The Social Security Administration has been crippled by cuts to the agency pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The Washington Post reports that employee cuts at the SSA have led to office managers at field offices being forced to answer phone calls at the front desk in place of fired receptionists. In addition, the agency’s website crashed four times in 10 days in March due to server overloads, preventing millions of retired people and the disabled from accessing their online accounts.
On top of that, the office that monitors whether people are satisfied with their service was also cut by DOGE, making it nearly impossible to figure out small ways to fix some, if any of the problems.
Unable to get answers from the SSA, Americans who depend on Social Security have flooded congressional offices with angry phone calls. The AARP says it has been getting 2,000 calls a week since early February, double its usual amount, from people concerned about their Social Security benefits.
The SSA is responsible for $1.5 trillion in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans, and now is struggling to deliver to these vulnerable groups. About 40 percent of older Americans depend on Social Security as their primary source of income.
At present, the agency is being run by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, who has cut more than 12 percent of the SSA’s 57,000-person staff and says DOGE is calling the shots, despite a court order last week preventing Musk’s cronies from accessing the agency.
Dudek’s predecessor, Michelle King, quit her job as acting commissioner rather than hand over Americans’ sensitive personal information to DOGE. Still, Musk’s staffers have pressed on with their quest to find fraud in Social Security benefits, a problem that isn’t as extensive as they claim. Instead, their efforts have resulted in the people who depend on those benefits being shut out altogether.
Dudek and DOGE’s actions have caused chaos within the agency, pushing out experienced officials who were running the SSA’s complicated information technology and benefit systems. As a result, an agency that has been underfunded for years now is on the brink of being shut down, according to Dudek, who wasn’t happy with last week’s court order blocking DOGE from accessing Americans’ data.
Is all of this by design? Musk has called Social Security “the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and conservatives have long sought to privatize the agency. One former agency veteran who took early retirement this month told the Post, “They’re creating a fire to require them to come and put it out.” If that is the goal, is there anything that can save one of America’s most successful anti-poverty programs?
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