Trump's Assault on Social Security

The plan to cut America's most successful safety net program in half

Social Security is our biggest and most successful safety net program. The annual $1.6 trillion in benefits constitutes 21% of federal spending and 40% of older adults’ income. It lifts more people out of poverty than any other government program. We all know some of the 69 million Americans depending on those benefits. If you are not currently a recipient, you will be at some point. We all have a stake in ensuring that Social Security works.

And so, we all have a reason to fear the Trump administration’s call to cut 50% of Social Security Administration employees. It’s current staff of about 57,000 employees would drop to 23,000. SSA, quite simply, will not be able to function if this happens.

President Trump promised that “Social Security will not be touched.” Then he claimed he would act only eliminate SSA fraud based on false claims by Elon Musk. Gutting agency capacity is not about fraud, and is very much going to affect people’s experience of Social Security. The benefits that so many Americans depend on will not administer themselves.

Social Security is very efficient

An important starting point is to understand that Social Security is an incredibly efficient program, and has only become more efficient over time. The percentage of Social Security spending devoted to administration has steadily declined, from 2.2% in 1957 to just 0.5% today. The efficiency of Social Security was a major barrier to President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize the program, since privately administered retirement funds featured much higher administrative costs, eating into the money left for beneficiaries.

Cutting 50% of staff is especially alarming because the agency is already substantially understaffed. Even as the population it serves has grown, its funding and staffing levels have been consistently dropping to a 50 year low. In other words, SSA staff are already doing more with less. We should be investing more in SSA rather than cutting it in half.

How will staffing cuts affect access?

While we don’t know precisely how the agency will implement the staffing cuts, it will almost certainly entail closing many of the 1,233 SSA field offices around the country. About 120,000 people visit those offices each day. Those that remain open will have fewer staff to serve more people.

We talked with Kathleen Romig, the Director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. She has also previously worked with Social Security, as well as the Social Security Advisory Board. She said:

There’s no way SSA can sustain the thousands of staff losses that result from the massive reductions to come without hurting beneficiaries. Over two-thirds of the agency’s staff serve the public directly, and the rest support their work—hearing appeals, keeping SSA’s systems running and secure, maintaining a high level of transparency and accuracy, and more. It’s going to get a lot harder for people to get help and take a lot longer to get access to their earned Social Security benefits.

DOGE has already announced the closure of 45 field offices, though its unclear if the offices are actually closed. The process is so chaotic that members of Congress are not being told when field offices are being closed in their district.

If the proposed cuts in staff move forward the scale of field office closures will be much greater. Field offices serve many functions. Its where you get a new Social Security card if you lost yours or need it changed due to a name change. The card, of course, is critical for everything from getting a drivers’ license to opening a bank account. It is the closest thing the US has to a national identity system. Field office staff also help people decide when they should enroll in the program, as well as provide in-person assistance when the agency makes mistakes with payments or paperwork.

We already know the effects of field office closures on a smaller scale. A study in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found that field office closures led to a 16 percent decline in disability recipients in the surrounding communities due to excess demand in the remaining offices. The people hit hardest were those with moderately severe disabilities, lower education and lower income.

In prior years when field offices cut back their hours, a seemingly small and benign change compared to cutting half of all SSA staff, there were immediate and significant repercussions. We described what happened in our book, Administrative Burden:

The SSA Office of Quality Review found that the percentage of the public satisfied with the field office hours dropped from 97 to 93 percent between 2011 and 2012. The number of individuals served by field offices declined by approximately 1.5 million between 2011 and 2013. An evaluation found that at 80 percent of eighteen field offices surveyed, individuals reported arriving during the hours when the office had been previously open but were now closed. The hours the offices were open were far busier, which in turn increased wait times from fourteen minutes in July of 2011 to more than thirty minutes by November of 2013. Managers reduced the number of scheduled appointments by 30 percent to redirect staff to service windows to manage the increasing demand. Wait times for appointments grew to approximately three weeks. The public directed its anger at staff…Lobbies were often so full that some had to wait outside. Field offices began to feel less like a doctor’s office and more like an emergency ward. Not surprisingly, service complaints have increased substantially.

The Trump administration’s Reduction in Force guidance specifically says that RIFs should not undermine service delivery: “For agencies that provide direct services to citizens (such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ health care), the agency’s certification that implementation of the ARRPs [Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans] will have a positive effect on the delivery of such services.” Based on prior research about cuts, there is simply no plausible way to provide assurances that staff cuts will not dramatically undermine service quality.

Previous cost cutting was based on the idea that more people would move towards phone and online interactions. Doubtless the same argument, or perhaps some claim that AI will magically enable Social Security to function better, will be advanced. But no credible plans have been offered to support such claims.

In fact, DOGE has already shut down the Office of Transformation within SSA. This office, formed in 2023, was tasked with modernizing service delivery. Partnering with the US Digital Service (which DOGE now occupies), it had won awards for its use of technology.

