The Real Cost of Downsizing Social Security

Since last spring, I’ve been in touch with a woman I’ll call Jean, the manager of a Social Security field office in the Midwest. She and her team assist beneficiaries, by phone and in person, with retirement and disability claims, Medicare applications, Social Security cards, Supplemental Security Income, and other government programs. Their service area, based on Zip Code, spans hundreds of square miles. It isn’t unusual for people to drive two and a half hours to get help.

Jean joined the Social Security Administration more than a decade ago. She started as a claims representative, taking calls and staffing the front desk. The S.S.A. provides benefits to seventy-five million Americans. It’s enormous, and enormously complex, yet there’s an odd intimacy to the work. People come through at the most important junctures of their lives: childbirth, disablement, incarceration, immigration, retirement, death. Twelve hundred field offices are open five days a week. With the exception of the U.S. Postal Service, the S.S.A. is the only federal agency with such a direct, brick-and-mortar connection to the American public.

Early last year, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, of the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, accused the S.S.A. of widespread fraud—Musk said on X, without evidence, that millions of centenarian “vampires” were collecting checks from the agency—and listed dozens of offices for closure. Trump appointed a long-time agency employee named Leland Dudek as the acting commissioner after Dudek boasted that he had “circumvented the chain of command” to help DOGE access confidential data. Then, last May, Frank Bisignano, a fintech executive with no government experience, was confirmed by the Senate to lead the S.S.A.; later, he was appointed to run the Internal Revenue Service as well. (A spokesman for the S.S.A. said that Bisignano serves both agencies “1srcsrc percent of the time,” and declined my request to interview him.) At an early meeting, Bisignano told a group of S.S.A. managers that he’d known nothing about the agency when he was tapped by Trump. “I’m, like, ‘Well, what am I gonna do?’ ” he said, in audio obtained by ABC News. “So, I’m Googling ‘Social Security,’ you know?”

In 2src25, the S.S.A. shed more than seven thousand of its fifty-seven thousand employees, including some three thousand workers who provide direct customer service. Over-all staffing has hit its lowest point since the late nineteen-sixties, when the system served approximately fifty million fewer beneficiaries. In 2src24, an index measuring employee satisfaction gave the S.S.A. a score of fifty-four out of a hundred; in 2src25, a similar index gave it a score of fifteen.

Bisignano was not one of the Trump appointees who promised to destroy their own agencies. He demonstrated no outward hostility toward the S.S.A., which has dealt with inefficiencies and delays that have stumped Democrats and Republicans alike. But he did introduce significant changes, often—according to Jean and twenty other S.S.A. workers, recipients, and experts I spoke to—without fully understanding the implications of those decisions. Most of his reforms seemed to shrink the role of field offices and nationalize operations.

Jean’s Midwest region, for instance, was combined with much of the West, so that it now stretched from Ohio to Alaska. The head count at the consolidated headquarters went from around five hundred to just sixteen, eliminating many policy experts who had assisted field offices with difficult cases. Bisignano was keen to implement technologies such as A.I. call sorting, and set a goal of reducing in-person visits by fifty per cent in 2src26—from nearly thirty-two million to fifteen million. (This goal was circulated to employees in writing, but the S.S.A. spokesman denied its existence, saying, “the fake news media is eager to ignore the truth to scare seniors.”) In November, Bisignano’s chief of field operations told field offices that they should no longer operate like “independent ‘mini-SSAs.’ ” Jean believed that this reflected a misunderstanding of how the public interacts with the agency. “If you keep it local and we are ‘mini-S.S.A.s,’ we’re your source,” she said. “You have someone accountable to fix your problem. You know them. You know their name.”

For years, Jean had followed the same routine. She would drive to work by seven o’clock, even in the Arctic winter months, so that she could schedule out the day for her employees. “I can look at the claims and say, ‘This one’s gonna be a mess’ or ‘This one’s gonna take a long time,’ ” she told me. Some parts of the year were busier than others, depending on the flow of international students and seasonal workers in need of Social Security cards. Her desk was perpetually covered in Post-it notes of various neon hues. Two computer monitors displayed a riot of overlapping windows, including an old, blocky software program called P-COM, which offered thirty-five types of commands. It let her do things like initiate various benefits claims, or check the Unverified Prisoner System to see if someone was incarcerated and thus ineligible.

