The Trump administration’s colossal cuts to the Social Security Administration in the name of “efficiency” are sowing chaos and dysfunction throughout the agency. Even attempts to fix these new problems are akin to rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship because they fail to address the core problem: staff shortages.
The Washington Post reports the SSA is “temporarily reassigning about 1,000 customer service representatives from field offices to work on the swamped toll-free phone line, increasing the number of agents by 25 percent.” And when the Post reports the phone line is “swamped,” what that means in practice is that people are complaining about dropped calls and previously reported wait times of up to five hours.
Trump is turning one of the country’s most important lifelines for the elderly and the disabled into a mess — all for foreseeable reasons.
But there’s one little oversight: There is no one in place to do the work that the reassigned representatives had to leave behind. According to the Post, “Jessica LaPointe, president of Council 220 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the move will slow responses to the complex cases that the field office employees handle and be only a temporary bandage for the phone problems.”
“The 1-800 number — they do offer a critical role at the agency, but it’s triage, whereas customer service representatives actually clear work for the agency,” LaPointe told the Post. “So it’s just going to create a vicious cycle of work not getting cleared, people calling for status on work that’s sitting because the claims specialists now are going to have to pick up the slack of the customer service representatives that are redeployed to the tele-service centers.”
So how did the SSA end up so shorthanded that it has to rob Peter to pay Paul? Before the second Trump administration, SSA had a staff of roughly 57,000. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Trump administration’s DOGE operation enacted “the largest staffing cut in SSA’s history,” which involved “indiscriminately pushing out 7,000 workers to hit an arbitrary staffing reduction target.” The Trump administration has also ousted dozens of officials with expertise in running SSA’s benefits and information technology systems.
On top of the problems noted above, reassigning workers adds further inefficiency because they have to do on-the-job training and lean on more experienced co-workers to get them up to speed. And field offices themselves were already beleaguered, dealing with the effects of other reassignments within SSA. “Field office staff are struggling to resolve the most difficult cases, due to disproportionate losses and reassignments in SSA’s regional offices, which provide daily support to their colleagues in the field by answering complex policy questions and troubleshooting system problems,” the CBPP reports.
Trump’s “efficiency” efforts now have a single staff member serving 1,480 beneficiaries, according to AFGE. That’s three times the number of clients that one staffer served in 1967.
On top of all this, the SSA’s new phone system, implemented in May, seems to have problems of its own. Jen Burdick, a Social Security expert and a divisional supervising attorney with Community Legal Services, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the system’s new artificial intelligence could be exacerbating the problem.
“We spend a lot of time calling Social Security offices on people’s behalf — sometimes 15 times a day,” Burdick told the Inquirer. “We’re on hold for hours, then get AI bots spewing random information you never asked for before hanging up.”
“It really hurts our clients who are in trouble, trying to navigate this difficult system. It’s very upsetting for people,” she added.
Staff shortages seem to result occasionally in callers being rerouted to offices in other parts of the country, the Inquirer report adds, and thus the responding staffer is not always able to answer specific questions.
Trump is turning one of the country’s most important lifelines for the elderly and the disabled into a mess — all for foreseeable reasons. Indiscriminate mass cuts don’t represent a serious bid at generating efficiency in administering a public benefit. The only thing these cuts do with any efficiency is rip a major hole in the American safety net.
The future doesn’t look so good, either. Trump’s recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is only going to make things worse, since changes in the tax code will accelerate Social Security and Medicare’s insolvency. MAGA’s policy vision is all about divestment from the common good — and America’s collective future.
