Courage, as they say, is being scared to death but saddling up anyway. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana has been saddling up for years now, taking on a fight that sounds almost too absurd to be true. Yet here we are, in the year 2025, and Congress has finally passed legislation to stop the federal government from sending taxpayer dollars to people who are no longer among the living.
Let that sink in for a moment. The United States government, with all its technological prowess and bureaucratic machinery, has been cutting checks to dead Americans. Not occasionally, mind you, but as a matter of routine practice.
Kennedy, never one to mince words, explained the situation in terms that would make any reasonable person’s blood boil. The Social Security Administration maintains something called the Death Master File, a database that tracks deceased Americans. You would think this information might be useful to other government agencies responsible for distributing benefits and payments. You would be wrong.
For reasons that defy common sense, the SSA kept this critical information to itself, like a closely guarded secret. Other federal agencies, apparently operating in their own isolated bubbles, continued processing payments without bothering to check whether recipients were still drawing breath.
When Kennedy discovered this arrangement and sought to remedy it, he learned that the SSA would need congressional permission to share death records with other agencies. The bureaucratic absurdity speaks for itself.
The Louisiana senator introduced the Stopping Improper Payments to Deceased People Act, which temporarily authorized this common-sense data sharing. But temporary fixes have a way of expiring, leaving problems to resurface. Kennedy understood this and followed through with the Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act, which makes the data sharing arrangement permanent.
“I have been working for years, literally years, to target welfare fraud, especially the fraudsters who conduct fraud in the name of deceased Americans,” Kennedy stated.
The passage of this legislation represents more than just closing a loophole. It exposes a fundamental dysfunction in how our government operates. We are talking about separate federal agencies that apparently cannot or will not communicate with each other about basic facts, such as whether someone is alive or dead.
The fraudsters Kennedy mentioned are real. They exploit these system failures, collecting benefits intended for people who have passed away. Every dollar sent to a deceased person is a dollar stolen from living Americans who actually need assistance or who paid into these systems with the expectation of honest administration.
This is not partisan politics. This is about basic competence and stewardship of taxpayer money. The fact that it took years of persistent effort to achieve something this straightforward tells you everything you need to know about the challenge of reforming government waste.
Kennedy’s success here should serve as a reminder that meaningful change often requires dogged determination. The easy path would have been to throw up his hands and move on to flashier issues. Instead, he stayed with it, year after year, until the job was done.
The question now becomes how many other obvious inefficiencies remain embedded in our federal bureaucracy, quietly draining resources while everyone looks the other way. If sending money to dead people required years of congressional effort to stop, what other absurdities are we still funding?
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