Since the Trump administration took office in January, the Social Security Administration has experienced significant deterioration following cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Caseload backlogs have swelled to over 6 million, and applicants now face substantial obstacles in obtaining basic information.
According to a Washington Post report, "Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures." Employees who were not terminated or resigned in response to the changes have been reassigned between departments with minimal training for their new roles, further compromising service delivery.
As the report notes, those efficiencies put in place by DOGE staffers have left the agency in “turmoil" as multiple commissioners have come and gone, leading to “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.”
According to John Pfannenstein, a claims specialist outside Seattle and president of Local 3937 of the American Federation of Government Employees, “It was not good before, don’t get me wrong, but the cracks are more than beginning to show.”
The Post reported that “regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.”
“Wait times for callbacks remain over an hour, and more than a quarter of callers are not being served — by getting disconnected or never receiving a callback, for instance,” pointed out Jenn Jones, AARP’s vice president of financial security.
The report notes that the remaining staff members have been forced to accept reassignment to new duties or face firing and that training for the new positions has, at times, been nonexistent.
“Training on the phone system and complicated claims and benefit programs lasted four hours for some reassigned workers when it should have taken six months, another employee said. As a result, some customers still can’t get basic questions answered or are given inaccurate information, according to a half-dozen staffers who answer the phones or work closely with employees who do,” the Post reported, and one employee added: “They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim.”
You can read more here.