Over its nearly 90-year history, Social Security has been one of the U.S. government’s most popular and widely supported programs. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, and checks started being issued to recipients over 80 years ago, the program has had an exemplary record of never missing a payment. But that may be about to change.
After President Trump launched his campaign to eliminate or make massive cuts to federal agencies led by his top campaign contributor billionaire Elon Musk, the Social Security administration announced plans to reduce its staff by 7,000 employees. The program has also said it will close 6 of its 10 regional offices and more than 40 of its 1,200 field offices where the public goes to make claims and seek assistance.
Martin O’Malley, former Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, warns that the dramatic cuts in staffing and office closures could trigger a total system collapse that would disrupt basic customer service and timely payment of benefits to 73 million elderly, disabled and infirm recipients. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Justin Glawe, an independent journalist, and editor of the American Doom newsletter. Here he discusses his latest Rolling Stone magazine investigation into the Trump administration’s actions that could shatter the once reliable Social Security system.
JUSTIN GLAWE: In talking with O’Malley, who was a Social Security Commissioner under Biden for a year, basically what he has said is, “Look, the Social Security Administration was already understaffed at a time when there are more and more people signing up for benefits as baby boomers retire.” And this isn’t just a government agency head saying, “Oh, we need more people. We need more people.”
There have been independent government studies that show that the level of staffing at SSA has gone down as the number of beneficiaries have gone up. So his point is pretty simple. If they’re already understaffed, cutting more staff is not going to help out the agency do what it needs to do in terms of getting benefits to people and helping people sign up for benefits.
SCOTT HARRIS: It’s been talked about that 7,000 Social Security administration workers may be laid off, fired or terminated. That’s a large percentage of the workforce.
JUSTIN GLAWE: Yeah, it’s about 12 percent of the workforce. And I can’t think off the top of my head if they’ve said exactly who those people are going to be. But what they’ve been doing is they’ve been eliminating offices at the headquarters. They’ve been closing field offices. DOGE has slated, I think, 47 field offices in 24 states to be closed. So as your listeners, some of them I’m sure are aware, these are the places that you go to sometimes apply for benefits and to turn in paperwork and things like that.
And DOGE is looking to eliminate those offices entirely so they just won’t exist. So you’ll have to call an 800 number or drive to the office the next county over or something like that. Again, this all looks to be in O’Malley’s and in Democrats’ estimations really just an attempt probably to sort of break Social Security and then look and say, “Oh look, it’s broken. We have to replace it. Look at this very, very broken agency. Let’s privatize some services or whatever the end goal is.” And O’Malley and others think that that’s probably what’s going on.
SCOTT HARRIS: One other episode in terms of recent outrage targeted at what DOGE, Musk and Trump are doing was there was a proposal, I believe, to shut down the phone systems of Social Security. There was some really strong backlash because many seniors, of course, don’t know much about the Internet, can’t rely on the Internet to get specific information for their policies and benefits. So what happened there? Update us on that threat to shut down the phone system so real people could answer the phone and help you with your benefit questions.
JUSTIN GLAWE: Well, yeah, they backtracked on it. But what I think has been a little bit missed in some of the coverage of that is that, well before they said that they were thinking about doing away with the phone system, what drew me into reporting on this however many weeks ago it was, is that they already have canceled, eliminated offices and employees who deal with online customer service stuff.
So the person who I was initially talking to about this worked on customer service issues for people trying to navigate the system online. And so even though they backtracked on the phone thing, they have eliminated people to help online and they’re eliminating the field offices. So still kind of looks like just cutting down on the amount of help that people can get.
SCOTT HARRIS: Justin, what are the possible repercussions for these major cuts to staffing against the Social Security Administration? There’s some 73 million Social Security recipients around the country. Many of them seniors, many totally reliant on their Social Security checks to make it from one month to the next. If checks are delayed or God knows what, if there’s no staff to deal with the needed bureaucracy to process checks and the like, what are the possible consequences here?
JUSTIN GLAWE: Well, I mean, everything that you can imagine when you are living on a fixed income and you don’t have your source of income. People won’t be able to pay their rent. They’ll miss mortgage payments. They might not be able to purchase medication, so they’ll have potential health problems as a result of this.
And O’Malley and others are quick to point out that Social Security has really been a huge success in its time. They hardly, they never miss a payment. In fact, if anything, they’re guilty of overpaying people, which was the subject of the story that came out this morning of mine at Rolling Stone. So the repercussions of this are grave, I think.
If it ends up being a situation where because of the reduced staffing and the reduced workforce that payments stop going out to some people, that’s going to be really devastating for a lot of people. And it’s not just seniors and retired folks. It is disabled folks who can’t work. It’s disabled children. It’s the children of disabled folks who can’t work, who receive these benefits. And it’s everything from, like I said, paying rent and mortgage and buying medicine to just putting food on the table.
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