Social Security workers: Bad situation turned worse under Trump

WASHINGTON—Closed offices. Short staffing. Long drives to get service. Even longer waits in lines. And interminable delays in having your case decided—as the boss tries to push your clients onto computerized responses that are sometimes flat-out wrong.

Welcome to the world of Social Security staffers, where for the last 15 years, with one short exception during the Democratic Joe Biden administration, everything that could go wrong has. 

As a result, morale is in the tank. Potential new workers are hesitant about signing on. The crunch the current workers face keeps building. And for every new worker hired, ten quit. 

The situation at Social Security, both in its field offices and at its headquarters in the Baltimore suburbs, is dire, and it began long before anti-worker GOP President Donald Trump took over.

That’s because, in periodic spasms of cutting the federal budget, lawmakers left Social Security short-staffed even as its workload exploded. The basic law for Social Security calls for a target of 1.2 cents for every dollar coming into the system to be earmarked for running the program and hiring and training its workers.

The actual figure, workers at a Zoom press conference convened by the workers’ union, the Government Employees, said, is 86/100ths of a cent per dollar. Private insurers, the workers noted, can divert 20% of people’s premiums to “overhead.” Left unsaid: Much of that goes into the pockets of the insurers’ CEOs or to “pharmacy benefit managers”—third-party firms who rule whether your policy covers your medicines and treatment, or not. 

And then Trump re-entered the Oval Office, carrying his disdain for federal workers, his turnover of their fates to Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the thinly disguised crusade by Trump’s corporate backers to privatize the nation’s retirement system, thus handing its trillions of dollars—and the fate of its recipients—to Wall Street.

To reveal the problems the workers face, their union, the Government Employees (AFGE), convened a Zoom press conference on August 7. Workers told reporters that there are too few staffers—fewer than 15 years ago—to handle burgeoning numbers of people who depend upon Social Security, especially since the “Baby Boom” generation is retiring at an increasingly rapid rate.

The object of the press conference: To inform the U.S. people that the nation’s basic retirement system not only needs an enhanced revenue stream, but that the faithful workers who run it want to interact more, and more often, with their customers—and that means hiring 20,000 more workers.

Social Security is so understaffed now that system bosses pulled doctors and nurses off of patient care—for people with disabilities who come to emergency rooms—to handle the flood of 800-number calls for such tasks as setting up appointments, often weeks in advance, says Jeanne LaPointe, who ordinarily handles disability claims, which can be complex.

Social Security’s bosses, however, want recipients to sit at their computers, with no coaching at all, and submit their claims, and no possibility of correcting errors due to the automated response system, said Rich Couture. The bosses are even going “to terminate the attorneys and paralegals” who handle appeals of disability claim denials, he added

“Whether it is denial of a claim or not, the decision should be made by human beings,” Couture stated. “We don’t want to go the way of private insurers,” who are now infamous for rejecting legitimate claims for repayment of health care costs, using computer algorithms to do so.

“Just the other day, a customer came in to set up a (future) appointment, and the computer software had no way to track who’s waiting to be served,” LaPointe said. The result is that customers can sit for hours waiting to discuss their needs with a human being.

And the same thing happens over the phone, LaPointe added. The call centers are so overwhelmed that “who knows how long they’ll have to keep trying to get through.”

Conditions improved slightly under Biden, said LaPointe. His budgets proposed, and Congress approved, enough money to hire “thousands of new workers” but only after “we lobbied hard” for them. And all the new workers couldn’t fix an ancient computer system whose machines “we joke, are held together by dental floss and chewing gum.”

When Trump came in, though, he not only ordered Musk to slash the workforce, but he also let Musk’s DOGE diggers copy all of Social Security’s files on individuals: Names, phone numbers, e-mails, bank account numbers, medical diagnoses, etc. Morale plummeted, and “for every new hire” during DOGE’s ravages “ten people would leave,” LaPointe added.

“That’s why we negotiated flexible working hours and telework into our contract.” Trump wants to yank those and force everyone to come into the remaining offices. At least nine Social Security offices, all in rural areas, are now completely unstaffed, the workers said. They expect more closures.

The GOP-run House Appropriations subcommittee, which handles Social Security’s administrative funds, boosted them by $25 million for the fiscal year that begins October 1. Chairman Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., said the combination of that increase and turning over routine tasks to artificial intelligence would improve service. But Social Security’s own administrator asked the panel for $14.9 billion, $200 million more than this year. 

The labor-backed Alliance for Retired Americans noticed the difference, and didn’t like it.

Citing a report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, Alliance President Robert Roach, a former top Machinists official, noted “more than 57,000 SSA workers—an already historically low number—were on staff at the end of January 2025. Only about 49,000 people were working at the SSA in February 2026,” thanks to Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE. 

“The administration…scrambled to reassign remaining staff to answer customer service calls to keep wait times from increasing,” Roach said. “This caused unprocessed claims to pile up. In March, processing centers reported a backlog of six million cases while field offices reported a backlog of 12 million cases.” 

“Americans earned their Social Security benefits with each paycheck. They should be able to expect an efficient and reliably run Social Security Administration,” said Roach. “Once again, we implore Congress to pass legislation…to require a fully staffed SSA.”

Several workers on the Zoom press conference call see an ulterior motive in the mistreatment by the GOP Trump regime. It can be summed up, they said, in one word: Privatization. 

The workers believe Trump, Musk, and Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, deliberately want to cut staff and services so people come to mistrust the system. 

“We prevent waste, fraud and abuse,” said AFGE communications specialist Emily Curry. “The essence of the service is being destroyed,” LaPointe added. 

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