Millions of Americans could soon feel the impact of the deep staffing cuts being planned at the Social Security Administration, which is undergoing a massive reorganization that the acting commissioner has acknowledged is being steered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The loss of experienced employees who manage Social Security’s fragile and interdependent web of computer systems will likely leave the agency vulnerable to technical outages and, potentially, interrupt the benefit payments that are sent to more than 73 million retirees, people with disabilities and others, Martin O’Malley, who served as commissioner under the Biden administration, told us.
The former Maryland governor predicted a meltdown could occur within 90 days, though other employees and experts were unsure of the timing even as they agreed the risk exists.
“Everything they’re doing is driving this agency to system collapse,” O’Malley said of Social Security’s new management. “It will lead to interruptions in service, and that will ultimately cascade into more frequent system interruptions for the processing of claims, ultimately leading to system collapse and eventually the interruption of benefits.”
The agency’s overhaul is being led by acting commissioner Leland Dudek, though he has admitted that he’s not the one actually making the decisions, according to an attendee at a nearly two-hour meeting Dudek held with staffers, legal aid attorneys and other advocates earlier this week.
“People are coming in from the outside. They’re unfamiliar with the nuances of our agency,” the attendee said Dudek responded when asked who is in charge. “It’s DOGE – not the DOGE kids, it’s the DOGE management.”
President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency, Frank Bisignano, is awaiting Senate confirmation.
While the president has said repeatedly he will not touch Social Security benefits, the changes being wrought by the Trump-approved DOGE team could harm the entitlement program that tens of millions of Americans depend on for monthly payments, current and former employees and advocates say. What’s more, both Trump and Musk – who last week called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” – have spread dubious and misleading information about alleged fraud in the system, raising red flags about their true intentions among advocates.
Looming cuts
Like other federal agencies, Social Security is going through a period of upheaval as it seeks to comply with Trump’s directive to shrink the size of the federal workforce. It plans to shed 7,000 employees, or about 12% of its staff.
Already, many senior staffers have exited as Dudek, a former mid-level manager who was elevated by Trump last month after collaborating with DOGE, is shuttering divisions, offering early retirement and voluntary separation packages to all staffers and threatening layoffs as part of a reduction in force, or RIF.
However, the overhaul lacks strategic planning, which could have serious ramifications for an agency that has never missed a benefits payment in its 90-year history, according to advocates and employees CNN interviewed. The focus is on swiftly shrinking Social Security’s staff with little thought given to making it function more efficiently or transferring the knowledge of those who depart, several said.
“We have a bunch of individuals with no or little experience in the operations of the agency trying to run one of the most important benefit programs in our country,” said Jack Smalligan, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute who previously was a longtime official at the Office of Management and Budget, where he focused on Social Security. “The downsizing is happening in such an unstructured, unplanned manner, it puts the agency at special risk.”
Even Dudek admitted at the meeting that the DOGE team could make mistakes and “break things,” the attendee said. And he acknowledged that he’s had concerns about benefit interruptions but said he is doing everything he can to prevent them.
The acting commissioner told attendees that the way the reorganization is being carried out is “fundamentally different” than how he’s seen government operate before. Typically, agency leaders would spend several months discussing and formulating a plan, but now the DOGE team has told them there isn’t time and they “just have to do stuff,” according to the attendee.
As an example, Dudek backtracked on Friday from his decision to end two contracts that help new parents in Maine request Social Security numbers and cards for their newborns at the hospital and that share death records with the agency.
“As a leader, I will admit my mistakes and make them right,” Dudek said about the canceled contracts, which garnered media attention.
The shakeup comes as Social Security’s staffing is at its lowest level in decades even as the number of retirees has soared as the Baby Boomers age.
In 2010, the agency’s 67,000 workers provided benefits to 60 million Americans, according to Rich Couture, a spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees’ Social Security General Committee. Now, it has 57,000 staffers assisting 73 million people.
“Losing staff will crater the agency’s ability to serve the public and that could potentially have a disruptive effect on the provision of benefits,” he said, noting that the chaos and uncertainty has already eroded employees’ morale and adversely affected their ability to do their jobs.
What’s more, culling staff will lead to an increase in improper payments – the very thing that Musk has railed against – as workloads balloon, O’Malley said. And it will take longer to catch and correct those mistakes.
The Social Security Administration did not return a request for comment.
Outages happen
Social Security’s core, mission-critical computer systems are run on an aging programming language, known as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).
The computer system is old enough that its monochromatic green screen upon loading says “welcome to the future” – an irony given the age of the technology.
