Summary
Jeremiah Schofield, a former employee of the Social Security Administration (SSA), reveals troubling practices within the agency regarding the manipulation of death records. After 25 years at the SSA, Schofield encountered a significant issue in 2025 when thousands of living individuals were incorrectly marked as deceased. This alarming trend was not due to clerical errors but rather directives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which aimed to facilitate deportations by creating bureaucratic obstacles for these individuals.
Schofield describes how he was instructed to add names to the death master file, a record intended to prevent identity fraud. Initially, he complied with requests to mark individuals who were over a century old as deceased. However, when faced with a second list of over 6,000 names of people he believed were alive, he raised concerns about the legality of these actions. His apprehension was confirmed when he discovered that the DHS was targeting these individuals, primarily of Hispanic origin, to either force them to self-deport or to facilitate their detention.
After leaving the SSA, Schofield sought to expose these practices as a whistleblower, but he faced challenges in gathering evidence due to the nature of his former role. Despite the difficulties, he filed a detailed complaint that garnered media attention and prompted congressional inquiries. Ultimately, the SSA stated that it would not proceed with the plan to mark the 2.7 million individuals as dead. However, Schofield reflects on the personal costs of his actions, including strained relationships and a sense of loss, questioning whether he would make the same choices again.
Show Notes
In Social Security’s database, a few keystrokes can turn a living person into a dead one. As part of a deportation scheme, DOGE pushed to do just that to 2.7 million people — without checking whether they were actually dead. Social Security whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield decided to stop them.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
More from Click Here
Deepfakes are getting harder to spot. But digital forensics expert Hany Farid says the bigger problem isn’t just that AI can fool us. It’s that even when something is real, people may refuse to believe it. What happens when seeing is no longer believing—and the truth has a hard time catching up?
In 30 years of representing whistleblowers, national security attorney Mark Zaid has never had so many government lawyers come to him for advice. They’ve seen things inside the Trump administration that trouble them. And they want to blow the whistle. But as lawyers, they know the law. Which, as it turns out, may be part of the problem.
Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook with more than 20,000 pages of internal documents. And somehow, nobody caught her. Now her story is getting the Hollywood treatment in Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Reckoning. But how did she actually pull it off? Haugen takes us behind the scenes of her surprisingly low-tech operation—and explains why the next Facebook whistleblower might not be so lucky.
There’s a new space race underway. And this time, it’s not just about astronauts and moon landings. Companies are launching satellites by the thousands. Militaries are eyeing space as the next battlefield. And now people want to put AI data centers up there, too. So why is everyone suddenly so interested in space? Former astronaut Ed Lu says it has a lot to do with a 60-year-old prediction about computer chips. And there’s just one problem: the rules haven’t kept up.
Across Russia, the internet keeps going dark. The Kremlin says the blackouts are necessary to stop Ukrainian drones. But critics say it is really helping Vladimir Putin accomplish something he’s been working toward for years: an internet the Kremlin can control — and, when it wants to, cut off from the rest of the world.