Beneficiary

There’s some good news related to the Trump administration’s concerted attack on the Social Security Administration: Thus far, it doesn’t appear to have significantly affected the delivery of benefits. Checks are still going out and payments into beneficiaries’ bank accounts are still arriving on time.

Beyond that, however, the system is going to hell.

While Social Security appears to still be working well — superficially — under the surface the agency is suffering through a period of unprecedented turmoil. That’s the gist of a new report by Kathleen Romig and Devin O’Connor, Social Security experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Under the Trump administration, Romig and O’Connor observe, the Social Security Administration’s regional office staff “have been mostly eliminated, robbing front-line staff of key supports.” Headquarters staffing has been cut by nearly half, including technology experts. Field office and call center staff also have been eviscerated.

Few departments within SSA have been spared — not even the office tasked with helping members of Congress assist their constituents with Social Security issues and helping to develop legislation.

The so-called Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs was cut to three employees from 50. Constituent caseworkers in congressional offices have been receiving “bounce-back emails and no-replies from legislative liaison offices that were previously responsive to congressional inquiries,” according to a letter sent by 50 Democratic House members to the SSA in July.

Even Republicans, who generally have been willing to go along with the administration’s rampage through agency budgets, raised the alarm about customer service failures at SSA, noting in a legislative markup that “there are significant service delivery challenges at SSA that are impacting critical services that millions of Americans count on. “

The agency’s staffing problems may be simmering under the surface, but it translates into chronically poor customer service. “Inadequate staffing at SSA directly harms the retirees, people with disabilities, and bereaved families the agency is responsible for serving,” Romig and O’Connor report.

“Because there aren’t enough workers in SSA’s local offices, applicants wait over a month on average for an appointment. Because there aren’t enough people answering the agency’s 800 number, most callers wait over two hours on average for an answer, as of early August,” they write. “Because there aren’t enough disability examiners, applicants wait eight months for an initial decision on their eligibility for disability benefits, with an additional seven-month wait for those who appeal.”

Meanwhile, more information has emerged about the incursion of untrained representatives of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting DOGE service into Social Security’s most carefully guarded databases. The outcome has been the exposure of workers’ and beneficiaries’ private personal information to outsiders, all without adequate oversight.

I’ve been following Trump’s campaign against Social Security from the outset. Although Trump has promised repeatedly that “we’re not touching Social Security,” actions speak louder than words, and his unconcern about the program, if not his outright hostility, have been screaming from the rooftops.

Among the weapons Trump could use to undermine the program, as I wrote, was “starving the program of administrative resources — think money and staff.” As it happened, Sure enough, within a month of Trump’s inauguration, the program announced plans to reduce its employee base to 50,000 from 57,000.

Its press release about the reduction referred to the program’s “bloated workforce.” That sounded like a cheap gag, since the truth is that the agency has been hopelessly understaffed for years.

The DOGE team showed its ignorance and incompetence at every turn, issuing inaccurate assertions about fraud at Social Security and then instituting operational changes that had no effect on fraud but inconvenienced thousands of beneficiaries. In March, for example, a DOGE employee went on Fox News with the claim that 40% of phone calls to the agency to change direct deposit information came from fraudsters. As a result, the agency mandated that such changes had to be made in person or online.

The true statistic misinterpreted by DOGE was that 40% of direct deposit fraud is connected with phone calls, not that 40% of all calls to change bank information is fraudulent. After the dime dropped at DOGE, the restriction was rescinded.

Since then, the Trump administration has acted from time to time as if the Social Security Administration is an arm of the White House. In March, it shut down SSA services in Maine because the state’s governor had challenged Trump face-to-face over his policies. (The decision was promptly reversed, but then-Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek admitted that he had taken the step in retaliation for the governor’s conflict with Trump.)

In April, Trump tried to dragoon Social Security into his anti-immigrant campaign by declaring some 6,300 purportedly illegal immigrants to be “dead” in program records, even though they were very much alive. The administration said its goal was to deny the workers benefits, though under the law noncitizens without legal residency in the U.S. can’t collect benefits, even if they’ve made payroll contributions to the program.

The biggest threat to the public’s confidence in Social Security may be the administration’s raid on its secure databases, starting with a rampage by DOGE documented by then-Chief of Staff Tiffany Flick.

More has come out since Flick filed her account in court. Last month, Chuck Borges, formerly the program’s chief data officer, filed a whistleblower affidavit outlining his concerns about “serious data security lapses, evidently orchestrated by DOGE officials, currently employed as SSA employees, that risk the security of over 300 million Americans’ Social Security data.”

