A former Social Security executive said the plan, which was not carried out, would have used a death database to pressure immigrants to leave the country.

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive.

The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.

Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.

Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.

Social Security carried out a smaller version of such an effort last year, The Post previously reported, moving 6,100 immigrants into its “Death Master File” — a database used by banks, employers and government agencies to determine whether someone is alive. Some of those people later showed up at Social Security field offices to prove they were alive and were restored in agency records.

In a written statement, a Social Security spokesperson who did not provide their name said the agency “did not add a list of 2.7 million names to the Death Master File. SSA maintains the highest level of internal controls. This includes having all appropriate policies and procedures in place to maintain the integrity and accuracy of agency records.”

Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security, as career officials questioned the legality of such efforts and watched DOGE officials gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive databases. In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.

“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.”

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Lauren Bis did not respond to questions about the plan but said that sharing information across agencies can be beneficial and attacked the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” she said.

Being moved into the Death Master File can be devastating to someone who is still alive because it can cut off their financial access. Last year, career staff warned that falsely giving people death dates could be catastrophic, though the administration overrode those objections.

In the past year, two other whistleblowers have also shared concerns about Americans’ personal information being accessed and shared by DOGE. One whistleblower, former Social Security chief data officer Charles Borges, alleged DOGE members shared data through third-party services and placed Americans’ personal information on a cloud. A second whistleblower anonymously claimed in disclosures to the inspector general that a DOGE member allegedly took a thumb drive of Americans’ data to a private company, which is being investigated by the agency’s watchdog.

When Schofield left Social Security in October, he did not expect to blow the whistle. He said he followed legal requirements to destroy documents in his possession. He had told family and other co-workers about the call when it happened but had otherwise kept quiet as he watched other civil service workers facing retaliation in the Trump administration.

But months later, at a February happy hour, he told another former federal worker he was haunted by what he had seen and how Social Security data had been compromised, and she encouraged him to speak out.

He said he asked others if they would speak out with him and confirm his account on the record but none would. One other person contributed anonymously to the whistleblower complaint to the Senate, but The Post was not able to confirm that person’s identity.

“I don’t think that it’s right that they do this to us, and I think that we need to stand up for each other in this time,” Schofield said.

‘Lots of red flags’

When DOGE officials first arrived at Social Security headquarters in February 2025, Schofield welcomed their help and hoped they would help modernize the agency’s outdated systems, he said in an interview with The Post.

Schofield joined the agency in 2000 as a customer service representative and rose through the ranks to become head of IT modernization and the key person transmitting headquarters policies to field offices. He had witnessed many ways the social service program — serving 75 million beneficiaries, including retirees, people with disabilities, widows and orphans — could be run more efficiently. So he came to his first meeting with DOGE officials with several ideas on how to help them.

But when he met with the DOGE members — Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling — the three identified themselves as volunteers, he said. He noticed they weren’t using the standard-issue laptops provided to Social Security employees. They had whiteboards in their conference room listing the agency’s key databases. They talked as if they had already seen data few others in government could access, he said. He said he worried DOGE was improperly accessing sensitive data.

“Lots of red flags went off,” he said.

Gracias was a longtime confidant of Musk’s and appeared alongside Musk at an event last year where the two made inaccurate claims about Social Security, including that that millions of undocumented immigrants were receiving federal benefits and voting in elections.

More than a month after DOGE officials arrived, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking DOGE members’ access to data at SSA, though the Supreme Court lifted that ban in June. Schofield recalled that Gracias, Koval and Rehling departed the agency around the time of the court order, though other DOGE members remained.

Alex Spiro, an attorney for Gracias, said Gracias was unaware of the plan to mark 2.7 million people as dead. Koval and Rehling did not respond to requests for comment.

In early April 2025, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem sent two memos to then-acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek requesting the agency “prevent suspected terrorists who are here illegally” from using social security numbers.

Along with those memos, Schofield found out the agency had been given a list of 6,100 people from DHS to effectively kill off in financial records.

