What might be called Day of the Dead Living is being continually played out at a Social Security Administration (SSA) office in upstate New York, and likely across the country.
“We have people who did not receive benefits come in every day with their ID and say, ‘I’m not dead, I’m alive!” says Rennie Glasgow, a claims technical analyst with 15 years of experience at the agency who handles the most challenging cases at the Schenectady office.
These supposed dead are not to be confused with more than 6,000 living immigrants the Trump administration moved to the SSA Death Master File (DMF) in an attempt to force them to self-deport by depriving them of the ability to work legally.
Many more American citizens were wrongly consigned to the DMF after Elon Musk’s DOGE goons bullied their way onto the SSA’s databases and mistakenly decided that “countless” people listed as 120 years old and older were receiving benefits.
“[DOGE staffers] went into the system and they killed off people,” Glasgow told The Daily Beast. “About 4 million people, they marked them as dead. But they’re not sure if those people were supposed to be marked as dead, so they’re sending us an email saying, ‘If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.’”
The 55-year-old father of six added, “So we’re going to be resurrecting a lot of dead people.”
And restoring financial life is never simple.
“We have to go through this long process to resurrect them, to get them back as alive, which can take about three to four days,” Glasgow said.
He noted that until people get off the DMF, they endure a kind of financial death.
“When they mark someone dead on the Social Security record, it stops their life,” he said. “It stops their car payments, it stops their credit, it stops their ability to do anything. Their identification gets flagged. And most times those things have to go to the payment center.”
The system’s payment centers have suffered DOGE cutbacks that have at least doubled and maybe tripled the wait people must endure.
“What used to take 15 days to get done when we send something to a payment center is now taking about 30 to 45,” Glasgow reported.
Cutbacks have also hit Glasgow’s office hard. The staff there has been cut from 38 to a bare-bones 30. Only four of the 18 service windows are open due to the staffing shortage. And a person could finally step up to a window after a three-hour wait only to encounter more DOGE-induced inefficiency.
“Every day, between the hours of 10 to about 12, our system goes down,” Glasgow told The Daily Beast. “So it’s not just that people are sitting there, waiting for us to help them. When they get to the window, they’re told, ‘Our system is down. We can’t help you. We don’t know what’s going on.”
The staffing might get even tighter. Glasgow says that on Friday, DOGE sent out a renewed offer of a lump sum of $20,000 for early retirement.
DOGE is simultaneously making the workday more stressful for the remaining staff.
“Every day there is a new email that is either derogatory, disgusting, [or] threatling,” Glasgow said.
In the DOGE era, even missives that might have otherwise seemed positive can have a malevolent undertone.
“Today, there was a new email that came out [saying] that, ‘We want to recognize Social Security month. April every year will be Social Security month, and we will continue with our efficiency push to maximize customer service,’” Glasgow said on Wednesday.
The DOGE-controlled SSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Glasgow, who is vice president of the union representing the region’s SSA workers, Local 3343 of the American Federation of Government Employees, cannot help but feel there is a deliberate effort to sabotage the heretofore popular SSA to the point that the public will turn against it. The next step would be privatization and access to the trillions in the SSA coffers.
Whatever the motive, the purported “efficiency” people are creating onerous inefficiencies.
“It’s crazy,” Glasgow said.
Glasgow figures it will all continue even if Musks reduces his direct involvement next month, as he said he will this week.
Whether or not Musk goes, the Day of the Dead Living seems sure to continue.
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