As the staff and service cuts by the Trump administration to the Social Security Administration (SSA) begin to take effect, those dependent on the benefits program are feeling the impact in the form of website crashes, excessive call waiting times and long lines at department offices.

US retirees, their survivors, the poor and disabled—73 million people, or approximately 21.5 percent of the US population—receive monthly checks from the SSA worth a total of $1.5 trillion annually. As of February 2025, the average monthly Social Security benefit for 65.8 million retired workers is approximately $1,980.86. For 4.5 million disabled workers, who received Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the average monthly benefit is around $1,580.

Changes to the SSA systems began immediately after Elon Musk publicly attacked Social Security and claimed in a podcast on February 28 that the longstanding and vital government program is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” On the same day, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk leads, announced plans to reduce the SSA staff by 7,000 employees, a reduction of 12 percent.

Other changes announced include the shutdown or consolidation of 47 SSA field offices across the country. Of these, 26 offices are scheduled to close in 2025. For some people, the closure of the offices will mean traveling distances of 100 miles or more to the next closest SSA location. Meanwhile, DOGE has announced the closure of six out of 10 regional SSA offices.

Among the immediate actions, for example, is the closure of the field office in Forrest City, Arkansas, on April 25, 2025. Arkansas is the fourth poorest state in the US by median household income behind Mississippi, West Virginia and Louisiana.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the SSA website crashed 10 times in the last three weeks, “because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging into their online accounts.”

Meanwhile, the Post report said, staff reductions have meant that “office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. … And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.”

The Post report continues:

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

In an interview, Independent Senator Angus King of Maine told the Post:

What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating. 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.

Unable to get answers from the SSA, Americans dependent upon Social Security benefits are flooding congressional offices and advocacy organizations with angry phone calls. The AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) has reported that it is getting 2,000 calls a week since early February, double its usual amount, from people concerned about their benefits.

After Acting SSA Commissioner Michelle King resigned on February 16, in a dispute with DOGE staffers who demanded access to sensitive personal data, President Trump appointed Leland Dudek as acting commissioner. Dudek appears to have been selected by Trump solely because he was placed on administrative leave for collaborating with Musk behind the backs of Michelle King and other managers at the agency.

A March 21 ruling by US District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland blocked DOGE from accessing the SSA systems and cited concerns over potential misuse of personal data. The judge rejected the claim by Musk that the DOGE team needed broad access to sensitive information to search for fraud.

Judge Hollander wrote:

The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.

In response to the judge’s decision blocking the DOGE from accessing sensitive taxpayer data, Dudek threatened to bar SSA employees from accessing its computer systems, effectively shutting down the entire system. After an exchange with the judge, Dudek backed down and said he was “out of line,” and “I am not shutting down the agency.”

In any case, Dudek, who was previously a mid-level official at the SSA Office of Program Integrity, began making significant changes at SSA, including the suspension of telework programs that allowed employees to work remotely, shutting down the office that monitors whether people are satisfied with SSA services and implementing new identity-proofing procedures.

A report by Popular Information on March 17 detailed the changes to the claims process being implemented under Dudek’s direction, saying they “would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.”

As with all of DOGE’s justifications for attacks on the federal workforce and government services and agencies, a memo authored by Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz said the motivation for the new identity-proofing procedures is the need to mitigate “fraud risks.” Lies about rampant fraud are at the center of the campaign to dismantle the system or to privatize the nearly $3 trillion Social Security Trust Fund.

During his address to a joint session of Congress last month, Trump peddled the lie, boosted by Musk, that millions of people over the age of 100 were receiving benefits checks based on a deliberate misrepresentation of Social Security databases.

The amount of Social Security fraud that takes place is less than 1 percent of the annual budget of the program. While specific annual figures are not available, the Center for Retirement Research reports that improper payments, including those to deceased individuals, are estimated at about $3 billion per year.

The Office of the Inspector General reported that, as of November 2024, SSA imposter scams resulted in losses of $577 million. This amounts to a rounding error when compared to the nearly $1.5 trillion in annual expenditures.

According to one former SSA operations official who spoke to Axios, the money it would cost to implement the changes sought by Dudek would dwarf any savings that would come from cracking down on identity fraud.

The biggest change outlined in Diaz’s memo would require “internet identity proofing” for “benefit claims … made over the phone.” When an SSA customer is “unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation.”

Because the SSA serves a large population that is either older or physically disabled, many cannot access the internet and must make a phone call to sign up for benefits. The new system would force these individuals to visit an office to have their claims processed. The Diaz memo estimates it would require 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors per week to SSA’s offices to implement the policy.

With SSA offices being closed and staff reductions underway, the resources do not exist to handle the influx of in-person appointments. According to the Popular Information report:

In 2023, the most recent data available, there were about 119,128 daily visits, on average, to SSA offices. Eighty-five thousand more weekly visits would be a 14 percent increase. SSA offices no longer accept walk-ins and the wait time for an appointment, even before these changes, averaged over a month.

Crippling the SSA system and creating chaos is part of the strategy of Trump, Musk and DOGE, as this will be used as a justification for the privatization of Social Security and provide direct access to the trillions of dollars in financial assets that the working class has paid into it over generations through payroll deductions.

The mounting attack by the cabal of billionaires running the White House on Social Security provides a powerful impulse for masses of people to embrace the struggle for the socialist transformation of society, including the expropriation of the wealth of the parasitic financial elite and the expansion of retirement benefits and reduction of the retirement age for all workers.