Cuts to the Social Security Administration will hurt Social Security beneficiaries, particularly the most vulnerable among them.
In January, the Social Security Administration (SSA) distributed cash benefits to over 73 million people.
The bulk of these benefits were “Old-Age and Survivors Insurance” benefits, which go to retirees and their families—what we normally associate with the phrase “Social Security.” Another 8.3 million people receive Social Security Disability Insurance, which provides income support to people below retirement age who can no longer work due to a work-limiting disability. Still more receive Supplemental Security Income, which supports particularly low-income elderly and disabled Americans.
These benefits are the only source of income for many Americans, and together, they directly lift more people out of poverty than any other social program in the U.S.
The SSA, in addition to doing the important work of sending out the payments, provides vital services that are necessary for many people to receive benefits in the first place. In particular, it adjudicates claims for disability benefits, a labor-intensive process. There is currently a massive backlog of disability claims, and tens of thousands of people die every year waiting for a decision on their claim. Cuts to staff and SSA offices will only make this worse.
Given the poverty-reducing qualities of the benefits and services the SSA administers, it is only natural that the agency has drawn the ire of the richest man in the world and his illegal cost-cutting operation, DOGE. President Trump and Elon Musk have falsely claimed that there is a ton of fraud within Social Security programs, which really just appears to be a pretext for the proposed cuts. (Or, perhaps, paying Musk and his Silicon Valley cronies money for an AI “solution” to improper payments, which would be disastrous.)
The full scope of President Trump, Musk, and DOGE’s cuts to the SSA is not yet clear, partly because of DOGE’s incompetent and chaotic approach to gutting critical public services. Its website claims to be shutting down a field office in Carlsbad, California, apparently a figment of the DOGE team’s imagination since there is no Social Security office in Carlsbad, California. (There is an office in nearby Oceanside, but there’s been no confirmation of whether that is what DOGE meant.)
SSA Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, a Musk loyalist, has reportedly floated the idea of cutting half of the SSA’s workforce. The SSA has insisted that this is false, but credible reporting continues to indicate otherwise.
Publicly, the SSA has instead floated cutting its own workforce by about 7,000 jobs, which would still be incredibly harmful to beneficiaries. The agency has been underfunded for years now, having lost 10,000 full-time employees since 2010. The SSA’s services, and thus the people it serves, have suffered as a result.
Dudek has also said that the SSA ought to “outsource nonessential functions to industry experts.” It is unclear what exactly he meant by this, but former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley suggested to The Bulwark that it could mean privatizing call center workers with AI.
The bottom line: Cuts to the SSA’s workforce and field offices will mean longer wait times for beneficiaries, worse customer service, and ultimately, fewer people receiving benefits to which they are legally entitled.
Longer wait times for hearings and disability determinations
- DOGE appears to be terminating the lease of one of SSA’s 161 hearing offices, an office in White Plains, New York. The office has a backlog of over 2,000 cases. In these cases, administrative law judges determine whether or not people are eligible for the benefits they seek, mostly disability benefits.
- Cutting hearing offices will make it more difficult for beneficiaries in the area to get a hearing in a timely manner, and wait times are already staggeringly high. Most hearing offices have an average wait time between six and ten months.
- In 2023, 30,000 people died waiting for a decision on their SSA-administered disability benefits, with many of them waiting for a hearing at a hearing office. Others were waiting for an initial decision on their disability, a process that DOGE’s cuts to SSA field offices and staff will lengthen. The longer wait times get, the greater number of people who will die while waiting for a decision on their disability benefits. They often have little-to-no income.
- Even Republican Congressman Mike Lawler has urged DOGE not to terminate the White Plains hearing office’s lease, writing in a bipartisan letter with Congressman George Latimer, “The decision to close shop without so much as looking for a new space is an abandonment of Hudson Valley residents seeking the Social Security benefits that they have earned.”
Weakening of basic customer service functions
- For the last few years, the SSA’s teleservices have been in a state of disrepair. In late 2021, the SSA’s average time to answer calls shot up to over 30 minutes. It stayed that way until early 2024, when the agency began to hire 1,600 new employees to staff its call centers. In September 2024, the SSA’s average speed to answer calls hit just 11 minutes, though it has since increased.
- SSA’s field office and call center staff were exempted from the Trump administration’s first round of probationary employee firings, but much of the new call center staff that has helped to get the SSA’s speed to answer calls down has been hired in the last 12 months, potentially making them vulnerable to future purges.
- Laying off call center staff would have the obvious effect of raising the time it takes for the SSA to answer your call, and indeed, it already has done so. Per a March 6 report from The Washington Post, “Wait times for basic phone service have grown, in some cases to hours.”
- Other SSA services may suffer as a result of staff cuts too. To give just one example, applications for replacement Medicare Cards have increased a lot in recent years. Currently, beneficiaries typically receive a new card within about 30 days, but mass layoffs could make it more difficult for the SSA to process these kinds of basic applications, of which they receive hundreds of thousands every year.
- Scammers often try to obtain seniors’ Medicare numbers to steal their identity, and a successful scam often requires seniors to obtain a new number and new card. Providing replacement cards is an essential service.
Fewer people will get benefits
- Many beneficiaries, in the process of getting benefits, must call the SSA or go to a field or hearing office. Gutting the agency’s administrative capacity means that it will be harder for people to access the services that the agency performs, and thus, fewer people will get benefits.
- (Research bears this out. The American Prospect’s David Dayen has a fantastic writeup on a recent paper showing that staff cuts at SSA field offices in the 1980s lowered enrollment in Social Security programs.)
- In particular, the (relatively) labor- and resource-intensive part of the SSA’s operations is administration of disability benefits. The process by which disabled beneficiaries obtain Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance requires caseworkers and administrative law judges and places for these workers to do their work. Cutting SSA jobs and offices means that disabled people with little ability to work will have a much more difficult time receiving the benefits that they have earned and are owed. All in service of the world’s richest man getting a tax cut.