UPDATE (April 10, 2025): Social Security Administration reverses entirely, says they will permit all claim types to take place over the phone, no longer requiring website use or in-person visits to Social Security offices, as had been previously announced to start on April 14, 2025 for many transactions.

UPDATE (March 26, 2025):  Social Security Administration begins backing out of their horrific planned changes to curtail phone support: (1) Changes pushed to April 14 instead of March 31. (2) Changes will no longer apply to Medicare, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants.

The elimination of previous phone support will still apply to regular retirement benefits, and this will still leave vast numbers of retirees at horrible risk.

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Social Security is in a DOGE-created crisis, and seniors are already at terrible risk.

DOGE moved quickly to order massive changes to Social Security, originally to essentially end all phone-based Social Security support, and then after major blowback to that — since so many people dependent on Social Security don’t use computers or have Internet — this was revised to continue phone support other than for changes to functions like payment accounts, and also for identification issues. Those crucial functions will no longer be doable by phone and will have to be by Internet — which again many of the people who need Social Security can’t use, or via in person visits to Social Security offices — which can be difficult or completely impossible for many elderly or disabled persons, especially in rural areas.

On top of this, DOGE ordered the closure of around 50 Social Security offices and the firing of thousands of their employees, so in person visits become even harder.

As I’ve said many times before, technical people often don’t really understand the situations that nontechnical people, especially older persons have to deal with. Often there’s a totally wrong assumption that pretty much EVERYBODY uses the Internet. But like I said, a large percentage of seniors do not use the Internet for anything like this, or at all.

Now DOGE originally said all of this was to fight fraud. But its early claims that 10s of millions of deceased persons over 100 years old were getting Social Security payments were apparently incorrect — it’s important to understand these systems — DOGE reportedly didn’t realize that those historical records did not mean all those dead people were getting payments, other aspects of the systems prevented payments to them.

And studies have shown that apparently improper Social Security payments amount to about 1% of overall payments, mostly errors not fraud, and 2/3 of mistaken payments were clawed back.

This all really erupted over the last few days when the administration’s new Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, made some stupendously tone-deaf and clueless comments in an interview. He said that it’s fraudsters who would complain most loudly about missing Social Security payments, saying that his 94-year-old mother in law wouldn’t call to complain — she’d assume there was something messed up and she’d get her payment the next month.

That of course means having faith that the next payment won’t also fail to appear due to the same problem, but then again having a billionaire son-in-law probably would make that missed payment of somewhat less concern. Unfortunately, most Social Security recipients don’t have billionaire sons-in-law. He said cutting off payment system payments is the easiest way to find a fraudster, because whoever screams is the one stealing.

As you can imagine, Lutnick has been widely criticized for these statements. You really have to wonder what planet he’s been living on.

Because the reality is that 40% of retirees rely on Social Security as their sole source of income, and for many more it’s a primary source. You cut off Social Security from these retirees, even for just one month, either by declaring them dead when they’re still alive — reports of that are already increasing — or by making it impossible for them to quickly fix payment or identification problems by phone when they can’t travel to a Social Security office or use the Internet, and many won’t have any way to pay for food or lodging or anything else.

And these changes that are going to so negatively impact so many seniors dependent on Social Security, were only announced VERY recently and are being rushed into effect at the end of THIS month just a week from now, leaving seniors in an even worse situation, and many of them don’t have anyone locally to help them even if they had more time.

This situation has gone from bad to disastrous. Actually improving Social Security is indeed a good goal, but creating a massive mess that will leave so many vulnerable seniors at such risk, is both gruesome and utterly unacceptable.

–Lauren–