What's Going on with SSA's "Death Master File"? (Part 3)

Note: if you haven't been following this story, it may be helpful to review our Part 1 and Part 2 blog posts on this topic for additional context.

The latest update to the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File" once again contains some interesting changes.

More long-deceased backfills

Similar to what we saw in March and early April, the major departure from the norm in this week's DMF file is another sizable backfill of identities with decedent ages over 120:

SentiLink's analysis suggests that, assuming the listed dates of birth are correct, these are people who are genuinely deceased, but whose death predated the advent of electronic records at the Social Security Administration.

Additionally, as in previous weeks, there's a large spike in additions with a decedent age of zero. These are not genuine infant deaths, but rather additional long-deceased backfills that have missing, incomplete, or invalid birthdates such as "0/0/1874."

Most of the "April 8" group remains

Last week, we wrote about a cluster of more than 6,000 unusual DMF entries: a group of younger-than-average people who all ostensibly died on April 8, 2025. SentiLink examined a sample from this group and was not able to confirm that any of the people in this group were deceased. We found positive evidence that at least one was still alive several days after April 8. This corresponded with reporting that the Trump administration's DOGE had added roughly 6,000 living immigrants to the DMF.

Over the past week, it has been reported that 31 of these living additions to the DMF have been removed, and SentiLink's analysis of the latest update to the DMF mostly confirms this: while most of the April 8 group remains in the DMF, 31 people with April 8 death dates were removed.

(However, the net change is actually 30, as one of the 31 people removed was an 83-year-old who is genuinely deceased; his record was removed and then an identical record was re-added using a different row identifier for unknown reasons.)

While most of the April 8 group remains in the DMF, SentiLink did not find indications that additional living people have been added to the file in this week's update.

What's next?

SentiLink will continue to monitor updates to the DMF for irregularities.