Is Social Security being threatened by President Donald Trump’s administration?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s brainchild—the Department of Government Efficiency—has been slashing federal services in the months since Trump took office earlier this year. One of the biggest agencies facing cuts is the Social Security Administration (SSA) despite Trump’s vows to not touch Social Security.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the SSA “is engulfed in crisis” as a result of DOGE’s cuts to the federal agency that sends benefits to more than 73 million Americans. The report said that the agency’s website crashed four times in 10 days this month as the phone service remains a mess due to low staffing.
Acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek “hurried to cut costs when he took over in mid-February, canceling research contracts, offering early-retirement incentives and buyouts across the agency, and consolidating programs and regional offices,” according to The Post. According to the report, the number of regional offices that oversee field operations was cut from 10 to four.
“I do not want to destroy the agency,” Dudek told The Post. “The president wants it to succeed by cutting out the red tape to improve service while improving security.”
The report highlighted a number of recent changes to SSA since Trump took office, including requiring in-person identity checks for new and existing recipients.
The Post also reported that the agency will “require legal immigrants with authorization to work in the United States and newly naturalized citizens to apply for or update their Social Security cards in person” instead of receiving their card in the mail.
The SSA phone service is under intense strain, with The Post reporting that some people were on hold for about four to five hours as the offices face a surge of calls from retirees wondering if their benefits have been cut.
The Post also spoke with a Baltimore employee who works on the Social Security payment systems. He said that nearly a quarter of his team has left or will be leaving due to resignations and retirements, which means his office will likely miss crucial deadlines to complete software updates to the system.
He warned that workers responsible for fixing “technology glitches” that “mistakenly stop payments” have been leaving the office, meaning that recipients’ payments could be at risk.
“That has to get cleaned up on a case-by-case basis, and the experts in how to do that are leaving,” the Baltimore employee said. “We will have cases that get stuck, and they’re not going to be able to get fixed. People could be out of benefits for months.”
The Social Security Administration provides benefits to more than 72.5 million people in the U.S. A recent survey from Bankrate found that 77% of retirees surveyed said they are relying on their Social Security to pay for necessary expenses, CNN reported last year.
The DOGE website says that leases for 47 Social Security field offices across the country, including in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and North Carolina, have been or will be ended. However, Dudek downplayed the impact of its offices shuttering, saying many were small remote hearing sites that served few members of the public.
Many Americans have been concerned that SSA office closures and massive layoffs of federal workers — part of an effort by Trump and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the size of the federal government — will make getting benefits even more difficult.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Stories by Lauren Sforza
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