'A bad sign': Trump official offers bizarre explanation for major Social Security problem

Even before President Donald Trump began his second term, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been plagued with poor customer service. But for once, the administration isn't pinning the blame on former President Joe Biden.

In his Tuesday MSNBC column, author Ryan Teague Beckwith observed that the SSA has long had a reputation for excessively long wait times for callers who have simple questions about their benefits. And staffing levels at the agency were already at critically low levels even before Trump was elected to his second term.

But in a recent statement to USA TODAY, acting commissioner Leland Dudek chose to blame not Biden's failure to properly staff the agency or former SSA commissioner Martin O'Malley's leadership, but rather on "advancing radical DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and gender ideology over improving service for all Americans."

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Earlier this spring, roughly 3,000 of the agency's approximately 57,000 workers took buyouts amid Dudek's effort to downsize the SSA's workforce. This has resulted in already long hold times being exacerbated, and lobbies of SSA offices being "flooded" by beneficiaries seeking solutions to problems they weren't able to solve over the phone.

Dudek also rolled out additional identity verification purposes that forces beneficiaries to jump through additional hoops online in order to prove who they are, which has resulted in advocates sounding the alarm that this could prevent some retirees from accessing their earned benefits. Because many SSA recipients are elderly, it isn't a guarantee that all beneficiaries will be able to navigate online verification processes. Beckwith argued that Dudek's focus on DEI was a distraction from real problems.

"DEI has become a scapegoat of convenience for the Trump administration, especially when the problem is being caused by its own policies. It's a political argument, made for the benefit of Trump's largely white and male base," Beckwith wrote. "But when those arguments start to be made by the people in charge of making sure the checks go out on time, it's a bad sign."

On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Fiserv CEO Frank Bisignano to lead the SSA by a 53-47 margin. Bisignano has been referred to as a "DOGE guy" by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, given his sympathy toward Tesla and CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and its goal of slashing federal spending — particularly for Social Security – by hundreds of billions of dollars.

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Click here to read Beckwith's full column on MSNBC.