Social Security Stability Remains at Risk

The Washington Post reported last week that “Social Security is breaking down,” describing several website crashes from overloaded servers, “complicated benefits cases … falling by the wayside,” “online claims … piling up” due to employee reductions, and “a series of rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff.” Unfortunately, these developments are unsurprising, given the approach President Trump, Elon Musk, and the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have taken with Social Security and the dangers they present — as we detailed in our own report.

In combination, false claims of massive fraud, deep cuts to front-line staff and technical experts, new restrictions on service options, and the granting of unprecedented data access to untrained and inexperienced DOGE political staffers has created the risk for unprecedented delays, degraded customer service, and unnecessary barriers for millions of beneficiaries.

In the days since our report and the Washington Post article were published, several developments have corroborated our concerns, including:

• System and service breakdowns. The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) ability to serve beneficiaries is rapidly degrading, with hold times for people calling the toll-free 1-800 number for assistance reported at “more than 120 minutes or 180 minutes” depending on the time of day, after having been reduced to 50 minutes on average in the Biden Administration. The Post reported that SSA lacked “a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.”

• Barriers that threaten benefit access. A New York Times report found that the Trump Administration’s handpicked acting Commissioner admitted that the rapid implementation of new restrictions on phone services — which are likely to force millions of beneficiaries to visit crowded and understaffed field offices to receive benefits or assistance — were “at the behest of the White House, which demanded an urgent time frame” even though “such a change would typically involve far more planning — a process that would normally take two years instead of two weeks.”

  Last Wednesday, SSA announced that it would delay implementation of the phone restrictions for an additional two weeks, reportedly in part because DOGE-forced staffing cuts have shrunk the teams that would have worked on the needed technological support, leaving fewer employees to prepare for the change. Yet that delay is only a partial reprieve, as the Administration apparently still plans to make this damaging change for retirees. And all grieving families applying for survivors benefits and parents of child applicants will need to visit an office in person to complete their applications, because they cannot apply online.

• Rushed and poorly planned changes that put beneficiaries at risk of being defrauded. The rushed announcement that SSA would restrict options for identity verification created confusion that, ironically, is causing new avenues for fraud, with agency leadership acknowledging that the proposal triggered what the Washington Post described as “a wave of scammers” taking advantage of confusion over the proposal to target retirees and try to steal their identities.

• DOGE considering rushed effort at systems modernization, carrying unnecessary risks. Reporting from Wired suggests that DOGE is planning a potentially reckless, unrealistically rushed effort at modernization that could be “putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely — at risk.” SSA’s DOGE team is expected to leverage generative AI to help translate COBOL coding into a more modern programming language within months. However, a similar COBOL replacement project that the Office of Personnel Management is undertaking with its retirement system — though significantly less complicated than the SSA effort — was expected to take two years.

  As we wrote, efforts to carefully and responsibly modernize outdated SSA systems to improve customer service and operations would be greatly welcome if done with “a thorough understanding of the current infrastructure, sufficient staff and funding to see the project through, and a healthy respect for the importance of ensuring the systems for determining eligibility and providing benefits remain functional as upgrades are made, so people get the benefits they need and are owed.” This DOGE-led effort appears to have none of those elements, posing unnecessary risks of system failure.

• Threats to the security of personal data. Following a court ruling that the DOGE team had been inappropriately granted access to sensitive data and should be prevented from directly accessing such data without clear justification, the Administration took additional steps to solidify DOGE access to and control over the data. SSA announced that one of the DOGE team members would take over as chief information officer, with responsibility for managing and directing SSA’s information systems security program.

  This followed the revelation that President Trump’s nominee for SSA Commissioner allegedly lied under oath in his confirmation hearing when he claimed not to have contact with the DOGE team at SSA — when in fact the nominee had spoken “multiple times a day” with DOGE team members about operations and policy and had “personally intervened … to instruct SSA staff” to onboard a DOGE team member and give them immediate access to SSA’s highly sensitive data systems.

• DOGE effort fails to identify the fraud they falsely claimed was rampant. Despite Elon Musk and President Trump’s discredited claims of widespread fraud in the form of scammers receiving benefits on behalf of a deceased person, it was reported that an intensive DOGE effort was only able to identify roughly 200 instances where benefits may have been improperly collected in the name of a dead person –— and not necessarily due to fraud.

If the Trump Administration, Elon Musk, and DOGE do not change their focus to better serving those who rely on Social Security, their actions will continue to threaten the program — harming customer service, degrading operational reliability, and making it harder for beneficiaries to access the benefits they have earned.