Seattle
CNN
—
Ned Johnson is not dead. The 82-year-old proved as much by bounding across a Seattle sidewalk to greet us with a firm handshake and a broad grin. But Ned was declared dead last month by the Social Security Administration, which led him and his wife on a Kafkaesque quest to prove there’s life left in this salty old Seattle seadog yet.
Ned has spent his life building business and sailing the world’s oceans, and he’s spent the past few weeks proving to bureaucrats and reporters that he’s still very much alive.
“There’s been a lot of gallows humor,” giggled Ned’s equally spry wife, Pamela. But there’s also been some serious red tape to reverse.
“You’re on the dead list,” deadpanned Ned, who is suspicious that all this might somehow be connected to President Donald Trump’s declarations that there are thousands of dead centenarians still collecting Social Security payments: false assertions enthusiastically parroted by the president’s dogged DOGE lieutenant, Elon Musk.
Trump told a crowd in Florida last month, “There is one person on Social Security who is 360 years old.” And the president said during his recent address to Congress, “We’re gonna find where that money is going and it won’t be pretty.”
DOGE now has at least 10 staffers working inside the SSA, six of them are involved with the death data. The first started work on February 13 analyzing “improper payments” and “the death master file,” according to court filings in an unrelated suit filed against the SSA. Five days later, Ned Johnson was declared dead.
“That is a curious coincidence,” the rather wry Ned told CNN. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions,” added Pamela. “But I think that maybe we’ll never know.”
Their bank, they say, was informed electronically on February 18 of Ned’s “passing” and the following day sent a letter to his presumably grieving Pamela. “We offer our sincerest condolences. I understand this is a difficult time,” were among the first words in that letter she opened and read over breakfast one morning in their airy, antique-stuffed Seattle apartment.
“It was a little weird,” she told CNN while sitting at that same oak dining table. “Because he was sitting next to me drinking coffee.”
The Johnsons assumed this was an attempted scam, until money started disappearing from their bank account. Ned had been among the roughly 73 million Americans who receive Social Security checks every month. Those payments stopped and, he said, the SSA also clawed back any payments made after the date of his alleged demise: November 23, 2024.
Ned says Social Security told the bank the dollar amount to take back. “This amount out of this account – and they said, ‘OK’,” he explained. “They just take it without permission,” added Pamela. “Apparently, they can do that because they have gotten this form from whatever hospital.”
Neither the bank nor the SSA was able to tell the Johnsons where that form came from, or to share it with them.
“I was told by the bank that ‘We have no way of communicating with Social Security,’” Ned said. “’It comes electronically to us. We automatically react to it,’” he said he was told of the bank procedure.
This is not a new or even a rare phenomenon. “More than three million deaths are reported to the Social Security Administration each year,” the agency revealed in a news release after Ned Johnson went public about his own alleged demise. “Less than one-third of 1 percent are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected,” that release continues. But even that tiny percentage is roughly 9,000 people reported dead each year who are, in fact, still living and breathing and in need of their benefits. And the onus is on them to prove they are still alive.
Ned was eventually “resurrected” after spending nearly eight hours waiting at a Social Security office in downtown Seattle armed with his passport and himself as proof of life.
He did get his rightful benefits back, after he went public with his story in The Seattle Times. But he’s worried his death might still be lingering in other data. “They canceled my Medicare insurance and our health insurance,” said Ned. He did manage to get them restored. But he’s concerned that next time he travels abroad that his passport might not work, and he might have trouble getting a new credit card. “Your credit status goes to zero as soon as you’re declared deceased in the Social Security system,” he explained.
Johnson also worries for others who might not have the time or ability to prove they’re still living. “Somebody’s disabled,” he said. “They can’t get out of a wheelchair or whatever, and they live 100 miles from the nearest Social Security office: what are they going to do?”
Ned says the office was woefully understaffed the day he visited, with perhaps just three of 30 windows staffed, hence his long wait that he says should have been even longer. “One of the booths opened up and the next person was there, and I jumped in front of him, ran up,” said Ned. “I pleaded with this woman. I said, ‘I’ve been here all day and by the way, I’m declared dead.’”
Wait times might be about to get even worse because the SSA will now limit the number of recipients who can identify their identity online, and now no one will be able to verify their bank details over the phone. Experts estimate that will mean the need for tens of thousands more in-person visits to Social Security offices.
But the federal building in Seattle Johnson visited was earmarked for sale on a since-deleted government list. The SSA is planning to close several regional offices and is right now in the process of slashing roughly 12% of its workforce. The SSA claims the restructuring, which is, “Consistent with recent executive orders issued by the White House,” will actually, “prioritize customer service by streamlining redundant layers of management… and (involve) potential reassignment of employees to customer service positions.”
For Pamela, the non-widow, there’s a big question about how effective that will be. “To me anyway,” she said, the changes could create “more waste fraud and abuse than if they had a professional fully staffed office with easy accessible internet and a decent phone system.”