The S.S.A. operated a national 1-8srcsrc number, but each field office had a direct line, too. Some beneficiaries became familiar to Jean and her team; there were “frequent flyers” whose complicated needs kept them in regular contact. The field office constantly coördinated with local social-services agencies, hospitals, funeral homes, jails. The staff knew which group homes and foster-care agencies served as designated payees for children; they untangled addresses and replaced lost checks. There were special rules on how disbursements from tribal nations should be counted. Supplemental Security Income, or S.S.I., which goes to about seven million poor and disabled individuals, required employees to make regular redeterminations based on fluctuations in income, often from state- and county-based programs. A Colorado resident named Mary, who receives both S.S.I. and disability because of her blindness, told me, “With S.S.I., every resource, every change, everything, the agency has to deal with.” She used to call or show up at her field office to report new information or get help filling out a form; now walk-ins weren’t allowed. When she tried to reach her field office last month, she said, she was rerouted to the national line.

Social Security’s community touch was worn down in stages. Because of downsizing, wait times on the 1-8srcsrc number soared last year, with reports of hours-long holds. Bisignano promised to bring waits down to under ten minutes. To achieve that goal, he pulled various S.S.A. employees off their usual jobs—field-office customer service, payment processing, appeals, I.T.—to answer national calls. Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official and a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, described this approach as “whack-a-mole management.”

One day, Jean spoke to a payment-processing worker who had received only three hours of training, compared with the usual three months, before donning a headset. “She didn’t know what she was doing and could see that the customer was ours,” Jean said. Bisignano claimed that automation of field-office phone lines was “enabling 3src percent of calls to be handled through convenient self-service options.” He cited a figure of ninety per cent for the 1-8srcsrc number, and Jean suspected that this is where the system was headed: full automation. She understood that some queries, such as status updates on pending applications, “could be skimmed off the top,” but she didn’t believe that a bundle of ventriloquized code could handle the harder cases, such as a widow trying to decide when to claim her benefit versus her dead husband’s. (The S.S.A. spokesman told me, “Americans are receiving better and faster service as a result of innovative technology and strategic staffing.” He added that all customer-service representatives “receive appropriate training” and have access to “ongoing technical support.”)

Field offices were having to respond to 1-8srcsrc calls on top of those coming through their direct lines. And even direct calls were becoming indirect. As part of the regional consolidation, offices in distant counties could now answer calls and schedule appointments for Jean’s office, and vice versa. “Before, local calls would have all been answered by a person here—a community person,” she told me. “Now I’ve got to put you on hold because I’ve got to figure out who in which office is handling your claim.” Beneficiaries on the West Coast were mistakenly scheduled for in-person appointments with Jean’s team. Other matters sat around for months, ricochetting between field offices and through cyberspace:

“Claimant calling as she went to her bank today and they notified her that she is ‘dead.’ ”

Please call number to develop fraud allegation and possible appointment of payee.

Proofs included I.D., certified court document and Medicaid card . . . Worker is concerned that they were lost . . . please contact as soon as possible.

“I go back in and double-check,” Jean said. “Everybody has so much work to do. It’s all falling behind.”

Reported wait times for the 1-8srcsrc number did go down—to under seven minutes, as of April—but Romig, the former agency official, told me that there are various ways to fudge the numbers. For one thing, as noted in a 2src25 report by the S.S.A.’s inspector general, the agency was counting the wait for customers who requested a callback, rather than staying on the line, as zero. Jean noticed that the wait times displayed on her internal scorecard often exceeded an hour. And the agency didn’t track whether or not a caller’s problem was addressed. “So many calls are people like me being told by A.I., ‘Do you want to hang up?’ ” Jen Burdick, a legal-services lawyer in Philadelphia, told me. “Eventually, I get mad and say yes.”

