'Cracks beginning to show': Social security 'in turmoil' under Trump

A person holds a sign during a protest against cuts made by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to the Social Security Administration, in White Plains, New York, U.S., March 22, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Layne/File Photo

The Social Security administration was not in a stellar place to begin with when Donald Trump returned to the White House, but according to a new breakdown from the Washington Post, after one year of his presidency the agency is "in turmoil" with "cracks more than beginning to show" as its reduced workforce struggles to handle its backlog while dealing with haphazard leadership.

The SSA is responsible for handling retirement, disability, and survivor benefits payments to roughly 74 million Americans, a task it has already been struggling with for years. While the agency has been the target of Republican lawmakers for decades, things have gotten substantially worse under Trump, with thousands of employees fired or driven to quit by the massive DOGE firing waves, the Post explained in a report from Tuesday. All told, the agency shed around 7,000 employees earlier in 2025, or around 12 percent of its total workforce.

The remaining employees left at the SSA are left to handle "record backlogs," with 6 million pending cases and 12 million pending transactions in various field offices. "Hasty policy changes and reassignments" have also left inexperienced staff members in charge of key duties.

“It was not good before, don’t get me wrong, but the cracks are more than beginning to show,” John Pfannenstein, a claims specialist outside Seattle and president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees union, explained to the Post in an interview. “It is a great amount of stress on our employees that remain on the job, who haven’t jumped ship.”

Claims of fraud and abuse in the Social Security system have also become more widespread from Trump and his GOP allies, despite being largely baseless or overblown.

"Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone," the Post explained. "Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data shows."

The agency is working to combat its mounting backlog, with Commissioner Frank Bisignano approving millions in overtime pay for employees working around the clock. It also touted a number of improvements to its system in the last year, claiming to have "reduced the processing center backlog by 1 million cases this fall, cut pending disability claims by a third and kept the website live 24/7 after a series of outages earlier this year."

Social Security beneficiaries remain unconvinced by these claims of improvements, however, and Democrats have stepped up efforts to defend the program, which has long been one of the most popular in the entire US government.

“We’ve kept up the pressure and held Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Frank Bisignano accountable for the chaos they’ve caused,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said.

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