DOGE, Borges reported, created “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information” and placed it in a digital platform that could be easily accessed by those without authorization.

At issue is the so-called NUMIDENT database, which includes the “name, … place and date of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, parents’ names and social security numbers, phone number, address, and other personal information” of every applicant for a Social Security card.

“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment,” Borges asserts, “Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost.”

Trump has instituted the largest staffing cut in Social Security history, while the caseload per employee is higher than ever

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

A federal court shut that access and activity down. But in June it was overruled by the Supreme Court, which unaccountably granted DOGE members access to the agency database “in order for those members to do their work.”

SSA didn’t respond to my request for comment on these issues or on increasing concern about the program’s functioning under its recently installed commissioner, Frank Bisignano.

Bisignano has been issuing self-congratulatory press releases boasting about improvements to customer service metrics at the agency — for example, phone answer times cut to an average of six minutes, down from 30 minutes last year. A press release issued in July attributed the improvement to “focused technology enhancements and process engineering.”

In fact, according to Romig and O’Connor, it’s more likely that the improvement happened because the agency reassigned 1,000 staffers from field offices, where they served clients face-to-face, to answering phones. The reassignments, Romig and O’Connor observed, “likely is coming at a steep cost to the rest of the agency’s work.”

At least 2,000 field office employees already had been pushed out by DOGE, so removing an additional 1,000 workers from the field only “deepens problems for people seeking in-person service — which were already considerable.”

Indeed, back in April the agency itself acknowledged that more than three dozen field offices around the country were in dire condition, suffering staff losses of 25% to 33% from DOGE’s “voluntary” resignation program that resulted in the loss of more than 7,000 workers overall, or 13% of the payroll.

Earlier this year, DOGE listed 47 Social Security offices due for closing, though it is not clear how many have actually been shuttered this year or what the schedule is for closing the rest.

Over the last decade or so, Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been wringing their hands over what they say is Social Security’s impending fiscal crisis, caused by the exhaustion of its trust fund reserve sometime in the next decade. But that’s still the subject of conjecture.

What’s more certain is that the congressional cheeseparing and the DOGE raid that have produced the largest staffing cut in the program’s history — at a time when its caseload is at record size and is destined to grow even further — loom as a greater threat to most workers and beneficiaries.

“To raise customer service to acceptable levels, Congress must not only provide SSA with sufficient funding but also forcefully push back against the Administration’s current mismanagement of its existing resources,” Romig and O’Connor maintain.

They’re right. Isn’t it time for Capitol Hill to take firm, bipartisan action to protect America’s most important government service from its enemies?

John McGing couldn’t reach a human. That might be business-as-usual in this economy, but it wasn’t business; he had called the Social Security Administration, where the questions often aren’t generic and the callers tend to be older, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable Americans.

McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had an in-the-weeds question: how to prevent overpayments that the federal government might later claw back. His call was intercepted by an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot.

No matter what he said, the bot parroted canned answers to generic questions, not McGing’s obscure query. “If you do a key press, it didn’t do anything,” he said. Eventually, the bot “glitched or whatever” and got him to an agent.

It was a small but revealing incident. Unbeknownst to McGing, a former Social Security employee in Maryland, he had encountered a technological tool recently introduced by the agency. Former officials and longtime observers of the agency say the Trump administration rolled out a product that was tested but deemed not yet ready during the Biden administration.

“With the new administration, they’re just kind of like, let’s go fast and fix it later, which I don’t agree with, because you are going to generate a lot of confusion,” said Marcela Escobar-Alava, who served as Social Security’s chief information officer under President Joe Biden.

Some 74 million people receive Social Security benefits; 11 million of those receive disability payments. In a survey conducted last fall, more than a third of recipients said they wouldn’t be able to afford such necessities as food, clothing, or housing without it. And yet the agency has been shedding the employees who serve them: Some 6,200 have left the agency, its commissioner told lawmakers in June, and critics in Congress and elsewhere say that’s led to worse customer service, despite the agency’s efforts to build up new technology.

Take the new phone bot. At least some beneficiaries don’t like it: Social Security’s Facebook page is, from time to time, pockmarked with negative reviews of the uncooperative bot, as the agency said in July that nearly 41% of calls are handled by the bot.

Lawmakers and former agency employees worry it foreshadows a less human Social Security, in which rushed-out AI takes the place of pushed-out, experienced employees.

Anxieties across party lines

Concern over the direction of the agency is bipartisan. In May, a group of House Republicans wrote to the Social Security Administration expressing support for government efficiency, but cautioning that their constituents had criticized the agency for “inadequate customer service” and suggesting that some measures may be “overly burdensome.”

