In the past month, the Trump administration has announced a flurry of changes at the agency that administers Social Security.
Among these changes are plans to cut thousands of jobs, close offices and enact new policy — including more stringent identity checks that could require in-person office visits.
Advocates warn these sweeping moves could lead to seniors and people with disabilities having a harder time getting help with their crucial benefits.
Already, getting assistance can be burdensome.
"My first phone call that I made to Social Security, I was on hold for 3 hours and 15 minutes before I spoke to somebody," Aaron Woods, who's been trying for months to help his mother sort out her Social Security and Medicare benefits, told NPR.
Woods, who lives in Tennessee, said his local Social Security office has been "super helpful" despite having a hard time trying to fix the issues.
"It was also a weird case," he said. "They didn't understand why Mom wasn't getting Social Security."
Woods said he figured out there was a problem with her bank account that started last summer. Those problems led to her not getting her Social Security checks, which created a lapse in her Medicare prescription benefits, because she paid for them with her Social Security.
Woods said this had some serious consequences.
"So, Jan. 21, my mom was hospitalized with stroke-like symptoms, and it turned out to just be a really bad case of really high blood sugar," he said, "and she was hospitalized because she didn't have access to her prescriptions."
Woods' mother is still not getting all her benefits, and it's unclear why. The Social Security Administration doesn't comment on specific cases due to "privacy laws," an agency spokesperson said in a statement.
"It's really overwhelming to work with all of these services to get the care that my mom needs," Woods said.
An agency backlog and offices closing
For years, advocates say the Social Security Administration has struggled to keep up with its growing workload. Besides retirement services, the agency runs programs that provide survivor benefits and disability benefits and supplemental income for the very poor.
"There simply have not been enough workers to administer the benefits timely," said Kristen Dama, a managing attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, which helps people navigate the benefits process. "To make sure that mistakes aren't made. And then when people get disconnected, whether it's for financial reasons or for mistakes, there's just not enough people … to allow recipients to get reconnected easily."
And problem-solving could get harder as the agency plans to cut 7,000 jobs — though its current staffing of about 57,000 is already at a 50-year low.
SSA leaders maintain that their reorganization plans will have a "positive effect" on the delivery of services.
The agency also announced it would undergo a massive restructuring by eliminating six out of its 10 regional offices, which Dama said would significantly affect her organization's ability to sort out problems for her clients.
"For legal aid advocates, both at my organization and across the country, the regional offices are really the fixers, are the quality control, and they play that role also for constituent service staff, social services organizations," she said. "They are really the place where problems that can't be solved get escalated."
In a statement to NPR, a SSA spokesperson said the agency is "identifying efficiencies and reducing costs, with a renewed focus on mission critical work for the American people."
"These steps prioritize customer service by streamlining redundant layers of management, reducing non-mission critical work, and potential reassignment of employees to customer service positions," the spokesperson said.
But Dama said she fears that all these changes will mean it will be harder to get problems sorted for beneficiaries, which could be life and death in some cases.
"I am really afraid for my clients and for Social Security and SSI recipients generally, because when frontline staff either don't have the resources or don't have the knowledge to solve the case and our clients and other people are in life or death situations, it's going to be very hard ... to get errors and oversights corrected," she said. "And that means that people are going to have devastating financial circumstances."
Why the SSA is decentralized
Nancy Altman, president of an advocacy group called Social Security Works, which opposes the staff cuts, said the agency is decentralized on purpose.
She said the regional offices support the roughly 1,200 field offices across the country so that they don't have to go through agency headquarters in Baltimore for everything they need.
"There'd be such a backlog if it all had to go through some central office," she said. "So instead, it's an appropriate, an efficient way of running this massive organization. It's one of the largest departments in the government."
And Altman says if an administration wanted to make it more efficient by restructuring — which is what the Trump administration says it wants — there's a way to do that. But she says it would take time, planning and communication throughout the agency.
And Altman said she thinks that isn't how these changes are being made.
"All of these things are huge and create all sorts of questions," she said. "And at this point, no one knows what's going on."
Controversial identity check plan
The slew of recent changes have been announced by the agency's acting commissioner, Lee Dudek, who was tapped for the role by President Trump. Dudek has said he's carrying out the Trump administration's stated goal of protecting benefits while rooting out waste and fraud.
Both Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire adviser, have made inflated claims about fraud in the system.
Dudek's most controversial recent step has been the announcement that, by the end of the month, the SSA is changing identity verification rules. The new guidelines will require beneficiaries to travel in-person to a Social Security office for both benefit claims and direct deposit changes, if they are unable to use the online verification system.
"For far too long, the agency has used antiquated methods for proving identity," Dudek said in a statement. "Social Security can better protect Americans while expediting service."
But Nancy LeaMond, AARP's executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer, said the announcement "not only comes as a total surprise but is on an impractical fast-track."
"The Social Security Administration's move to force people to visit offices in-person for services that they have sought by phone will result in more headaches and longer wait times to resolve routine customer service needs," she said in a statement.
Dozens of Democratic members of Congress also sent a letter to Dudek, asking him to reconsider the change.
"Requiring beneficiaries to seek assistance exclusively online, through artificial intelligence, or in person at SSA field offices would create additional barriers, particularly for those who live far from an office," members wrote. "This change would disrupt services for 73 million Americans."
Concerns of a "system collapse"
During a recent event with the National Academy of Social Insurance, two former SSA commissioners — Martin O'Malley, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, and Michael Astrue, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush — both expressed serious concern over the direction of the agency.
"It's perfectly appropriate for a president of the United States to say, I want to have more efficiency," Asture said. "But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it."
O'Malley said he thinks all of these changes will lead to the agency losing "a lot more than 7,000 people" in the coming months, as well as deeper problems for the people the agency is supposed to serve.
"I really hope I'm wrong," he said, "but I believe that most of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse of Social Security have already been taken."
Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said he thinks the actions are all an effort to "undermine the support" that an overwhelming share of Americans have for Social Security.
"By making it more difficult to navigate the program, to get information, to apply for benefits, to make changes … the goal here is pretty simple," he said. "It's to discourage people from the kind of support that they have voiced and expressed for Social Security for 90 years."
In a statement, a spokesperson for the SSA said the agency's "common goal is to improve Social Security services for all Americans."
"SSA is committed to ensuring that all Americans can get the help they need whether that is in our field offices, telephone, or through automated solutions," the spokesperson said.
In the meantime, Aaron Woods said he's worried about his mother's situation not getting sorted soon.
He said his mother's health continues to worsen, and her Medicare benefits that are tied to her Social Security are still inaccessible to her. And his mother's medical bills, he said, are stacking up.
"I don't have the funds to take care of that, and neither does she," he said. "I'm not really sure what we would do … if we don't get the care from these agencies that we need."
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