While news about the Department of Government Efficiency has disappeared from the headlines, as the White House deals with the Jeffrey Epstein files scandal and a looming government shutdown, the damage the Elon Musk-inspired agency did is not getting better.
According to a new report from the New York Times, the damage done to the Social Security Administration is extensive and deep, with offices woefully understaffed, calls going unanswered and remaining employees barely hanging on.
As the Times' Tara Siegel Bernard reported, DOGE “sent the agency into a state of upheaval, while Mr. Musk and his lieutenants spread false claims of widespread fraud,“ adding, “shrinking the staff, before making technological improvements, has made an already difficult situation worse, particularly for Social Security’s most vulnerable beneficiaries, many field staffers, legal advocates and researchers said.”
According to one employee working out of an understaffed office in the Midwest, “In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad, to the point that a lot of us are medicated.”
“The agency already lost 1,230 field office workers from March through August, according to an analysis of agency data by the AFGE Council 220, a union that represents Social Security employees. Then, in July, roughly 1,000 field office workers were diverted to work on the national phone lines, which meant they had new responsibilities while local offices had fewer people to absorb the load,” the Times reported.
The report added that people needing Social Security cards are facing waits of up to six weeks just for an appointment, and those who have questions about their payments are being left on hold.
According to Katie Savin, an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento who co-authored a study on the impact of all the changes, “Respondents overwhelmingly reported that compounding administrative breakdowns — loss of staff with specialized knowledge, rapidly changing policies, significantly worse processing delays, more frequent errors with emails and faxes routinely lost — have made even basic tasks impossible.”
Jan Gibson, whose daughter receives disability benefits, told the Times that when she tried to make changes by phone, “The answering bot hung up after telling me to verify the information and call back. This message continued for two days.”