WASHINGTON — The chief of the Social Safety Administration underneath President Joe Biden says President Donald Trump’s workers cuts may trigger such disruption within the company that seniors would possibly miss profit funds.
Martin O’Malley, who served as commissioner of Social Safety from December 2023 to November 2024, stated the present administration’s efforts to shrink the workforce will ship away important personnel and jeopardize the company’s most elementary features.
“I think for the first time in 90 years, we’re going to see an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley instructed HuffPost on Monday. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but I believe it will. And at the very least you are going to see wait times skyrocket.”
Greater than 73 million individuals, together with 56 million seniors, depend on the Social Safety Administration for month-to-month profit checks. Missed funds may trigger hardship for recipients and political hassle for the president, whose opposition to Social Safety profit cuts has been a signature concern.
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Already, Democrats have hammered Trump and Elon Musk — the White Home adviser main Trump’s purge of the federal workforce by way of his so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity — for looking for main reductions of the Social Safety Administration’s 60,000 workers. Musk’s younger DOGE disciples have been posted in SSA convention rooms and reportedly have sought entry to delicate fee data.
“Make no mistake: Trump and Elon are breaking Social Security to enrich themselves. It’s seniors who will pay the price,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) stated Friday. Democrats have lengthy stated the company wants extra administrative funding, which presently quantities to simply half a p.c of its complete value.
O’Malley stated 30% of the company’s data expertise specialists have been eligible for retirement throughout his tenure and that their work was so essential he hesitated to chop again on distant work for concern of pushing them towards the exits. Now the Trump administration is actively shoving out employees.
“You’re talking about an agency that already has been operating at a 50-year low in staffing,” O’Malley stated.
Spokespeople for the Social Safety Administration didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Appearing Social Safety Commissioner Leland Dudek introduced final week the company would endure a “massive” reorganization with “significant workforce reductions,” providing longer-tenured workers choices for buyouts and early retirement applications. Dudek then positioned two dozen senior workers on depart and introduced plans to consolidate regional places of work, in line with a memo obtained by HuffPost.
Members of Congress have lengthy scrutinized wait instances for appointments at Social Safety subject places of work and delays in answering calls to the company’s 800 quantity. It’s exhausting to see how workers cuts may enhance on these customer support metrics, although Dudek has stated some workers could possibly be reassigned to “front line” positions answering calls and staffing subject places of work.
The Authorities Accountability Workplace, an investigative arm of Congress, has repeatedly warned that the Social Safety Administration and different companies depend on outdated IT software program, together with a programming language generally known as COBOL that was first created in 1959. The GAO famous in a 2023 report that the SSA has needed to rehire retired workers and that “having a shortage of expert personnel available to maintain a critical system creates significant risk to an agency’s mission.”
O’Malley stated that in his tenure he noticed two widespread methods outages that each resulted from legacy software program straining underneath new duties.
“It’s a very fragile system,” O’Malley stated, including that an exodus of skilled workers will “create a super high risk of collapse and system failure.”
In an e mail to workers over the weekend, Dudek stated the company had been working on “autopilot” for too lengthy and that customer support has suffered because of this.
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“The changes we implement acknowledge the urgent customer service crisis we face and are determined to fix,” Dudek wrote. “For our dedicated staff and every American we serve, these difficult decisions are not setbacks but opportunities to create a more efficient, accountable, and responsive government.”