He asked the agency’s general counsel’s office, which told him it was illegal to falsify records and that the agency could run afoul of federal records laws by marking living people as dead. Schofield said he raised concerns to his boss, acting deputy commissioner Doris Diaz, and she agreed with his worries. But within two weeks of their conversation, she abruptly left the agency, he said. Diaz did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview Thursday with The Post, Dudek — who was Social Security’s acting commissioner during that period — said he also heard concerns about the legality of putting people still living in the death database. As a result, he said, he renamed the file, replacing the word “death” with “ineligible.”

“Death is a state of ineligibility,” he said.

A number of people at the agency also shared Schofield’s concern that the plan to add people to the death file was intended to create financial pressure for immigrants to self-deport, according to a former Social Security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal debates.

“If you’re on the [Death Master File] you can’t have a bank account, you can’t get credit, so no apartment, no way to save money, no way to get paid, no way to get on insurance or carry health insurance,” the person said. “It has a ton of devastating effects.”

While Schofield and his team were trying to find a legal way to comply with DHS’s request, he said, someone in the chief information officer’s office went ahead and added death dates for those 6,100 people.

A few weeks later, in late April 2025, Schofield said, DHS gave Social Security a new list — the 2.7 million people they wanted to declare dead.

Schofield decided to drill down on a sample — 25 people — to understand who they were, which he said was a typical procedure in handling new data like the list from DHS to confirm its accuracy. By looking at databases at Social Security and DHS, Schofield said, he and one of his deputies discovered many of the 25 were still living and included U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. He said he had no way of confirming if the people actually had criminal or terrorism ties as DHS alleged.

He said he went to a higher-up, Deputy Commissioner for Operations Stephen Evangelista, with his findings, and they arranged a meeting with DOGE official Koval, who was now at DHS. Evangelista did not respond to requests for comment.

Schofield said he walked through his findings and requested DHS do more analysis, and Koval said the department would do so.

Immediately, after that meeting, Schofield said, he told Evangelista that the list and plan appeared to have the goal of forcing 2.7 million living people to leave the country. Evangelista disagreed, Schofield recalled, and told Schofield and others in the eighth-floor conference room to be quiet while he called Koval back on his cellphone to ask.

On speaker phone, Evangelista asked Koval to walk through the goal of the list. Schofield said Koval’s response was “pretty matter-of-factly” that people would either choose to self-deport or they would show up at a Social Security office and get arrested by law enforcement.

Schofield said he felt vindicated but simultaneously saddened to hear Koval spelling out that the aim was to destroy the lives of people. He said Evangelista was silent after the call and the meeting disbanded.

Senate Democrats demand answers

Schofield’s disclosure has riled Democratic lawmakers who say it confirmed their fears about the Trump administration’s goals and manipulation of Social Security data.

“Donald Trump has waged war on Social Security, and DOGE has been the tip of the spear, sowing chaos and corruption everywhere,” Warren, who is a leader of Senate Democrats’ Social Security War Room, said in a statement to The Post. “This looks like an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security to carry out Trump’s cruel immigration agenda.”

Blumenthal said he was demanding answers about how Social Security was “weaponized” as part of the Trump immigration agenda.

“Thanks to this brave whistleblower’s disclosure, we have 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,” he said in a statement.

The two senators sent letters Thursday to Social Security and the three former DOGE members about the plan to mark living people as dead.

White House spokeswoman Liz Huston did not directly respond to questions about the death database or DOGE. Instead, she touted Trump’s policy win to implement a temporary tax deduction for seniors as part of last year’s mega tax bill.

Schofield’s attorneys — longtime whistleblower attorney Debra Katz and nonprofit legal group Whistleblower Aid — shared the disclosures with Democratic senators after reports of political interference in inspectors general offices and concerns of retaliation under the Trump administration. They also said Schofield’s disclosure offers new details about how anyone in the country, whether here legally or not, could have their lives upended if government data is misused.

“This is a bipartisan issue and everyone, regardless of political party, should insist on answers and ensure accountability,” Katz said.

In a court filing last month, the Trump administration said it had taken data access away from DOGE members as of the beginning of this year, and SSA has no plans to bring back DOGE in the future.