Cleaning up the Social Security records was critical to the program’s longevity, and on Monday the Social Security Administration announced it was finally done. SSA said it’s the largest cleanup of its numbers in the agency’s 91-year history. The work has been underway since the start of the Trump administration. Parts of the problem have existed for 10 to 40-plus years. Audits by the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General dating back to at least 2015 repeatedly found millions of records in the Numident—the agency’s master database of Social Security Numbers—missing death dates. That included 6.5 million people age 112 or older with no death information. By 2023 the figure for those born in 1920 or earlier with no death dates had reached about 18.9 million. Missing or inaccurate citizenship data also built up over years of incomplete reporting. Individual audits tied subsets of these gaps to hundreds of millions in improper payments. Across the full span of gaps the cumulative cost moving forward would’ve run into the low billions of waste. SSA corrected nearly 15 percent of all U.S. citizen SSNs, roughly 50 million records out of about 330 million. The changes include adding 17 million dates of death that were previously missing using State Department data, updating 25 million files that lacked citizenship information with help from DHS, and correcting another 8.5 million records that had inaccurate citizenship data. Stronger internal controls were also added to cut future manual-entry errors. These fixes should prevent future improper payments in the range of $500 million to $2–3 billion over the next several years. That’s meaningfully higher than the ongoing waste rate of the uncorrected records. Past losses from the messy SSN records were in the millions but were growing quickly. That’s why finishing the cleanup now matters for Social Security. The main value is stopping the leakage going forward. Accurate records are one of the basic requirements for keeping Social Security solvent longer. This cleanup removes a known source of waste that previous administrations left in place. The program is stronger for it. This kind of work needs to happen across the board in every department of government. That’s how the programs that matter stay funded and functioning as they were intended.