As Americans wait fearfully to see if they'll get their Social Security

Rather than reflect any caution from outcries over cutbacks in service, long applicant waits and fear already affecting Social Security recipients, the Trump administration apparently is pressing for more speed in making changes.

Under temporary head Leland Dudek, formerly a mid-level fraud analyst, the agency has shut four of 10 field offices, and, according to a sourced Axios.com report, “is rushing cuts to phone services at the White House’s request, Dudek told a Social Security advocacy group. Weirdly, Dudek also says he is trying to streamline service, even as complaints soar.

Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday held a confirmation hearing for Wall Street financial services executive Frank Bisignano, Trump’s nominee to head the suddenly struggling agency.

The story at Social Security is one that seems to typify this Trump administration. An agency that seemed to be working well to deliver services to 73 million Americans was targeted by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting operation. Despite disparaging remarks about Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” Musk has failed to identify substantial amounts of waste, fraud and abuse, and so has turned to eliminate customer service and field offices.

The Washington Post catalogued some of the most immediate practical effects, but overall, the changes are happening so quickly that the biggest side effect is confusion and fear among the senior and disabled clientele the agency is supposed to serve. Basically, the Post suggests that Social Security is breaking down — with more to come.

Bisignano, the nominee, told senators that he was a DOGE fan, and wanted to pursue turning customer service into artificial intelligence-driven machinery — likely not a good fit for the targeted population of seniors and people with disabilities, or those away from city centers or stuck in nursing or residential homes. Bisignano offered a “guarantee” he would not seek to privatize the program.

More to the point, Trump himself keeps insisting that Social Security and medical benefits will not be touched — they generally are set by Congress, not the White House — even as the obvious chaos they are causing suggest that the agency is imploding over job and service losses.

Longer Waits, Fearful Calls

The Post has sought to list practical effects, including the immediate increase in waiting in lines, waiting for calls, and the crashing of Social Security Administration websites four time in 10 days this month. The promise to end phone services requires web access for issues, status changes and questions that often are difficult to fit into the available categories or physical visits to field offices that are being consolidated.

Among their findings:

–Office managers are now answering the phones at field offices because 12% of the 57,000 workers have been dismissed, and more are fleeing voluntarily. Depending on the time of day, a recorded message tells callers that their wait on hold will last more than 120 minutes or 180 minutes. Some report being on hold for four or five hours. Previous call waits were up to 50 minutes.

–A callback function was only available three out of 12 times when a reporter called the toll-free line.

— Complicated benefits cases are falling by the wayside, workers are reporting. Online claims, which are completed by field staff, are backed up.

–The return-to-office orders for employees do not provide workspace or parking for all employees.

–AARP, the nonprofit senior group, is receiving double its usual inquiries.

–The jam of phone calls before service is shut is encouraging a flood of Social Security scammers, according to internal agency emails shared. Scammers are asking recipients to verify their identity to keep receiving benefits.

–The office to measure effectiveness of consumer response has been eliminated.

Taken together, the cuts may not be intended to affect benefits, but they are affecting the ability of people to apply effectively or to make necessary adjustments for bank account confirmations or personal circumstances.

The people — or machines — creating government forms and web pages always think they are clear; let’s face it, they’re not able to anticipate even the normal set of confusions or complications that arise in families, work separations, relationships and even addresses and names that change over time, to say nothing of differing language abilities., To get Medicare or Medicaid coverage, for example, you need Social Service clearance first. Getting through such a process rarely involved a single contact with the agency.

Building a hand-off benefits system that assumes everything works the first time without human intervention is, um, unrealistic.

Is This What Trump Wants?

What happens to Social Security in the next couple of weeks will also befall the U.S. Postal Service and other service-heavy departments like Veterans’ Affairs. Just yesterday, Trump moved the handling of student loans from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration, whose 6,500-member staff is being cut by 2,700 and has no familiarity with the issues that have arisen over student loans.

A sizeable chunk of the phone calls currently flooding Social Security concern fears about continuing benefits.

What exactly does Trump envision for Social Security besides this errant search for fraud? If Trump and congressional Republicans really want to eliminate the Social Security system for a privatized version, they ought to bring on that discussion rather than cut customer service and phone access to the agency. It is just angering their potential voters and spreading fear.

If there is a better system — like Trump’s always alternative to Obamacare that never appears — they should be debating it in the open.

Despite the big overall numbers, Social Security has been underfunded for years and faces potential insolvency in a decade. It has had four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed. Last week, Dudek threatened to shut down operations in response to a federal judge’s ruling that Dudek claimed would leave no one with access to beneficiaries’ personal information to serve them. Musk’s DOGE team has access to private data of millions of Americans on projects never discussed in public.

As always, the question: Where’s the plan?

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