In other words, not only is there no plan to offset the massive cuts, they fired the people who were best placed to come up with such a plan.

An SSA employee we spoke to, who we are not naming because of concern for retribution, said:

They are effectively looking to dismantle SSA in a matter of months. With no study. No planning. No insider knowledge. Nothing. What they are about to do it appears should take many many years to do it right.

DOGE has also cut funding for research on SSA and how to improve it, by ending the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium (RDRC). Cutting $15 million per year on research to better understand $1.6 trillion delivered to beneficiaries is penny wise and pound foolish. For example, the research described above on the effects of field office closures was supported by the SSA. (Full disclosure: we have received research grants from the RDRC).

Reflecting on research cuts, as well as DOGE’s access to data, Romig noted:

We will know less about the government’s largest and most impactful program and our personal data will be less secure.

“Elon’s boys have taken control of the entire agency”

The Acting head of Social Security, Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer who was promoted after helping give DOGE staff access to SSA data, reportedly wants to replace SSA staff with private call centers. He is encouraging experienced staff to take buyouts and quit. Social Security mostly works well, and so the types of problems that cause people to reach out to field office staff tend to be more complex. Call center staff with limited expertise and high turnover will be a disaster for service quality. People like having a bricks-and-mortar location and competent staff to address their concerns.

The fact that five of the eight regional leaders of Social Security have already resigned gives a strong indication of how little internal support there is for plans to downsize the agency. Martin O’ Malley, the previous Commissioner responded: “We had everything moving in a better direction for the first time in a long time, and now these guys are intent on cratering it.”

The SSA employee we spoke to described the atmosphere among employees:

Terrified, Complete and utter confusion and chaos…fear…Our bosses know nothing; their bosses know nothing…Elon’s boys have taken control of the entire agency. No regular SSA executives would be so ruthless and risky. And all for no reason. They are creating a crisis

How will things fall apart?

While SSA is efficient, it doesn’t mean it can run with only half of its staff. Monthly payments need to be processed for those receiving benefits, new retirees need to start receiving benefits, beneficiaries who’ve passed away need to stop receiving benefits. Computer systems need to updated and audited. Payment systems need to be kept functioning. SSA also needs to collect and store earnings records for another 200 million of us not yet receiving benefits.

Imagine if your bank suddenly lost half its staff. Would you trust it that it was accurately keeping track of your accounts? Would you trust that it was keeping your funds and your banking information safe? Would you trust that you’d receive adequate customer service going forward?

What kinds of things might go wrong? Wage records may not be accurately collected and stored. The agency likely will not be able to ensure adequate security for the records it keeps, from our wages to our bank account numbers.

With such chaos, you or your loved ones might not receive benefits, or receive incorrect benefits. Given the scale of its operation, it’s not surprising that mistakes happen, even with the current staffing. For example, in 2023, SSA erroneously underpaid beneficiaries $2.4 billion dollars. While these beneficiaries largely got their benefits back, a gutted staff will not make more of these mistakes, they’ll also lack the capacity to fix them.

Social Security became the third rail of American politics partly because it was designed to be the rare safety net program that respected its clients. The heavy investment in field offices and capable staff, who were trained to treat the clients as citizens claiming their earned benefits rather than welfare recipients, is part of why it has maintained such strong public support.

Impacts on disabled beneficiaries

The harshest consequences of staffing cuts will be for people with disabilities. They are already shouldering a disproportionate share of the burdens that have resulted from existing declines in SSA staff.

There are currently 1 million people waiting to receive benefits. Long wait times have become a nearly universal experience in recent years. Between 2018 and 2025 alone, the average wait time to receive a decision on a benefit application increased from 110 days to 240 days. It’s not unusual to wait years before eligible individuals ultimately receive benefits.

The consequences of waiting are already devastating. In 2023 alone, over 30,000 people died waiting to receive benefits. Between 2008 and 2019 1.2% of applicants died while waiting, and a similar fraction went bankrupt.

Cutting half of the agency staff will harm all Social Security beneficiaries, and it may be financially devastating for some, but it will be almost universally devastating for people with disabilities. The disability benefit system is already broken, these cuts will smash it to smithereens.

What you can do?

It’s easy to lose sight of what the SSA does because it does the work quietly and efficiently. It’s easy to forget it’s there. It’s easy to forget its importance. But make no mistake, SSA is critical for the well-being of nearly all Americans, whether it’s for yourself or a family member.

There is still time. The cuts haven’t been implemented yet. And Social Security is incredibly popular. It has the highest support for additional spending of any major program.

Support for more spending is bipartisan and consistent over time.

Percent of population that believe we spend too little on Social Security, by party

Politicians know this. And they’re very responsive when they know people are concerned about it. The last time a President proposed large scale cuts to Social Security field offices, public opposition forced him to back down.

Call your representatives. Call the White House. Call them repeatedly. Get to a town hall. Make them understand these cuts will be devastating to you and your loved ones. Get the word out to everyone because everyone will be affected.

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