- Social Security Administration employees raised the alarm on Trump’s plan to slash the agency’s workforce.
- They warned that cuts to staff could delay payments for Social Security beneficiaries.
- The agency offered its employees early retirement in an effort to cut staff.
Delayed payments, longer wait times: Cuts to the Social Security Administration’s workforce will have a detrimental effect on the benefits millions of Americans rely on every month, several agency employees said.
“Put bluntly, the ramifications of downsizing SSA are enormous,” an agency employee told Business Insider. “Because it’ll take two to three times longer to work these cases, some people will die before a decision is reached.”
The Social Security Administration sent an email to employees on Thursday offering voluntary early retirements as part of a “restructuring that will include significant workforce reductions.” One internal memo seen by BI on Friday listed two dozen senior staff who had already resigned.
BI spoke to five SSA employees who received the emails, granting them anonymity to speak freely about changes within their agency.
They said they’re concerned that slashing the agency’s workforce will hinder critical functions, including causing overpayments, increased call wait times, and potential payment delays for older Americans and those with disabilities who receive Social Security benefits.
These cuts are part of President Donald Trump and the DOGE office’s larger goals to reduce government waste and slash the federal workforce. The administration has already terminated thousands of workers across a range of agencies. Elon Musk, who is leading DOGE, has criticized the Social Security system in a series of posts on X over the past week, calling out “significant inconsistencies” and saying, “No one person actually knows how it works.”
SSA employees said that since the buyout offer targets workers nearing retirement age, the agency could suffer from losing its most experienced employees. “The institutional expertise is invaluable,” one employee said. “We are overwhelmed with calls as it is.”
SSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI on the impact slashing the workforce would have on the agency’s functions.
The employees said that the agency is already strained to meet the public’s needs, and cutting the workforce even more could significantly harm Social Security recipients. Already, the average processing time for disability and supplemental income benefits, known as SSDI and SSI, has more than doubled since fiscal year 2016 to 231 days — just over seven and a half months.
“Drastically cutting everybody and everything has the very real potential of erasing people’s record of lifetime contributions and therefore their eligibility for benefits,” an SSA employee said. “If they recklessly ‘pulled the plug,’ it would mean disaster to everyone currently collecting and future retirees and disabled claimants.”
‘We just want to help disabled Americans and retirees’
Over 73 million Americans receive Social Security benefits — a number that will continue rising as more baby boomers retire. The agency said in its FY2024 report that staffing had declined to one of its lowest levels in over 50 years, which it attributed to years of “chronic underfunding” even as the number of beneficiaries increased.
Phone call wait times for the agency have spiked since the fiscal year 2008, when callers would wait around four minutes to get through to the agency’s 1-800 number. In fiscal year 2023, callers waited nearly 36 minutes — although SSA has made some progress in cutting down wait times. One SSA worker told BI that the areas the administration is looking to cut would directly impact customer service.
“The people who complain about long wait times and nobody answering the phone are talking about those entities,” the worker said.
One agency staffer told BI that if the Trump administration follows through with cuts, “service to the public will undoubtedly suffer. We barely have enough staff now to meet the public’s needs.”
Another employee said that for as long as they had been at the agency, it was understaffed, and a larger cut to the workforce would mean that “overpayments to beneficiaries will drastically increase because there won’t be enough workers to get to those cases in a timely manner.” A July 2024 report by the Office of the Inspector General found that improper payments have accounted for under 1% of total SSA payouts between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. The employee said slashing the workforce could amplify the issue.
“People who can’t work and are waiting on a disability decision will experience immense financial hardship,” they said, adding that cases subject to re-evaluation “will not be worked quickly enough to prevent overpayments and there’s never a guarantee the overpayment will actually be paid.”
Kevin Foster, 64, receives over $3,000 a month. “I feel the pain for millions of recipients who aren’t as lucky as I have been,” the Illinois resident said. “Social Security must endure.”
Sharon Sartori, 60, who receives $967 in benefits and lives in South Carolina said, “If checks are late, it’s going to put a real strain on low-income seniors for rent, their medications, and food. Utilities could be shut off. It would be a mess.”
It’s unclear how many people will voluntarily resign following the SSA’s latest email to staff. The Office of Personnel Management issued a memo on February 26 requesting that all federal agencies develop reorganization plans by March 13.
One staffer speculated that “once service gets bad” at SSA following any cuts, “the case will be made to privatize us.” For decades, some Republican politicians and lawmakers have floated privatizing Social Security in an effort to rein in the federal deficit, but the idea lacks mass support from voters.
The SSA employees BI spoke to overwhelmingly said that the millions of Americans who rely on Social Security benefits will feel the pain from any workforce cuts.
“We need the people higher up to support us and build systems that work, we need HR. We need those ‘invisible’ people to make sure checks get paid on time, all the systems are up and running,” one employee said. They added: “I don’t know why we are villains. We just want to help disabled Americans and retirees get what they paid for.”
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