“There had been talk about removing it, because it seems so ridiculous, but that would have cost money and required more staff that they didn’t have,” O’Malley said. “So they’ve never done that.”
COBOL is no longer taught as a computer language to more recent engineering hires. The employees who know it best at Social Security are often those who have been around the longest – meaning they are prime candidates to leave the agency as staffing is cut.
Roughly 30% of the employees on the chief information officer’s team are eligible to retire, O’Malley said, and the number is even higher in a key division that manages the technology that handles everything from claims to payments, the Office of Benefit Information Systems.
“This system needs a lot of maintenance, and the concern is that if they’re not careful with their firing – and they’re obviously not – these people who are experts in COBOL tend to be retirement age,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group.
Advocates and former Social Security officials say that the systems are incredibly intertwined, meaning that the computer outages have ripple effects that can affect other areas of the agency.
There are 3,600 applications that are all connected to keep the agency running, and the 10 regional offices have built their own tech workarounds to solve problems that arise, a former senior technology official at the agency told CNN.
“The amount of shadow IT that’s in place at SSA is shocking,” the former official said. “There’s a lot of custom-built code that’s also been allowed out in the field. … There’s certainly a huge opportunity to correct it, but you have to do it strategically.”
Last year, there were two outages that briefly crippled Social Security’s computer systems. Benefit payments were not affected, but employees across the country were unable to do anything like process new claims, make changes to beneficiaries’ records or help people resolve issues with their accounts.
One of the interruptions was caused by the global Crowdstrike outage, and the other from a hardware server failure that impacted 152 systems, said the former tech official. The outages both lasted several hours and took hundreds of people to get the systems functioning again.
“They’ve never really put the right kind of money and investment to these old systems to prevent these kind of cascading failures,” the official said.
O’Malley said that that he believes these failures are going to become more frequent without sufficient staff to maintain the ancient computer systems and eventually could lead to a “system collapse” that impacts benefits.
“Right now, they’re driving these people that understand the IT architecture, understand how things are connected, understand how things work – and they’re driving them out of the agency as quickly as they can, with absolutely zero transfer of knowledge,” he said. “We looked at attrition as the fire breathing dragon at the gate that needed to be defended against. These guys think it’s a fire upon which to douse kerosene and to give people incentives to leave.”
Fewer offices and longer waits
The loss of staff – along with the closing of agency sites across the country – means that it will be tougher for people who need help to find assistance. DOGE has listed lease terminations for nearly four dozen locations across the country, prompting bipartisan concerns from some federal and state lawmakers.
“If you have a question, haven’t gotten your benefit or need something answered, there’s no one to follow through with,” said Connecticut Rep. John Larson, a Democrat and longtime defender of the program.
In particular, low-income Americans who qualify for the Supplemental Security Income program could struggle to obtain benefits since they have to apply in person, Altman said.
Also at risk are people with disabilities, who already face delays in obtaining benefits. Staff cuts will worsen the backlog of initial disability applications and appeals, which already topped 1.4 million in February, Smalligan said. It takes nearly eight months, on average, to receive an initial decision on a disability claim, roughly double what it took prior to the pandemic.
Even before Trump took office, Social Security was cutting back on services, said Jill Hornick, a union official at the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1395. In December, Social Security field offices stopped taking walk-in customers, requiring everyone to have an appointment.
The new policy could help the Trump administration shrink the agency, she warned.
In Dudek’s meeting this week with advocates, Social Security officials pushed back on concerns that DOGE was closing agency offices, suggesting in some cases only a subset of office space was being eliminated, and not the parts used for customer service, according to notes taken by another meeting attendee and viewed by CNN.
Some details from the meeting were first reported by the Washington Post.
Trump’s conflicting comments
The overhaul at Social Security comes as Trump has tried to position himself as a defender of the beloved program. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign and into his first six weeks in office, Trump has repeatedly vowed not to tamper with the benefits.
“Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something – we’re going to find it,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last month.
But at the same time, both Trump and Musk have made comments suggesting Social Security does have a target on its back.
In an interview last week with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk said: “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And Musk posted on X a chart claiming that tens of millions of Americans older than 100 were still receiving Social Security benefits – a claim that appears to be baseless. But that didn’t stop Trump from dedicating a lengthy chunk of his address to Congress on Tuesday evening to reading the dubious statistics from Musk’s chart.
Attacking Social Security with dubious fraud allegations “shakes people’s confidence” and trust in government,” Altman said.
