A Safety Net Coming Apart at the Seams

In early May, employees of the Social Security Administration received an email asking them to work harder. Not harder in a general sort of way, but at least 10% harder, preferably more. Citing a sudden spike in an already enormous backlog of retirement claims, the missive from headquarters demanded that 60,000 federal workers join together in a mass “sprint” of productivity to reduce processing times “by at least 10 percent daily through the end of May.”

The ask was not accompanied by any mention of the role played by SSA’s new leadership in creating the backlog. In March, the SSA’s leadership introduced new ID proofing and fraud protection measures that created three-day holds on all telephone retirement and survivor claims. The changes were part of a larger suite of so-called “Cost Avoidance, Efficiency and Workforce Optimization” initiatives engineered and administered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Then there was the DOGE-directed effort to shave the SSA by 7,000 employees; at the time of the directive, the project was halfway complete, with nearly 3,500 SSA employees accepting $20,000 buyouts by the end of March. The exodus included many of the SSA’s most important and veteran employees, as well as 2,000 field office workers, or more than one-and-a-half employees from each of the country’s 1,200 Social Security field offices. 

Landing as it did in the immediate wake of the biggest bloodbath in SSA history, the order to “step it up” failed to generate the intended groundswell of public-spirited resolve and motivation. “The response was anger and utter disbelief,” says Jessica LaPointe, president of AFGE 220, a union that represents nearly 30,000 SSA workers. “The DOGE policies caused the backlogs, but they ask us to work 10% harder with 10% less staff? It was insane.” 

It was also pointless. The ID proofing policy, it turned out, did nothing to reduce fraud and has since been scrapped. The staff shedding continues, all to save a few percentage points on SSA’s administrative budget.  

DOGE’s deleterious impacts on the functioning of the SSA extend beyond the current historic backlog of 600,000 pending retirement claims. The ongoing pressure put on employees to leave — whether by buyouts or burnout — also threatens to add weeks and months to steadily elongating wait times for admittance to Social Security’s disability and means-tested poverty programs. In recent years, processing times for these claims have reached up to 18 months. The DOGE cuts threaten to add months or even years to the process. 

The Trump administration has worsened and brought attention to the SSA’s staffing crisis, but it did not create it. Social Security has been steadily bleeding staff, expertise and institutional knowledge since the mid-aughts, when Congress first mandated cuts to the agency under George W. Bush. Subsequent budgets continued to enervate the SSA, resulting in longer processing times and an inability of field staff to perform the jobs they signed up for.

“When I started in 1974, the basic mantra was, ‘When people come into the office — take care of them,’” says Greg Bachinski, who worked for 50 years as a technical expert on the south side of Milwaukee before accepting DOGE’s early retirement offer in March. “They would come into the office and we would talk to them and take their claim that same day. Even with complex disability claims, we would help them get everything together and have a medical decision in three or four months, max. Now, there’s no time to talk to people. We check a box and put them on a list for appointments, which can take two months. After the appointments, it could be another nine months or more before they get a decision.” 

As late as the mid-2010s, extended sit-down interviews remained the norm for most in-person claims. By Trump’s first term, a decade-plus of budget cuts had ended that tradition for good. With 20% fewer workers than it had in 2005, SSA field offices across the country began imposing a hard cap of 30 minutes on interviews. If employees spent more than a few minutes on the phone, managers would pressure them to end the call. “It’s become more like herding cattle than treating individuals,” says one frustrated employee who is considering his future at the agency. 

All those years of understaffing are about to slam into the present. Among the 10,000 boomers retiring every day are many veteran SSA employees like Bachinski: half of SSA staff are either early-out or retirement eligible. This cohort is the keeper of the agency’s deepest reserves of expertise, commitment and institutional knowledge, but for every 10 that quit or retire, SSA can afford to hire only one new employee. Even if the money needed to re-staff were made available, it is too late to prevent the consequences of decades of underinvestment. 

