Amid DOGE Cuts, 'Utter Chaos' for Social Security

The Trump administration has run into trouble in cutting Social Security phone services while directing Americans to the agency's website, which has repeatedly crashed under high traffic. Users "are facing chronic website outages" when trying to log in to their accounts, the Washington Post reports, noting the website was at one point down for almost an entire day. Social Security employees in field offices have also been blocked from assisting beneficiaries. Even when the site is up and running, many have found account access blocked or relevant information missing. For almost two full days, many recipients of Supplemental Security Income saw a message stating they were "not receiving payments," prompting panic. A worker tells the Guardian it's been "complete, utter chaos."

Some 7,000 jobs have been eliminated at the Social Security Administration, where a lack of staffing was already an issue, with potentially thousands more still to be cut, per the Post and Guardian. According to the Post, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has called for a 50% cut to the agency's technology division—the very one responsible for maintaining the website. "To be sure, Social Security's antiquated public and internal systems have long experienced outages," per CNN. But employees say it's "unheard of for the system to fail this often," per the Post. An employee tells CNN that DOGE is cutting staff that understand the aging programming language that powers Social Security's computer systems and "can prevent upgrades from becoming outages."

"It's a concerted attack on the legitimacy of Social Security itself," Rich Couture, a rep for the union representing some 42,000 Social Security workers, tells the Guardian. In a statement, the Social Security press office said officials are "actively investigating the root cause" of the "brief disruptions," per the Post. Privately, officials have attributed many of the network outages to a fraud check system that was expanded by DOGE but not tested against high traffic, per the Post. "The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks," the outlet reports, adding the issues could become even more pronounced next week, when millions of users will need to start authenticating their identity online. (More Social Security stories.)