Some metrics described as wins by Bisignano signalled trouble to advocates and observers. The number of pending initial claims for disability benefits had dropped by thirty per cent since 2src24, and the average processing time was cut by forty per cent. A report by disability-rights organizations acknowledged the reduced backlog, but found that seven per cent fewer people were applying for disability in the first place and that the grant rate had fallen by three per cent. (That said, the number of beneficiaries has decreased since 2src15, as a result of demographic shifts and frustrations with the application process, Nancy Altman, the president of the nonprofit Social Security Works, told me.) An earlier study, published in the American Economic Journal, found that field-office closures led to a sixteen-per-cent decline in disability recipients in the surrounding areas.

Jean worried that another function of the field offices—as “fraud-detection systems”—was being undermined. Sometimes this involved simple in-person observations. She recalled when one of her employees had spotted a beneficiary pulling up to the office in “this big-ass pickup truck, probably less than a year old,” which he claimed had a value of just fifteen hundred dollars. There was also the not-uncommon case of an S.S.I. recipient trying to increase her cash benefit. “If you’re on S.S.I. and you don’t pay any rent because you’re living with your mother, then you get less monthly cash. So somebody calls and they say, Why am I not getting the full amount? Well, that’s because you’re not paying rent. So then they call back, and all of a sudden they are paying rent.” By chatting and comparing notes, she and her team had prevented many such cons.

Bisignano promised not to shutter field offices, but he continued to bring more functions under headquarters. Late last year, the S.S.A. announced two new national systems that would allow any field-office worker, anywhere in the country, to be automatically assigned a phone appointment or a case. Normally, before every complex call, a claims representative would “look at the earnings record, other former spouses, the remarks from when the appointment was made, policy guidance,” Jean explained. With the national systems in place, an employee would “get a certain number of appointments per day” and “just take claim after claim,” without time to prepare. The employees’ union interpreted this initiative as an assault on local and subject-matter expertise. Jean feared that it was a step toward automating and privatizing. “They’re going to point to us and say, ‘Look how Social Security sucks,’ ” she said. “They’ve been trying to privatize it for decades. Now this will give them the excuse.” The spokesman for the S.S.A. told me that Bisignano intends to preserve the agency. But Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, has described Trump Accounts, a new investment vehicle for U.S. citizens under the age of eighteen, as “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

In January, at the S.S.A. office in Duluth, Minnesota, a claims specialist named Sari Plumb started her day by mailing out S.S.I. redetermination forms. Then she took a string of calls on retirement, disability, and S.S.I. She kept looking at the office scorecard: seven calls in the queue with a thirty-six-minute wait, four people in the lobby with a twenty-four-minute wait. In years past, she had been given catch-up days to focus on a single type of case. Now there was a “lot of bouncing around from one thing to the next,” she said. “There’s no time.”

Plumb has been at the agency for eighteen years. She’s from Duluth, and lives with her husband and adult son in a big, historic house on the east side. Last spring, the bathroom pipes burst, requiring months of costly repairs. The family was still living amid plastic sheeting when, in September, the federal government shut down for a record forty-three days, and Plumb, who was considered an essential worker, did her job without pay. (Bisignano sent a starkly partisan e-mail to all S.S.A. staff, blaming “Congressional Democrats.”) Plumb deferred the loans that she’d taken out to put her son through college and borrowed money to cover other expenses. Even after the shutdown ended and she collected her back pay, it took a while to recover. At Christmastime, Bisignano sent every field office a gift basket of chocolate-covered pretzels made by Pretzables, his daughter’s company. (Though he paid for these gifts himself, Plumb and other S.S.A. employees told me that the gesture appeared to violate ethics rules. Bisignano would not comment, except to reiterate that he did not spend agency funds.) On an attached notecard, the Pretzables logo and website were in a much larger font than the commissioner’s holiday tidings.

“This year is the worst in my entire career,” Plumb told me. The combination of the shutdown, colleagues’ retirements, and policy changes had left her depleted and often physically sick. A co-worker told her about a man who had accidentally been marked “female” in his S.S.A. record. Thanks to Trump’s executive order against “gender ideology extremism,” it was now impossible to change the man’s record to “male,” which, Plumb noted, “could potentially affect his Medicare coverage, such as for prostate cancer.”

