What’s Up With Social Security?

About 67 million people get Social Security checks every month. The long name for Social Security is  Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. That means benefits go to workers who are old, to surviving spouses and children of workers who have died, and to people who go through a stringent and lengthy process of certifying disability. 

The Social Security Administration (SSA) was already overburdened and understaffed before Trump took office. Then the Trump/Musk regime took a chainsaw to the system. 

While Elon Musk’s DOGE crew is trying to dismantle the Social Security Administration (SSA), they have a fight on their hands. Because of the strong resistance, the situation changes almost daily. Here’s a brief summary of what has happened and where we stand today, April 11.

Overview

First, large staff cuts come at the same time that more retirees are becoming eligible as the population ages. After the Trump/Musk staff cuts, reports the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “SSA will have lost 26 percent of its staff, compared to 2010, even as the number of beneficiaries staff serve has grown by 28 percent.” 

Second, phone wait times already are out of control. In March, according to official SSA reports, the average callback time was two hours and 30 minutes. The average call wait time was one hour and 30 minutes. Only 39.4 percent of callers were ever connected to a representative. Unofficial reports describe even worse wait times. 

Third, the SSA website experienced repeated crashes, lasting from 20 minutes to a whole day. The Washington Post reported on March 25:
“The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.”

Fourth, the Trump/Musk regime is closing offices. That will will mean longer travel times in many areas of the country.  

Plan to end phone applications

Making everyone apply either online or in person would severely disadvantage people with disabilities that make it difficult to use the internet, those seniors who are not proficient online, and people in rural areas with still-unreliable internet service. In-person applications mean making an appointment by telephone and usually waiting more than a month for that appointment. Many seniors and people with disabilities do not drive and would have difficulty getting to an office appointment. 

The Trump/Musk regime’s plan to eliminate phone applications has been defeated—for now. Here’s the timeline:

March 17: Judd Legum/Public Notice published an internal SSA memo describing a plan requiring everyone to apply for everything either online or in person—no more phone applications, as of March 31.  Legum noted, “An SSA source described the policy as part of an effort ‘to break the agency and hurt the public.’”

March 26: After outrage and strong pushback, SSA backed down part of the way, exempting Medicare, Disability, and SSI applications from the new requirement, and delaying the effective date to April 14. 

April 8: SSA abandoned the whole plan, making the announcement on X/Twitter, rather than in an official press release. 

THIS IS A WIN! Public pressure, with a big boost from the stellar investigative journalism of Public Notice, forced the Trump/Musk regime to back down. 

Lies About Fraud and Waste

“Millions of 150-year-old people”: The Trump/Musk regime started with a big lie about millions of 150-year-old people getting Social Security checks. That is complete bullshit. The Social Security database shows millions of people over the age of 100. When the system does not have a date of birth or death, a computer program assigns an arbitrary date of birth. The existence of a such a record does not mean the person is receiving payments. 

On the contrary. The census shows about 80,000 people over the age of 100 living in the United States. Social Security records show about 44,000 of them receiving benefits. Social Security stops benefits when it receives death reports from funeral homes, financial institutions, and government agencies, which are routinely submitted. 

Despite complete and thorough debunking of this lie, the Trump/Musk team continues to repeat it, with slight variations.

“Massive fraud and waste”: The opposite is true. As in any large program, some mistakes occur. Here’s the breakdown, collected by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

“Social Security’s Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program has a payment accuracy rate of 99.7 percent, and the 0.3 percent in improper payments is typically paid out to eligible beneficiaries but in incorrect amounts due to mistakes or delays.^[22] (See Figure 3.) Only 0.1 percent of Social Security benefits are paid to people over 100 years old, a figure consistent with other data about the number of people in the U.S. of that age.”

There’s more, but this is a blog post, not a book. For further information, see the 21-page, well-footnoted report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and subscribe to Judd Legum’s daily Public Notice reports for the latest on this and other news.