A new report details multiple issues within the Social Security Administration (SSA) over the past year, including long delays for service to millions of beneficiaries, due primarily to changes and “reforms” imposed by the Trump administration in 2025.
Social Security beneficiaries have faced backlogs and delays for years as the result of underfunding and other political obstacles. But the White House’s campaign to make the program more efficient by rooting out supposed “fraud” appears to have made matters worse.
According to The Washington Post, which spoke to dozens of employees within the agency and customers affected by the Trump administration’s actions, as many as 6 million pending cases are backlogged in processing centers, and 12 million transactions are backed up in field offices across the country. These backlogs are due to the agency’s diminished workforce — a result of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) taking control of the agency under President Donald Trump earlier this year.
The DOGE takeover led to around 7,000 employees being “squeezed out” of SSA, the Post reported, either by layoffs or because they chose to quit voluntarily. Behind the scenes, many SSA employees were moved from one department to another as restructuring took place, often resulting in workers taking a position for which they had little training.
Indeed, a majority of SSA staffers who have accepted reassignments in the post-DOGE takeover have not been properly trained for their new roles, several employees with knowledge of the situation told the Post.
“They offered minimal training and basically threw them in to sink or swim,” a veteran employee said of the situation.
Meanwhile, wait times for scheduled appointments have increased. In January, 87 percent of disability claims-related calls to SSA resulted in an in-person appointment being made within a month’s time. This month, that number has dropped to 66 percent, meaning that 1 in 3 calls to SSA to make an appointment for a disability claim take longer than a month to fulfill.
Hold times for calls went up to 2.5 hours, on average, when DOGE took over in March. Those hold times have since improved, according to SSA’s own numbers; however, those figures may be skewed, as customers who accept a callback rather than waiting on the phone are being marked as having a “zero” wait time. Even with customers accepting callbacks, there are issues.
“Wait times for callbacks remain over an hour, and more than a quarter of callers are not being served — by getting disconnected or never receiving a callback, for instance,” AARP vice president of financial security Jenn Jones told the Post.
Despite these issues, SSA issued a post on X on Tuesday claiming that the agency has gotten more efficient, and told The Daily Beast that the Post’s investigation was aimed at trying to “fearmonger seniors.”
But the Trump administration is clearly hellbent on making changes to the agency that critics say will make it more difficult to navigate. In October, it was leaked that the agency was planning to eliminate age as a factor for workers seeking disability benefits, which would make it harder for workers to prove they could not work as a result of injury or illness. After backlash to reports over that change, the administration backed away from implementing it.
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