In recent months, people trying to reach the Social Security Administration (SSA) have encountered website crashes, automatic hang-ups and hours-long waits on the phone or in person. But horrible customer service appears to be just the first step in Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s plan to destroy Social Security — the United States’ largest social welfare program, which provides benefits to 73 million people, or one in five U.S. residents.

President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) team significant access and power within SSA. In just three months, the agency has implemented plans to decrease the staff count from 57,000 to 50,000 (with rumors of deeper cuts to come), started closing offices, made it harder for people to register and access benefits, spread lies about fraud, accessed recipients’ personal information, and created an environment of chaos, fear and confusion. All the while, DOGE is on an obsessive hunt for widespread benefits fraud, which one federal judge characterized as “a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”

Advocates fear that as DOGE makes Social Security increasingly nonfunctional, trust in the enormously popular program will erode, allowing Musk and his allies the opportunity to further weaken or privatize aspects of the program.

Weakening Social Security has serious and even deadly consequences: Among older people who receive benefits, 39 percent of men and 44 percent of women derive more than half their income from it. Around 80 percent of recipients are retired workers (or their spouses and dependents), who paid into the system during their working years, while the rest qualify due to a disability or are children of deceased workers.

Despite its crucial role lifting millions of Americans out of poverty, Trump and Musk repeatedly disparage the program as dysfunctional, rife with fraud, or an outright scam. In February, Trump falsely claimed that millions of dead Americans were collecting benefits, alleging: “It’s all a scam, the whole thing is a scam.” Meanwhile, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” And in a FOX Business interview about DOGE cuts, Musk ominously called entitlements like SSA “the big one to eliminate.” (The White House insists Musk was referring to eliminating “waste and fraud,” not entitlement programs in their entirety.)

“Never before did we have a president claiming that there was all this fraud where there wasn’t any, or all this waste where there wasn’t any,” Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, a political advocacy group that calls for expansion of Social Security, told Truthout. “And then using that to make changes precipitously, without any kind of thought — some of which are just going to create more fraud. And no one has ever had access to all this data, people’s most personal data.”

Trump replaced his initial acting SSA Commissioner, Michelle King, a 30-year veteran of the agency, in February after she refused to allow DOGE unfettered access to recipients’ private data. Her replacement is Leland Dudek, a mid-level staffer, who at the time was on administrative leave for leaking information to DOGE behind his supervisors’ backs.

Unsurprisingly, Dudek has acted as a rubber stamp for DOGE’s staff-cutting agenda.

“DOGE has been all over the Social Security Administration,” said Altman. “They’re calling the shots.”

Under Dudek, SSA rapidly laid off employees, offered buyouts to the entire staff, ordered the entire workforce back into the office full-time, dissolved teams, announced the closure of 6 out of 10 regional offices and circulated plans to close dozens of field offices.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say around 1,000 years of institutional experience and knowledge have walked out the door,” said Altman. “The top cyber security people, the top people who maintain the systems, and so forth. … There has really been an enormous brain drain from the agency, and that’s continuing.”

Dudek admitted, behind closed doors, that he is following the orders of DOGE and the White House. “I work for the president. I need to do what the president tells me to do,” Dudek told senior SSA staff and advocates in a mid-March recording leaked to ProPublica. “I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it and I did it.” Later in the meeting, Dudek said: “Again, I work for the president. DOGE is part of that.”

Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Frank Bisignano, is a financial services CEO with a net worth of around $1 billion. Bisignano, who told CNBC he is “fundamentally a DOGE person,” has a reputation for cutting staff, while taking home 380 times the compensation of the median employee at his company.

Bisignano apparently lied at a March 25 confirmation hearing, telling the Senate Finance Committee he hasn’t had contact with SSA or DOGE. But a whistleblower told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) that Bisignano has had frequent conversations with SSA executives, requested explicit approval of all hires and intervened to ensure a DOGE engineer was hired and given........

© Truthout