The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending – a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months.
DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency but is not a Cabinet-level agency, had to cancel a plan to cut phone service for retirement and disability claims after drawing outrage from lawmakers, seniors and advocates. Staff reductions and reassignments led by DOGE are slowing the pace of claims processing as field offices lose longtime staff and gain a smaller number of inexperienced replacements. DOGE-driven changes to the agency’s website are causing crashes almost every day, and phone customers complain about dropped calls and long wait times. A DOGE-imposed spending freeze is leading to shortages of basic office supplies, from printer cartridges to the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs.
And on Friday, Social Security leaders told employees that the agency was ending a security check, developed at DOGE’s request, that was meant to root out allegedly fraudulent claims filed over the phone, according to three employees familiar with the situation and an email obtained by The Washington Post. But the measure – which involved placing a three-day hold on all phone claims as other staffers checked into the caller’s background – had only identified a couple of potential fraud cases while causing significant delays in claims processing, two employees said.
Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who is now at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said there were already safeguards in place to detect fraud through the agency’s phone service. DOGE’s efforts have only delayed claims processing and, like most of the team’s attempts to reshape Social Security, placed serious stress on the agency, she said.
“So much of this is self-inflicted wounds,” Romig said.
This account of turmoil within the Social Security Administration is based on interviews with eight current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private deliberations. The Post also reviewed more than a dozen pages of internal agency records and communications.
Some elements of the latest disarray at Social Security – including the decision to end DOGE’s ineffective phone fraud check and the agency’s request that its employees work harder to process the building backlog of claims – were earlier reported by NextGov and HuffPost.
Social Security is fielding an unprecedented number of retirement claims, with 575,000 pending, including 430,000 that have arrived in the past 60 days, according to an email sent to staff this week and reviewed by The Post. Stephen Evangelista, the agency’s deputy commissioner for operations, wrote in the email that employees must work 10 percent harder in “a sprint … through the end of May” to address “this growing backlog.” Calls to the agency’s processing centers are also spiking from seniors who complain that the main 1-800 hotline is going unanswered and who fear their checks will stop because of the Trump administration’s changes to Social Security, employees said.
Social Security is poorly positioned to handle the influx, according to several staffers, as well as records obtained by The Post. Thousands of employees have taken the Trump administration’s early resignation offer or its early retirement offer, depleting the workforce and leaving some offices wholly bereft of staff, emails show. A DOGE-led move to slash staffing levels spurred many senior administrators scared of getting fired to accept reassignment to lower-level field office positions, slowing claims processing further as those employees are trained, according to employees and records.
The tumult comes as Frank Bisignano finishes his first week as Social Security’s Senate-confirmed commissioner. After getting a chance to see agency operations up front, Bisignano has grown alarmed by the drastic downsizing ordered by DOGE and carried out by a mid-level employee, Leland Dudek, who led the agency in an acting role for four months, according to one current senior official and one former senior official briefed on Bisignano’s thinking. Bisignano is coming to dislike DOGE and hopes to minimize the team’s influence, the officials said. Another official, however, said Bisignano wants to “partner” with DOGE.
Asked about the worsening problems at Social Security, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston praised DOGE’s activities at the agency.
“DOGE has played a critical role in improving the Social Security Administration – from modernizing its technology infrastructure to enhancing efforts to identify waste, fraud and abuse,” she said in a statement. “This important work will continue to ensure the federal government is properly serving the American taxpayers.”
– – –
‘They knew there was no fraud’
DOGE staffers came to Social Security vowing to end fraudulent claims filed by scammers and grifters, and convinced that much of that activity was perpetrated over the phone, The Post previously reported. Career staff attempted to explain that wasn’t true, but to no avail, according to three current and former employees familiar with the matter. DOGE proposed ending phone service for retirement and disability claims, then narrowed its proposal after backlash from older claims recipients, advocates and lawmakers – then abandoned the idea.
Staff on the IT side developed a solution they hoped would pacify DOGE: A three-day hold on phone calls to allow extra checking for fraud, the employees said. Everyone, from rank-and-file career staff up to Dudek, knew the phone fraud check was not needed, the employees said. But they did it anyway.
“People lacked the fortitude to tell DOGE there was no fraud because they were afraid to lose their jobs,” one former high-ranking official said, referring specifically to claims filed by telephone. “They knew there was no fraud.”
The three-day check went into place late last month. It was modeled on a system already used to verify internet claims, one employee familiar with the matter said. When claims come in through the Social Security website, they often sit for a few days in a database before staff on the operations side are able to start working on them. Other staff elsewhere in the agency use that dead time to apply special checks for fraud, the employee said. By the time operations staff can pick up the claims, the fraud checks are completed and everything is ready to go.
But applying that same system to phone calls led to trouble, employees said. Operations staff taking calls from seniors normally process the claims as they happen, finishing up while still on the phone. Instead, under the new system, staff had to take down callers’ information before transferring claims to another part of the agency, where they could be reviewed for signs of fraud. After waiting three days, staff were supposed to pick back up their unfinished claims.
It never really worked. Mostly, what it accomplished was annoying field staff and delaying claims processing, employees said.
