DOGE’s Social Security Breaches Send Staffers Into ‘Death Spiral’
Corbin Bolies The Daily Beast
Elon Musk speaks at a Donald Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
The changes have driven fears among staffers that Americans would lose Social Security benefits.
“Until they get rid of DOGE and the person in office right now, and the Republicans actually get a backbone and stand up for something for once in their lives, things are just going to be complete chaos,” one worker told The Guardian. “That’s really the best word to describe SSA right now, just complete, utter chaos."
The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers benefits to nearly 69 million Americans a month, amounting to $1.6 trillion in benefits. DOGE architect Musk has claimed the entire agency amounted to a “Ponzi scheme.”
Staffers told The Guardian that DOGE’s plans to cut 7,000 jobs, close offices, and alter the SSA’s computer code could risk millions of beneficiaries not getting their benefits in time if it collapses.
“They couldn’t understand the coding, so everything they said SSA was doing illegally, they weren’t,” the source said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
The union representing more than 40,000 SSA workers—the American Federation of Government Employees’ Social Security Administration—said it believes DOGE will seek to cut even more than the 7,000 jobs it promised to nix.
“There is no safe office in this country,” Rich Couture, a spokesperson for the union, told The Guardian. “It’s a concerted attack on the legitimacy of social security itself. The promise that this country has made to the public with respect to income security is being broken.”
Couture fears a “negative feedback loop” in which staffing cuts lead to more work for those remaining. That, in turn, will push them to quit “until the agency ends up in a death spiral with staffing, inducing office closures,” Couture said.
“You’re going to see a wholesale collapse in the agency’s service structure,” he added. “Call wait times will skyrocket, wait times for appointments, processing times, all of it going to skyrocket because there won’t be enough people to do the jobs, which opens the door to privatization.”
Some disabled social security beneficiaries, along with disability groups, sued Musk, acting SSA commissioner Leland Duteck, and DOGE acting administrator Amy Gleason last week over the SSA changes. The plaintiffs argued that DOGE was inducing the “systemic dismantling” of the organization.
