Harv's Corner 03/31/2025

Harv's Corner

SOCIAL SECURITY IS TEETERING UNDER MUSK
Cuts result in hobbled phone service, web crashes.
By LISA REIN and HANNAH NATANSON •
The Washington Post

The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. But the agency no longer has a system to monitor customers' experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.

And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.

Financial services executive Frank Bisignano faced lawmakers Tuesday during a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump's pick to become the permanent commissioner.

For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12% of the staff of 57,000.

He has conceded that Musk is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.

The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants and legal immigrants who need Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.

"What's going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it's accelerating," Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said in an interview. "I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they're beside themselves. They don't know what's coming."

Leland Dudek — the accidental leader elevated to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk's team behind his bosses' backs — has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security's complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust.

The moves have upended an agency that, despite the popularity of its programs, has been underfunded for years, faces potential insolvency in a decade and has been led by four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed.

Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions from angry constituents in their districts. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. The AARP announced on Monday that more than 2,000 retirees per week have called the organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue.

Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40% of older Americans.

Trump has said repeatedly that the administration "won't touch" Social Security, a promise that aides say applies to benefit levels that can only be adjusted by Congress. But in just six weeks, the cuts to staffi ng and offices have already taken a toll on access to benefits, officials and advocates say.

With aging technology systems and a $15 billion budget that has stayed relatively flat over a decade, Social Security was already struggling to serve the public amid an explosion of retiring baby boomers. The staff that reviews claims for two disability programs was on life support following massive pandemic turnover — and still takes 233 days on average to review an initial claim.

But current and former officials, advocates and others who interact with the agency — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — said Social Security has been damaged even further by the rapid cuts and chaos of Trump's first two months in office.

Many current and former officials fear it's part of a longsought effort by conservatives to privatize all or part of the agency.

"They're creating a fire to require them to come and put it out," said one high-ranking official who took early retirement this month.

Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency team began poring through Social Security's massive trove of private data on millions of Americans, working in a fourth-floor conference room at the Woodlawn, Md., headquarters with blackout curtains on the windows and an armed security guard posted outside.

Their obsession with false claims that millions of deceased people were fraudulently receiving benefits consumed the DOGE team at first.

Then came new mandates designed to address alleged fraud: Directdeposit transactions and identity authentication that affect almost everyone receiving benefits will no longer be able to be done by phone. Customers with computers will be directed to go through the process online — and those without access to one to wait in line at their local field office.

A change announced internally last week will require legal immigrants with authorization to work in the United States and newly naturalized citizens to apply for or update their Social Security cards in person, eliminating a long-standing practice that sent the cards automatically through the mail.

Aging, inefficient phone systems have dogged Social Security for years. A modernization contract with Verizon started under the first Trump administration suffered from multiple delays, system crashes and other problems. As commissioner during the last year of the Biden administration, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley moved the project to a new contractor, Amazon Web Services, and data shows that the average wait time for the tollfree line was down to 50 minutes, half of today's average time on hold. But O'Malley ran out of time to switch the new system to field office phones, he said.

Now a perfect storm has overtaken the system. Turnover that's normally higher than 10% has worsened at the 24 call centers across the country.

Dudek told reporters in a call last week that "all options are on the table" to improve phone service, including outsourcing some call center service.

Scammers are already taking advantage of the chaotic moment, according to internal emails obtained by the Post.

Last week, staff in several offices warned employees that seniors were reporting receiving emails from fake accounts pretending to be linked to Social Security.