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Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.
The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.
An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6trn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelmingly popular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.
“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”
The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.
The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.
Acting commissioner Leland Dudek has acknowledged to staff that Doge are making the decisions at the agency. Musk, Donald Trump and others have claimed action is being taken to tackle widespread fraud at the agency.
Dudek was appointed acting commissioner after he reportedly secretly shared information with Doge staff. He has threatened to shut down the agency in response to a court order barring Doge from accessing the data.
“It’s just been a lot of craziness, a lot of foolishness. Until they get rid of Doge and the person in office right now, and the Republicans actually get a backbone and stand up for something for once in their lives, things are just going to be complete chaos. That’s really the best word to describe SSA right now, just complete, utter chaos,” the worker added. “They couldn’t understand the coding, so everything they said SSA was doing illegally, they weren’t. Common sense is something they lack. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Rich Couture, a spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees’ Social Security Administration general committee, the union representing roughly 42,000 social security workers, said Doge’s public targets for cuts make no sense.
Why are they cutting 7,000 jobs, asked Couture. “It has never been explained with any degree of clarity how they came up with that figure. What’s being served by that by a loss of 7,000 jobs? How does any of that supposedly makes this operation more efficient? How does it improves service? How does it improves productivity? Our position is that losing 7,000 people doesn’t do any of those things,” he said.
“I don’t think they’re going to stop at 7,000 people lost. If they lose 10,000 or 12,000, they’re running up their high score. They’re able to brag about it.”
Departments at the agency have been closed and reorganized, with workers forced to take reassignments or risk firings, and all workers have been ordered to return to the office five days a week.
Couture noted the return to office order occurred a day before a buyout offer was set to expire, in violation of union contract agreements, and the offices were not prepared or equipped to handle it, as many workers had no desks or equipment to work.
Phone services for the public have also been cut, and field and regional offices are slated for closure around the US.
“There is no safe office in this country,” added Couture. “It’s a concerted attack on the legitimacy of social security itself. The promise that this country has made to the public with respect to income security is being broken.”
The cuts come as staffing is already at a 50-year low despite the agency serving a record number of recipients as the US population above the age of 65 is growing.
The office of the inspector general at SSA reported in August 2024 that a record backlog of payment actions impacting social security beneficiaries was due to lack of staffing, increased workloads, and decreased funding for the agency, driving improper payments because staff weren’t available to update records.
Couture noted the operating overhead of the agency, as a share of benefits paid out, has shrunk by 20% over the last ten years and is now less than 1%. He disputed any claims of inefficiency or waste at the agency, claiming the agency is already a model of efficiency and as effective as possible under its fiscal and staffing constraints.
He said he was concerned the situation was creating a “negative feedback loop” where, as more employees leave, more work is put on those remaining, depressing morale and inducing more to leave “until the agency ends up in a death spiral with staffing, inducing office closures”.
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“You’re going to see a wholesale collapse in the agency’s service structure. Call wait times will skyrocket, wait times for appointments, processing times, all of it going to skyrocket because there won’t be enough people to do the jobs, which opens the door to privatization.”
Musk has called social security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” and has consistently pushed false claims and conspiracies about the program.
On senator Ted Cruz’s podcast last month, Musk repeated a white supremacist conspiracy theory that Democrats use entitlements to “attract and retain” undocumented immigrants as voters.
This week, Musk shared a chart of immigrants receiving social security numbers, falsely claiming they’re receiving benefits, though the program of providing social security numbers to legal immigrants began under Trump’s first term as part of program to facilitate employment. He’s also falsely claimed dead people are receiving benefits, despite the acting commissioner of the SSA has dispelled the claim.
In 2024, social security direct deposit fraud was at a rate of 0.00625% and less than 1% of social security payments had been found to be incorrect.
US commerce secretary and billionaire Howard Lutnick claimed in an interview on a podcast earlier this month that only a “fraudster” would complain about missing a social security benefit check.
“I worked there for 32 and a half years, and I rarely saw cases of fraud,” said John Oertel, a retired SSA employee for over 32 years in Redding, California.
“Because the agency is so understaffed that people who report their income, that’s not getting reported into the system. Musk and his group are saying look at all these people who are being overpaid, they must be committing fraud. They’re not committing fraud. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but because there are so few employees, none of that information is getting into the system.”
Oertel also dismissed false claims from Trump and Musk that dead people are getting social security benefits.
“They don’t understand or they don’t care. Those people aren’t collecting benefits, but the numbers are still technically active, because you can’t just erase social security numbers,” he said, noting that the numbers began being issued in the 1930s and are not deleted or reused, so they still remain in the system. “President Trump, Elon Musk, and whoever the next commissioner is going to be, I really think their ultimate goal is just to destroy social security.”
A spokesperson for the SSA deferred to press releases on the cuts and reorganization of the agency.
“We have listened to our customers, Congress, advocates, and others, and we are updating our policy to provide better customer service to the country’s most vulnerable populations,” said Dudek, the SSA’s acting commissioner. “In addition to extending the policy’s effective date by two weeks to ensure our employees have the training they need to help customers, Medicare, Disability, and SSI applications will be exempt from in-person identity proofing because multiple opportunities exist during the decision process to verify a person’s identity.”
They said in regard to office closures, that “to use our space more efficiently, we provided [the General Services Administration] a list of leases for termination,” and claimed that the return-to-office mandate was ordered to ensure “maximum staffing is available to support the stronger in-person identity proofing requirement”.
On claims of waste, fraud and abuse, a spokesperson said in an email: “The agency will continue to monitor and, if necessary, make adjustments to ensure it pays the right person the right amount at the right time while safeguarding the benefits and programs it administers.”