The agency’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive, is a tech enthusiast. He has a laundry list of initiatives on which to spend the $600 million in new tech money in the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request. He’s gotten testy when asked whether his plans mean he’ll be replacing human staff with AI.

“You referred to SSA being on an all-time staffing low; it’s also at an all-time technological high,” he snapped at one Democrat in a House hearing in late June.

But former Social Security officials are more ambivalent. In interviews with KFF Health News, people who left the agency — some speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration and its supporters — said they believe the new administration simply rushed out technologies developed, but deemed not yet ready, by the Biden administration. They also said the agency’s firing of thousands of employees resulted in the loss of experienced technologists who are best equipped to roll out these initiatives and address their weaknesses.

“Social Security’s new AI phone tool is making it even harder for people to get help over the phone — and near impossible if someone needs an American Sign Language interpreter or translator,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told KFF Health News. “We should be making it as easy as possible for people to get the Social Security they’ve earned.”

Spokespeople for the agency did not reply to questions from KFF Health News.

Using AI to automate customer service is one of the buzziest businesses in Silicon Valley. In theory, the new breed of artificial intelligence technologies can smoothly respond, in a human-like voice, to just about any question. That’s not how the Social Security Administration’s bot seems to work, with users reporting canned, unrelated responses.

The Trump administration has eliminated some online statistics that obscure its true performance, said Kathleen Romig, a former agency official who is now director of Social Security and disability policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The old website showed that most callers waited two hours for an answer. Now, the website doesn’t show waiting times, either for phone inquiries (once callback wait time is accounted for) or appointment scheduling.

While statistics are being posted that show beneficiaries receive help — that is, using the AI bot or the agency’s website to accomplish tasks like getting a replacement card — Romig said she thinks it’s a “very distorted view” overall. Reviews of the AI bot are often poor, she said.

Agency leaders and employees who first worked on the AI product during the Biden administration anticipated those types of difficulties. Escobar-Alava said they had worked on such a bot, but wanted to clean up the policy and regulation data it was relying on first.

“We wanted to ensure the automation produced consistent and accurate answers, which was going to take more time,” she said. Instead, it seems the Trump administration opted to introduce the bot first and troubleshoot later, Escobar-Alava said.

Romig said one former executive told her that the agency had used canned FAQs without modifications or nuances to accommodate individual situations and was monitoring the technology to see how well it performed. Escobar-Alava said she has heard similarly.

Could automation help?

To Bisignano, automation and web services are the most efficient ways to assist the program’s beneficiaries. In a letter to Warren, he said that agency leaders “are transforming SSA into a digital-first agency that meets customers where they want to be met,” making changes that allow the vast majority of calls to be handled either in an automated fashion or by having a human return the customer’s call.

Using these methods also relieves burdens on otherwise beleaguered field offices, Bisignano wrote.

Altering the phone experience is not the end of Bisignano’s tech dreams. The agency asked Congress for some $600 million in additional funding for investments, which he intends to use for online scheduling, detecting fraud, and much more, according to a list submitted to the House in late June.

But outside experts and former employees said Bisignano overstated the novelty of the ideas he presented to Congress. The agency has been updating its technology for years, but that does not necessarily mean thousands of its workers are suddenly obsolete, Romig said. It’s not bad that the upgrades are continuing, she said, but progress has been more incremental than revolutionary.

Some changes focus on spiffing up the agency’s public face. Bisignano told House lawmakers that he oversaw a redesign of the agency’s performance-statistics page to emphasize the number of automated calls and deemphasize statistics about call wait times. He called the latter stats “discouraging” and suggested that displaying them online might dissuade beneficiaries from calling.

Warren said Bisignano has since told her privately that he would allow an “inspector general audit” of their customer-service quality data and pledged to make a list of performance information publicly available. The agency has since updated its performance statistics page.

Other changes would come at greater cost and effort. In April, the agency rolled out a security authentication program for direct deposit changes, requiring beneficiaries to verify their identity in person if what the agency described in regulatory documents as an “automated” analysis system detects anomalies.

According to documents accompanying the proposal, the agency estimated about 5.8 million beneficiaries would be affected — and that it would cost the federal government nearly $1.2 billion, mostly driven by staff time devoted to assisting claimants. The agency is asking for nearly $7.7 billion in the upcoming fiscal year for payroll overall.

Christopher Hensley, a financial adviser in Houston, said one of his clients called him in May after her bank changed its routing number and Social Security stopped paying her, forcing her to borrow money from her family.

It turned out that the agency had flagged her account for fraud. Hensley said she had to travel 30 minutes to the nearest Social Security office to verify her identity and correct the problem.

Tahir writes for KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.