“Not to denigrate people working at Big Boy Burgers, but you can’t fire and replace qualified Social Security staff that fast,” says Bachinski. “These are complex systems and policies that take time to understand. All of these problems we’re seeing could have been avoided by hiring and maintaining the proper amount of trained people.”  

Glimpses of the future can be seen in the North Wisconsin Rapids field office, whose workers Bachinski represented for nine years as president of AFGE Local 1346. Following the DOGE buyouts, the office lost six of its 11 employees, including its two managers. To meet the workload, a manager from Wausau now drives an hour south to the Rapids office twice a week; on the other three days, he helps with Rapids claims on the phone and computer. This disconnect between people and place is new in the history of Social Security and is leading to confusion and time-consuming errors. “When claims are spread across districts, we start getting calls all over: People in Elgin are routed to Green Bay, where the staffer may not know the case,” says Bachinski. “It’s a waste and a recipe for frustration. If something gets off track, it’s hell to get it back on track.” 

While managers are forced to juggle the caseloads of multiple offices, lower-level employees are forced to do specialized jobs they were not trained for. Here, the impact of losing veteran technical experts is especially acute. 

“The technical experts were like the Swiss Army knife of the field office,” says LaPointe. “They could do everything and mentored others. But they have gone the way of the dodo. Now, claims people are doing the work of four or five people. They are burning out. We’re getting reports of mental health challenges. Trump’s budget director said he wanted to put federal employees in a state of ‘trauma.’ Well, it’s working.”

In a futile attempt to catch up with the growing caseload, SSA is increasingly leaning on overtime pay. That may seem an ironic outcome for policies advertised as “efficiency” measures, but time-and-a-half may be a small price to pay if the real goal is the destruction of the SSA as we know it. It does not require much paranoia to suspect a larger agenda is at play, since the administration has been clear about its goal to computerize and, eventually, outsource the administration of the Social Security pipeline, from claims to payments.

“From the union perspective, we are afraid that the idea at the upper echelons is to move everything to electronic systems,” says LaPointe. “This would make it easier to contract out. And it would be an enormous contract.”

As with budget cuts, the idea of digitizing the SSA also predates the current administration. In 2015, the Obama-appointed brass paid a team of Deloitte consults $622,000 to produce a strategic planning document. Published the following year, “Vision 2025” had nothing to say about bolstering staff and retaining personnel. Instead, it urged a tech-pivot to remake the SSA into an “innovative organization” centered on “a more cost-effective service delivery system that is primarily virtual.” The report’s publication, perhaps not coincidentally, timed to a wave of field office closures around the country. In many counties, the offices were replaced by computerized kiosks intended to do the same work. After the shuttering of 80 field offices, the closures were halted by an uproar among agency staff, the public and Congress. 

The kiosks, meanwhile, were largely rejected, and stand today as monuments to the danger of introducing technology to serve elderly, disabled and low-income communities. The importance of the human element is being relearned with the disastrous recent rollout of an artificial intelligence chatbot to handle the 400,000 phone calls made to SSA daily. According to multiple media reports, the bots used in the program — which SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano says he wants “completed this year” — misunderstands basic questions at a high rate.   

Similar bots are also maddening when you are trying to change a plane ticket or speak to your bank, but the stakes are not as high. Calls made to Social Security about missing checks or claim status can be a matter of life and death. For millions of seniors living hand-to-mouth, Social Security payments are a fragile lifeline. 

“Every case sitting on our desk is a human being that needs something very quickly — health care, medications,” says LaPointe. “We’re the face of government, and to provide the world-class service we used to tout, we need to hire 20,000 front line and support positions. Not bots, but trained federal workers who can answer complex questions during times of duress, such as an illness or the loss of a spouse. Americans have bought and paid for the ability to sit down with a well-trained human being who can walk them through complex programs with a human touch, compassion and listening skills. You can’t replace that with AI.”