Harv's Corner 04/14/2025

Harv's Corner

Social Security's move to tighten online account security, while necessary to combat fraud, creates a significant challenge when combined with reduced staffing at field offices. Beneficiaries unable to navigate the new technical requirements may be forced to seek in-person assistance, precisely when office capacity is shrinking. This convergence is projected to cause much longer wait times and delays at SSA offices, making it considerably harder for individuals to access services, manage their benefits, report essential changes, or resolve problems efficiently. The result is likely to be increased frustration and stress for those attempting to interact with the agency.

​These difficulties will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, including older adults, people with disabilities, rural residents, and those with limited digital literacy or resources, who may struggle with both the online security protocols and the burdens of accessing understaffed offices. This mismatch between the increased need for accessible support (driven partly by the security changes) and reduced agency resources risks creating significant barriers. Ultimately, it could impede timely access to benefits and essential assistance for the very individuals Social Security aims to serve, particularly those most reliant on direct, in-person support.

Social Security website keeps crashing as IT staff cuts loom
DOGE wants to slash the technology division that runs the portal by 50%.
By LISA REIN, HANNAH NATANSON and ELIZABETH DWOSKIN • The Washington Post

​Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing.

For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration's cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that's led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk's U.S. DOGE Service include a 50% cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example,many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were "currently not receiving payments," agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.

The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.

"Social Security's response has been, 'Oops,' " said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities.

The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.

"It's woefully insufficient when we're talking about a government agency that's holding someone's lifeline in their hands," Milburn said.

The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency's cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50%, the official said.

The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.

A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration's campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.
"We're just spiking like crazy," said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. "It's people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems.

It's the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people."
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are "actively investigating the root cause" of the incidents, which they called "brief disruptions" averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message.

But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours.

The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said.

And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.

Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.

The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.

T he network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers' identities.

The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.

But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
​
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, "While they've been brief, we prefer no outages." He said the outages were under investigation and may involve "challenges we've experienced with a number of partners." Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during "high volume use of the network."