She was also concerned that the agency had been dragged into immigration-enforcement activities that went way beyond its remit. As soon as Trump returned to office, according to the Times, the S.S.A. had agreed to share the addresses of nearly a hundred thousand people with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The S.S.A. then moved to categorize thousands of immigrants as deceased, so as to encourage them to self-deport, and halted a program—established during the first Trump Administration—that automatically issued Social Security cards to noncitizens with work permits. In a legal memo uncovered by the Substack “Popular Information,” the S.S.A. admitted that this reversal likely violated the Social Security Act, and would “cause customer confusion, additional field office traffic, and potentially increase the risk of issuing multiple SSNs to the same person.” (According to the S.S.A. spokesman, the agency “partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to update the records of 275,srcsrcsrc individuals no longer holding legal status.”)

Late last year, Trump started to deploy thousands of immigration-enforcement officers to Minnesota. Plumb had friends whose family members were being stopped and detained. In January, she was working the front desk in Duluth when a Native American woman, a member of a Minnesota tribe, came up to request replacement Social Security cards for herself and her children. The woman was on edge. She explained that she had taken her kids out of school because she worried for their safety. She wanted to make sure that everyone had fresh federal I.D.s. “It’s so hard being brown right now,” she told Plumb. “I’m so sorry,” Plumb responded.

The new systems—to nationalize schedules and workflow—that Bisignano had announced in December were slated to take effect in early spring. Yet hardly any information was made available. Staff and managers complained about the lack of specifics, as did legal-services providers and advocacy groups. “We’ve heard conflicting things on how broad the change is,” Jenn Jones, of the A.A.R.P., told me. “We know very little.” On update calls, Andy Sriubas, a former advertising executive put in charge of the field offices, seemed unable to answer specific questions. It wasn’t clear how the systems would account for unexpected staff absences, or what would happen if a claims specialist scheduled for a particular service was double-booked or still busy with another caller. If confidential paperwork were needed, would it all go to a central depository? And, if so, how was that more efficient than bringing an original marriage or death certificate into a field office? Would in-person service remain available? Sriubas pleaded for patience. The national systems would launch in beta mode, as a “minimum viable product.” (Sriubas declined my request for an interview.)

Every previous Administration had launched pilot projects and fiddled with the system, but they had given managers like Jean sufficient notice and resources to train their people. Bisignano’s S.S.A. appeared to lurch from one initiative to another. Last February, it had discussed, then denied discussing, the possibility of cutting the workforce in half. It had eliminated, then partly reinstated, the option of making direct-deposit changes by phone. It had said that it would stop issuing public-policy updates, except via X, then continued to send e-mails and publish news on its website. It discouraged walk-in service, then told field offices to make the option available. It instituted a strict clawback policy for accidental overpayments, then reverted to a gradual one that gave beneficiaries a financial buffer. Changes made in response to DOGE’s accusations of fraud, waste, and abuse were abandoned: there was no good reason to block employees’ access to news sites, no need for redundant “I.D. proofing.” The Administration listed field offices for closure, then delisted them, though some rural outposts, in Iowa, Montana, and West Virginia, offer only phone service owing to the loss of staff. The agency is on a “slow march to implosion,” Jean said. “We’re living in a world of nobody knows anything, and nobody has any details about anything.”

Last month, less than a week before the national systems were set to take effect, the implementation was postponed. Some field-office employees didn’t learn of the delay until after its supposed implementation date. Sriubas was given a new job, in S.S.A. marketing, and replaced by another former corporate executive.

On April 17th, Jean attended a first-ever virtual meeting for Midwest-West managers. The speakers were agency veterans from the shrunken regional office who did their best to be cheerful. There was good news (they were funded to hire ninety-four people), mixed news (“our phone answer rate has been increasing while our average speed of answer has been decreasing”), and news fit for the Trump era (on the org chart, “you’re not going to see CREO, or civil rights and equal opportunity”). All that was said about the national systems was that they would “be phased in, starting with two states,” neither of which was in the region. (They were later revealed to be Tennessee and Nevada.) “Everybody really wants this,” one of the speakers said. “We’ve got a lot of eggs in that basket.”

Bisignano’s other priorities were highlighted multiple times: coverage of the 1-8srcsrc hotline, online MySSA accounts, appointment-based scheduling. “We know what the commissioner wants,” the speaker went on. “We give the commissioner what he wants.” ♦

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