Seattle’s ‘Lazarus’ on Social Security still not fully back from the dead

“Are you dead — again?” I ask “Dead Ned” Johnson.

“I would describe it as kind of an in-between state,” he says about the condition of his being. “Somewhere between life and death.”

Ned Johnson is the 82-year-old Capitol Hill man profiled in this space two weeks ago for being declared “dead” by Social Security, even though he’s very much alive.

The agency clawed back $5,200 in benefits payments, pulling it from his bank account in the mysterious belief he was gone.

His weekslong odyssey of trying to resurrect himself through the Seattle Social Security office has now been told in congressional hearings, and on national and international news.

“Lazarus himself, Ned Johnson … he joins me live,” was how an ABC News anchor introduced him on Monday.

But incredibly, even after all the publicity, he is finding that the system doubts whether he’s really there.

“When I’ve called in to the bank, they still say I’m shown in their records as deceased,” he told me.

Social Security, despite restoring his living status, refunding his benefits and issuing a generic press statement on the matter, continued to lock his nine-digit number, on account of him being deceased, as recently as Monday.

“It seems to depend who I talk to, whether I’m alive or dead,” Johnson said.

The news release, titled “Social Security Provides Update about its Death Record,” says that of 3 million death reports annually, “less than one-third of 1 percent are erroneously reported deaths that need to be corrected.” This indicates “the agency’s records are highly accurate,” it said. This is true in one sense, but if you do the math, it comes out to about 10,000 Ned Johnsons per year.

I heard from a slew of them, which was eerie.

“I too was declared dead by an error from a mortuary company,” wrote one, from North Carolina.

“I’m dead like Ned, and please tell him I’m with him in spirit, as there has been no bigger hassle,” said another, from Utah.

“I am dead also, like Ned,” wrote a woman from Port Townsend, with a smiling photo attached. “Yesterday, my CPA attempted to e-file our joint tax return. It was rejected because my ‘social security number is locked due to death.’”

Hmm … maybe there are some advantages to being dead?

But seriously, the Port Townsend woman described a six-hour wait on the phone last week with Social Security trying to get it resolved — though she was first declared deceased nearly two years ago.

These are anecdotes, isolated stories in a nation of 330 million. The issue though with all government or corporate snafus is whether and how fast they can be fixed. The data shows Social Security’s response system may be starting to break down, in part due to staffing shortages and cuts pushed along by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE.

Phone wait times have doubled since last summer, to an average of one hour and 44 minutes in February. Johnson said he had to wait on hold so long at times that eventually the call would disconnect, forcing him to start over.

The Washington Post reported this past week on how “a flood of cuts led by Musk has sent the agency into chaos.” Its website crashed four times in a 10-day span in March.

“I feel like I’m in the last lifeboat off a sinking ship,” said Laura Novakoski, a 30-year staffer in Northwest-area Social Security offices, who is retiring. She spoke at a news conference this past week held by Democratic U.S. Sen. Patty Murray.

“I don’t think we should let Social Security be toyed with,” Novakoski said. “I don’t think we should let it be taken apart and taken over by private interests and billionaires.”

DOGE seems to be following the old tech motto of “move fast and break things.” It’s unclear what happens after the breaking-things phase, though. Musk has said Social Security is rife with fraud and a Ponzi scheme, so he seems primed to take the system down or, as Novakoski suggests, to privatize it. But for all the colorful claims of fraud, such as that people as old as America are supposedly drawing benefits — a claim President Trump made in the State of the Union address! — neither DOGE nor Trump has put up any proof.

“The fraud narrative is fraudulent,” writes Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who helped run the “reinventing government” cost-cutting for Al Gore in the 1990s. There is some fraud, of course, but auditors haven’t found it to be widespread — and have noted it would likely take more resources to pursue.

“In fact, congressional hearings last year focused on whether the agency was too aggressive in reclaiming funds after accidental overpayments,” Kamarck writes.

Which brings us back to Ned Johnson. Social Security won’t answer questions about individual cases, citing privacy reasons. But so many remain. What caused him to become dead? Why did the agency strip money out of his bank account without an official death notice or other confirmation? His wife, Pam, was asked to provide those forms by the bank, but by then the money was already gone.

“This is obviously a bigger issue than 200-year-olds getting benefits, which doesn’t seem to exist,” Pam Johnson said. “They need to stop making up pretend problems to mislead people and work on fixing the real problems.”

So true. The hyping of pretend problems is one of the political plagues of our time.

As for Ned, he says he now tentatively believes he’s alive again in the judgment of the system. But that’s what he had concluded in the column two weeks ago as well.

It turned out there was still a ghost in the machine with his name on it.

“There’s a shadow behind me,” is how he puts it. “I’ve come to believe this thing’s probably going to chase me for the rest of my life.”

Due to a surge in comments violating our Commenting Code of Conduct, we’ll be closing comments on Danny Westneat’s weekend column at noon on Sundays.