As Congress grapples with the federal budget, seeking massive cuts, much attention inside the Beltway is focused on the GOP majority’s approach to Medicaid. That’s because, with the party determined to enact cuts of great magnitude, onlookers believe members will have no choice but to tackle entitlement programs—and that Social Security and Medicare are too politically popular to touch.
However, there remains great concern about Social Security outside the Beltway. Some 70 million Americans depend on it, and whatever happens to the federal budget, the impact of the Trump administration’s policies is already being felt in households everywhere.
Part of this is because changes made by the “Department of Government Efficiency” are affecting Americans’ ability to get what they need from the Social Security Administration. Basically, the agency’s infrastructure is struggling. A technician in the Kansas City office writes in a recent commentary, “[s]ince the implementation of DOGE, computer system issues have plagued us as our information technology budgets have been slashed. Understaffing across the board has led to case backlogs going back years, with no end in sight. Beneficiaries are forced to wait for hours on hold or a call back for even basic services such as a bank or address update. And… they may be forced to wait weeks or months to get an appointment to go into their local field office.”
Those staff cuts aren’t the only DOGE initiatives that have alarmed many people. Its tech crew is also seeking access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of people, including Social Security numbers, medical records, banking information, and Americans’ employment histories. A federal judge has so far blocked that effort, labeling it a “fishing expedition… in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” But in early May, the Trump administration filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court asking the justices to override the lower court and let DOGE get access to those records.
The thing to understand about Social Security is that it doesn’t just support more than a fifth of the country. It also helps undergird the lives of people who don’t receive benefits. As government expert Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted back in March, the money that retirees and people on disability or receiving survivor benefits receive “is woven into the fabric of the economy. Since many Americans live in multigenerational families, the dollar not spent on Grandma’s groceries is the dollar that can go toward a son’s or daughter’s tuition.”
So it’s hardly a surprise that flippant talk by Elon Musk of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” the closure of field offices, and the promised layoffs of tens of thousands of SSA employees have alarmed Americans—despite President Trump’s insistence that Social Security is safe. A recent Gallup survey found 76 percent of respondents worried about Social Security either “a great deal” or “a fair amount.”
And that’s even before we get to threats to the system’s solvency. At current rates, it’s expected that the trust fund that undergirds Social Security will be depleted in a decade, at which point full benefits could not be paid. The outlines of a possible fix have echoed around Washington for decades: raising the amount of wages that can be taxed and indexing cost-of-living increases for beneficiaries. That was, in fact, what a 2010 commission suggested. Congress rejected the idea.
This is not an issue Congress can put off indefinitely, but it’s hard to be optimistic at the moment. As former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent put it in a recent MSNBC commentary, “[t]o save Social Security, Democrats will need to recognize changes to benefits must be on the table for consideration, and Republicans will need to be open to new revenues… The only way to achieve durable, sustainable changes to Social Security and other entitlement programs is through bipartisan compromise. Today’s polarized, toxic politics won’t allow such collaboration.”
Recently, the Senate confirmed President Trump’s pick to run the Social Security Administration, businessman Frank Bisignano. As the agency struggles and Americans fret about the system’s future, both he and members of Congress will be in the spotlight—as they should be.