The Social Security Administration wants to lay off 7,000 workers, bringing its workforce headcount to around 50,000, according to a recent news release. However, if there is any government program that could potentially affect the lives of all Americans, it’s Social Security.
According to the Social Security Administration, around 69 million Americans might receive a Social Security benefit every month in 2025. That’s around $1.6 trillion in benefits paid throughout the year.
Former SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, declared to CNBC that workforce cuts might result in a foreseen system collapse. However, Republicans believe these cuts are meant to reduce costs and eliminate waste.
“It’s, in fact, unknown at this time exactly how Social Security Administration cuts could impact Social Security beneficiaries,” Kristin Petersmarck, president and founder at New Horizon Retirement Solutions in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, explained. “One side will always say there will be delays, as the other one says the cuts aren’t related to mission-critical services.”
For Social Security recipients and those who plan to claim their benefits soon enough, here are some of the most important points to bear in mind about the cuts:
Will Social Security benefits ever be delayed?
According to a January 2025 report conducted by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, almost 40% of adults who are 65 and older would have incomes below the official poverty line without the much-needed Social Security benefits.
In most of these cases, any delay in processing benefits would suffer serious consequences. Politicians have often considered SSA a serious issue they don’t want to deal with since changes risk alienating many voters.
“For this very reason, it’s quite unlikely that benefits would be delayed. Way too many retirees all over the country rely on all kinds of government benefits for a living. Any kind of hold-up on Social Security checks will automatically generate pushback across a wide political spectrum.” Israelov explained. He also added that retirees and their children, who might later on have to financially support aging parents, would suffer in the end.
Navigating longer processing times
Retirees who didn’t get the chance to claim their benefits just yet, but expect delays, should act quickly. So carve some spare time to make an online account, if you don’t have one established already, and use the online portal.
If any delays are more likely to affect those who haven’t tapped yet into their Social Security. It is also possible that your benefits could be delayed if you are a brand new applicant or need further assistance with any issue. If you currently receive Social Security, then it should not have any delay.
Local Social Security office closures because of DOGE cuts
Since the Trump administration announced another series of cuts to the Social Security Administration, at least 10 offices all over the country are in the process of being shut down. That will more than likely make it way more challenging for Americans to visit an office for in-person transactions.
Sending out a series of benefits is not only the whole idea as far as the Social Security Administration goes, but a series of cuts to its workforce could result in the delays of other services, too, such as:
- tracking workers’ lifetime earnings to efficiently calculate Social Security benefits
- issuing a series of Social Security numbers
- administering Social Security benefits for people who are disabled or unable to work
- overseeing initial Medicare enrollment
- Investigating Social Security fraud and identity theft
- offering a series of tools and resources to aid people in estimating how benefits fit into retirement plans
- managing appeals for denied disability and even retirement claims
- overseeing a series of programs like Survivors Benefits for widows, widowers, and even children of deceased workers
Besides these services, it’s fairly common for people to call or even visit a regional Social Security office for help, especially if they lost their Social Security cards, or they deal with incorrect benefit amounts and direct deposit issues. The SSA’s customer service wait times were increasing before these cuts took place. We can only imagine that further staffing cuts can only exacerbate these issues.
Social Security this year
Soon enough, millions of Americans might feel the impact of the deep staffing cuts being planned at the Social Security Administration, which is currently undergoing a huge reorganization that the acting commissioner declared was initiated by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The loss of experienced employees who seem to manage Social Security’s fragile and interdependent web of computer systems will more than likely leave the agency quite vulnerable to technical outages.
Moreover, it can interrupt the benefit payment that is sent to more than 73 million retirees, people with disabilities, and other citizens. The former Maryland governor believes that a meltdown might take place within 90 days, even if other employees and experts are still unsure of its timing.
Looming cuts
Just like many other federal agencies, Social Security is currently going through a period of upheaval, seeking to comply with Trump’s directive to shrink the size of the federal workforce. It also plans to shed 7,000 employees or 12% of its staff.
Many senior staffers already exited, since Dudek, a former mid-level manager who was rapidly elevated by Trump last month, shuttered divisions, offering early retirement and voluntary separation packages to all staffers, and threatening layoffs back and forth.
However, the overhaul lacks strategic planning, which can have serious implications for an agency that has never truly missed a benefits payment in its 90-year history, according to various advocates and employees CNN interviewed so far. The focus is now on swiftly shrinking Social Security’s staff with as little effort as possible.
Outages taking place
Social Security’s core, mission-critical computer systems run on an aging programming language, also known as COBOL. The computer system is, well, old enough, especially since its monochromatic green screen says “Welcome to the future” upon loading, which is no less than an irony considering the age we live in.
There have been plenty of discussions about removing it since it seems quite ridiculous at this point to use the machine still, but that would cost a lot of money and require even more staff. COBOL isn’t presented anymore as a computer language.
The employees who still know how to use it are those who have been around the longest, which means they are also the prime candidates to leave the agency as staffing is cut. Around 30% of the employees on the chief information officer’s team are now eligible to retire.
The number is even higher in a key division that takes charge of the technology around payments. The system still requires a lot of maintenance, and the main concern is that if they are not careful enough with the firing, the people who are the best at using COBOL might not make the cut.
Plenty of advocates and former Social Security officials declared that these systems are well-intertwined, which means that the computer outages might have a series of ripple effects that could later affect other areas of the agency.
There are more than 3,600 applications, all well-connected to keep the agency up and running. There are also 10 regional offices that effectively built their own workarounds to solve all the impending issues.
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