{"id":100688,"date":"2025-07-29T00:19:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T00:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/100688\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T00:19:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T00:19:10","slug":"how-the-doge-driven-reductions-at-the-social-security-administration-are-playing-out-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/100688\/","title":{"rendered":"How the DOGE-driven reductions at the Social Security Administration are playing out now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>The Social Security Administration was an early DOGE target. And with allegations of rampant waste, fraud, and abuse, DOGE tried to force a massive restructure and a workforce reduction. You\u2019ve done a deep dive into this issue. What\u2019s your current take on the staffing situation at the Social Security Administration?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Well, the thing is Social Security started out the Trump administration understaffed. The agency lost 10,000 staff between 2010 and the beginning of the Trump administration, even as it served millions more beneficiaries. So what\u2019s happened under the Trump administration has really made things go from bad to worse and it is threatening customer service for all the retirees, survivors and people with disabilities who rely on the Social Security Administration for service.<\/p>\n

]]><\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>Talk to us a little bit more about how the current staffing level fits in the history of social security.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Well, since the Trump administration came into office, the Social Security Administration has cut 7,000 staff, taking its staffing from 57,000 to 50,000. That is the biggest staff cut in SSA history and it happened over just six months.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>And you mentioned that this is having an impact. Can you articulate some of the specific impacts that you\u2019ve documented?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Absolutely. The number of people serving the public in the front lines is lower than it was before, even after the agency has sort of reshuffled the deck chairs at SSA. So you have fewer people answering phones, fewer people serving the public and field offices, fewer people processing claims. And not only that, they have significantly less support because under the massive restructuring that the Trump administration has done, that headquarters and regional staff have been cut basically in half. So there are fewer people helping them with laptops or with any kind of stuck cases that they have to work out or all of the different supports that they relied upon to get the job done.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>So then the new Social Security administrator made some changes when he came in and one of them was reshuffling, as you mentioned, folks from desk jobs or back office jobs to front-line customer service and phone operators. How is that going? Is that having the impact that they hoped?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Well, it\u2019s been a very, very rapid transformation. They took, from headquarters and regional staff, 2,000 employees and very quickly retrained them to take claims, to answer phones or to work down the agency\u2019s backlog and disability claims. And that\u2019s really complicated work. It\u2019s not something that somebody can pick up overnight. It takes a lot of training and a lot of practice. And, in fact, as I say, executives say it takes about two years to really become proficient in those jobs. And here we have people in a sort of boot camp situation for maybe six or seven weeks, and then they\u2019re expected to take on these complex workloads really quickly. And so, as you can imagine, they\u2019re just not going to be as productive or as accurate as the experienced people that the agency has actually paid to leave through various incentive programs like voluntary separation or the deferred resignation program or the FORK.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>So the folks that got reassigned into these frontline-facing positions, does that mean that the jobs they were doing before are going unfilled?<\/p>\n

]]><\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Correct. And so there is much, much less support. And one example of that is that SSA had a regional office structure where there were people in those regional offices who would help with a technology problem or a technical question or when things got behind would fill in the gaps. And that structure has just been decimated almost overnight. More than 80% of the staff is gone now. And that help that those people provided to the front-line staff at SSA has just disappeared.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>So SSA used to be pretty good about publishing its customer service metrics. What are those telling us about the impacts, at least in the last five months?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Yeah, well, used to be is really the key term here. SSA was extremely transparent with its service metrics, even as recently as a few months ago, would show things like, for example, real time waits on the agency\u2019s 800 number. So if a beneficiary or an applicant had a question, they could go online and say, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s going to be two hours until I can speak to an agent. Maybe I don\u2019t have time to do that this afternoon and I\u2019ll have to try again tomorrow,\u2019 for example. Now that\u2019s disappeared from the website. Likewise, they were tracking metrics on all kinds of different performance metrics. So how long is the whole time on the phone or how long does it take to get an appointment or how long is a disability case going to wait in the queue? And almost all of those metrics have been taken off the website or substantially degraded so that we really cannot see month-to-month changes, whether things are getting better or worse at SSA.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>I\u2019m speaking with Kathleen Romig. She\u2019s the director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. So, Kathleen, tell us more about what that means for people who need services from Social Security.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>Yeah. I mean, people are waiting longer than they used to. The metrics, last time they were published, were pretty grim. Fewer than half of people, who were looking to make an appointment at SSA, for example, could do it within the month. They had to wait longer than a month to make an appointment in a field office. And that\u2019s important because a lot of things really do need to be done in person. For example, to make a claim for a survivor\u2019s benefit when a spouse dies or a parent dies, you can\u2019t do that online. So your only options are calling to make a telephone appointment or calling to make a field office appointment. So this is really important for people who have experienced a death in the family. They really need to be able to access their earned benefits and there\u2019s no online option for them. So, yes, they are waiting over a month in order to go into an office. And when they call on the phone to make that appointment, they were waiting two or three hours on average to get through to an agent to make the appointment.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>So one of the things we\u2019ve seen from the Trump administration across many of the agencies that it wants to transform is an assertion that technology is going to solve the people problem. What\u2019s your assessment of that when it comes to the services that the Social Security Administration provides?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>I think technology should be part of the answer, absolutely, and I think the agency has made a lot of technical improvements over the years, for example, getting the retirement and social security disability applications online. But like I said, not everything is online yet. The survivors application is not online. The Supplemental Security Income, that\u2019s sort of the SSA\u2019s low-income program for older folks and people with disabilities. That application is not online. There\u2019s a lot that still needs to be online. And SSA serves a population of older and disabled people, many of whom really struggle to access online services. Technology is never going to be the entire solution. There are many of SSA\u2019s customers who are always going to need in-person help, whether that\u2019s over the phone or in a field office, but they\u2019re going to need help from a human being. The programs are extraordinarily complex. They\u2019re going to have questions, they\u2019re going have problems, they are going to need help from real people. That\u2019s never ever going to go away.<\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>Well, given the restructuring that you talked about and the move of back office folks to front-line serving positions, who\u2019s going to develop this new technology and deploy it?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>That\u2019s a great question. Because the people who know the program best, the people who know the customers that SSA serves, many of them have left the agency. In fact, nearly half of the agency\u2019s senior executives have departed SSA just over the last six months. So those are the experienced hands who have been working on technological modernization over the years and who really know the systems. And they\u2019re not easy systems to master, both on the policy side as well as on the technological side. There are sort of layers and layers of different technology there. So the new commissioner, Frank Bisignano, has said that he would like DOGE to lead the efforts on technological modernization. And of course, that gives a lot of people pause. He\u2019s bringing in people who know very little about how the government works, very little about how Social Security works. They\u2019re often very, very young and they\u2019re not well acquainted with the population that SSA serves, primarily seniors and people with disabilities.<\/p>\n

]]><\/p>\n

Terry Gerton: <\/strong>So you\u2019re from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. What are your recommendations for improving how Social Security delivers its services?<\/p>\n

Kathleen Romig: <\/strong>I think you always have to start with the customer. And the customer in this case is older folks and people with disabilities, often people who have cognitive challenges or memory challenges, often people don\u2019t have access to technology or facility to use new technology. And so you have to start them. You have to think about what is it that they need? What is it they don\u2019t need to provide you in order to get what they need? How can we streamline services? And I think that is something that was very much happening previous to the Trump administration. There was a whole office of transformation that was looking at talking directly to the people that SSA serves, trying to figure out how to streamline things, how to modernize things on the back end. And one of the first things the Trump administration did when it started at SSA was completely eliminate that office that would have done customer-centered modernization of SSAs processes and systems.<\/p>\n

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