“We are already overwhelmed. It added a needless task to our plate, and claims were starting to get lost,” said one field office employee who dealt with the system.
And it turned up almost no examples of potential fraud, employees said. The agency already has reliable methods for identifying fraud on the phone, including the fact that staff answering the calls receive special training to catch fraudsters, they said.
In recent days, seeing that Musk was stepping back from government work to focus on his struggling car company, Tesla – and suspecting that DOGE’s influence might be waning – IT staff at the agency saw an opening. They drafted a memo for Bisignano’s review calling for the end of the three-day fraud check, according to a senior official briefed on the matter. NextGov first reported on the existence of the memo, which said the system had so far only turned up two cases of possible fraud out of 110,000 calls that were reviewed.
On Thursday, the agency sent a message to field offices declaring that, effective Saturday, “claims taken over the phone will no longer be subject to a three-day hold prior to adjudication,” according to a copy obtained by The Post.
Even as the DOGE-led fraud check falls flat, Social Security appears to be testing another novel change to its phone service.
Jennifer Burdick, a Philadelphia-based attorney representing clients seeking disability benefits, said that in the past week a new phone line operated by an artificial intelligence system has complicated her efforts to get help for her clients. In one case, she and her paralegal had to call repeatedly before they were connected with a human to discuss a client who never got their disability check last month.
“Many times when you say ‘agent’ it won’t put you through to the hold line, it’ll act like it didn’t hear what you said,” Burdick said. “This is causing some confusion. People are getting frustrated and trying to tell it what they mean, and instead of that being effective at all, it’s been spitting out weird Social Security knowledge.”
When a Post reporter called the phone line Friday afternoon, it took eight attempts to get transferred to an agent. The AI bot asked the reporter several times to end the call and gave unrelated information about a cost-of-living adjustment, Medicare Part B’s premium and benefits available to people after the retirement age.
Social Security has said it plans to roll out the automation to all field offices by this summer, and it is already in use in more than 350 field offices in the Southeast and Northeast as of the end of April.
A spokesperson said the agency is “constantly improving the feature,” which can be “affected by many factors, including background noise, quality of the connection, and clarity of speech.”
– – –
Claims surge, furniture breaks, vendors go unpaid
The surge in claims that Social Security faces goes beyond anything the agency has seen.
In his memo to field offices this week, Evangelista wrote that “this year, we’ve received more retirement claims than in any prior year.” Reasons for the surge, Evangelista wrote, include baby boomers turning 65 years old; a new law signed in January that increased Social Security retirement benefits for state and local government employees; and a recent policy change granting higher benefits to surviving spouses.
But a senior official at the agency noted there is another key reason: “People thinking that SSA is going to collapse because of what’s going on [in] the government,” especially with DOGE-led overhauls and cuts.
Another staffer who works in a processing center said older men and women are calling in at a rate they’ve never seen, complaining that no one picks up the main 1-800 hotline. The callers often tell workers “they are worried their checks will stop” and ask what’s going on, the employee said.
The Social Security spokesperson denied that the processing center has seen an unusual spike in calls and claimed that the average time it takes to answer calls to the main hotline has decreased. That measure does not account for dropped calls and busy signals.
As calls flood in, staff are fleeing. Since February, Dudek has overseen the elimination of 7,000 jobs through early retirements, buyouts, resignations and firings. He told the remaining workforce of about 50,000 last month that he hoped such cuts would be enough – but DOGE disagreed, as The Post has previously reported, and drafted plans to slash thousands more staff.
Fearing firings, employees leaped at the chance to leave under a second-round resignation offer unveiled last month, with 2,500 taking the buyout – costing field offices about 10 percent of their staff. IT departments were especially hard hit, and some offices were wiped out completely, including the security division for the Office of Hearings Operations, according to an email obtained by The Post. Many employees in management roles accepted reassignment to lower-level field office roles because they were warned they would lose their jobs if they didn’t take the demotion, according to employees and emails obtained by The Post. Those staffers now face months of retraining as they learn to process claims.
Some arriving in field offices are finding a dire situation: No more paper, no more printers, and no ability to shred documents, pay phone bills or hire foreign-language interpreters, according to interviews with half a dozen staffers spread across the country. That’s because DOGE reduced federal spending cards to $1 and declared that one of less than a dozen people must sign off on purchases for all 1,300 field offices, leaving few able to replenish basic office supplies or pay for other needs.
“Some vendors are refusing service until they’re paid for past services provided,” one staffer said. “Things break and there’s no money to replace furniture.” Frustrated employees have begun paying out of their own pockets for everything from pens to – in one Northeastern office – a refrigerator.
“We are going to purchase a new fridge since the funds that would normally be available for Facilities to provide us with one are still frozen,” read an email sent in late April and obtained by The Post. “Before we do, I would like to see if anyone else is interested in contributing.”
Related Content
An isolated, angry Fetterman is yet another challenge for Democrats
As Republicans weigh Medicaid work requirements, Georgia offers a warning
Harvard rejects Trump administration’s claims as funding battle escalates
The post How DOGE’s grand plan to remake Social Security is backfiring appeared first on Washington Post.
