Your monthly Social Security payment hasn’t arrived on time. You call Social Security’s 1-800 number, and a chatbot answers. The bot provides no helpful information. You repeatedly ask to be connected to an agent, until finally you are disconnected. You drive an hour to the nearest Social Security field office, where you’re told there are no walk-ins. The next available appointment is in two months — and your mortgage payment is due tomorrow.
This nightmare scenario could happen to you or someone you love. Why? Because President Trump and Elon Musk have sabotaged Social Security from within, gutting the infrastructure that has always ensured Americans get their hard earned benefits.
Ninety years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law. It has since withstood wars, recessions and pandemics, but it has never faced a greater threat than Trump and Musk.
I don’t say that lightly. I have over 50 years of expertise on Social Security and have written multiple books on its history. My mentors, Robert Ball, Wilbur Cohen and Robert Myers, began working on Social Security in the 1930s. If they were alive to see the damage Trump is doing to the system, they would be horrified.
Social Security is too popular to destroy in the light of day. President George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he couldn’t convince even a Republican-controlled Congress to hold a vote.
Trump has apparently learned from Bush’s defeat. His strategy is to destroy Social Security quietly from within, while loudly claiming he will never cut it. He has decimated the Social Security Administration’s dedicated workforce. Musk’s underlings in the Department of Government Efficiency have forced out thousands of Social Security staffers, including many in leadership positions. This is a mass involuntary exodus of expertise and institutional knowledge.
Most recently, the Trump administration pushed out Social Security’s chief data officer, Charles Borges, a brave whistleblower. Borges sounded the alarm about Musk’s DOGE minions grabbing all of our most sensitive Social Security data for unknown purposes and making it vulnerable to hackers.
Trump and Musk have no understanding of what it takes to run Social Security. They think they can replace these dedicated, experienced staffers with 20-year-olds and an AI chatbot. They are catastrophically wrong.
So is the man they handpicked to lead Social Security, self described “DOGE person” and Wall Street billionaire Frank Bisignano. Bisignano admits that he had to google “Social Security” when they offered him the job. But his lack of experience and expertise hasn’t stopped him from making sweeping changes — including replacing human workers with untested AI bots.
Under the Trump administration, Social Security field offices have lost an estimated 20 percent of their staff. Social Security has stopped reporting metrics that have been public for decades. Bisignano is cherry-picking the remaining metrics to try to paint a rosy picture, but investigations from journalists and members of Congress tell a very different story.
A Washington Post reporter called Social Security’s 1-800 number and asked the AI chatbot to connect her to a human. It took eight attempts. Similarly, an investigation from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) found that most calls to the help line are never answered by a human. According to her team, “The majority of calls ended when the caller was placed on hold and then dropped … leaving the caller without assistance.”
Like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic, the Trump administration responded to this accurate but devastating reporting by shifting thousands of field office workers to answering the 1-800 number — which means they aren’t processing benefit claims. Although Trump can report that the phones are being answered more quickly, the work to actually get benefits into people’s hands is falling farther behind.
Even before Trump took office, the Social Security Administration was understaffed due to decades of underfunding from congressional Republicans. In 2023, the agency was at its lowest staffing level in 25 years, even as the number of beneficiaries climbed, with 12,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day.
In December 2023, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) was confirmed as Social Security commissioner. Under his leadership, the agency finally made progress improving service to the public (progress that Bisignano is now falsely trying to take credit for). Congress provided funding to hire more staff, although it still was not nearly enough.
Instead of building on O’Malley’s good work, Trump, Musk and Bisignano are taking a wrecking ball to the Social Security Administration. The only reason the system hasn’t already collapsed is that the mission-driven staffers who remain are each doing the work of five people. They are holding Social Security together with shoestrings and chewing gum— but they can’t do it forever.
I don’t say this to scare people, but to spur them to action. Now is the time to call your members of Congress, go to town hall meetings, and join protest marches. Tell Trump and DOGE to keep their hands off our hard-earned Social Security benefits. In America, we don’t kneel to self-styled kings. We stand up and we fight back.
Nancy Altman is president of Social Security Works.
