Times
Sun March 16, 2025
Area: Seattle, Tacoma
“DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People,” the headlines read this past week.
I found a dead person on Social Security. Right here in Seattle, on Capitol Hill.
Of course the circumstances of Ned Johnson’s death were completely the opposite of what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had claimed was rampant.
“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”
That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.
“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”
At first she figured it was a scam — her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point.
“We know this is a difficult time, and we’re here to help,” the bank wrote. “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”
Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.
Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit,” which makes it tough to get a loan.
“The good news is I don’t think it can go any lower than that,” he said cheerfully.
He called the bank first, and they said an electronic notification had been triggered on Feb. 18 that he had died back in November. But I’m on the phone with you right now, he told them. Also, what did I die of? Take it up with Social Security, they said.
What followed was a nearly three-week battle to resurrect himself. He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24.
In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”
It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.
“They are so understaffed down there,” he said. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”
After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”
Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.
“When I was in that line, I was thinking that if I was living solely off Social Security, I could be close to dumpster diving about now,” he said.
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.
The director also debunked the idea that dead people are being used to fraudulently claim benefits in any widespread manner — as both Musk and Trump keep claiming.
There are 110-year-old and older people in one of databases, the director said, but those people are “not in pay status — they’re not actually being paid benefits. These are records we never bothered with.”
For his part, Johnson says he felt the agency was super-aggressive in the opposite direction. Money was unilaterally deducted from his bank account before he even had a chance to react to the news of his untimely death. People living check to check could be decimated, he said.
“I’m OK with mistakes being made,” he said. “But I’m not sure how much they’re focused on fixing these kinds of mistakes going forward, as they are in using the mistakes to tear the place down.”
Said his wife Pam: “You sort of have no choice but to laugh it off. But it seems like it’s going to get worse.”
For now, Ned Johnson is hopeful he has a new lease on life. But does he?
Agents cautioned him that once you’re tagged as dead in the electronic morgue, it floats in the ether and can haunt you again. It’s like there’s a ghost in the machine.
Sure enough, after I met Johnson on Friday and verified he was a live human being, I went home and Googled him. One of those people-search sites popped up with a listing at his address.
“Leonard A. Johnson, Seattle, WA,” it read. “Deceased.”
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