The Social Security Administration late Wednesday scuttled proposals it was entertaining to discontinue phone service for millions of Americans who submit retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service group was considering the move to prevent suspected fraud.
The transition would have steered older and disabled individuals to depend on the web and local in-person field offices to work on their claims, restricting a service that 73 million Americans have come to count on for decades to receive earned government benefits.
But Social Security and White House officials indicated the administration will proceed with another much smaller aspect of the original plan: Customers will no longer be able to update a direct deposit routing number or other bank data over the phone..”
Over the past few days, Musk’s budget-cutting staff at Social Security, which has overseen a rapid reduction of employees and services, had considered the changes to telephone services against claims processing and direct deposit bank account transactions, said one person familiar with internal discussions and documents provided to The Post.
The reductions planned and implemented risked disarranging Social Security’s internal workings and curtailing its capacity to serve the public, existing and former officials cautioned, even as DOGE is setting its sights on the agency for agency-wide personnel reductions of over 12 percent. The agency’s toll-free phone line is a lifeline for elderly customers who lack access to the internet or have difficulty with the web. But it has grappled with wait times of hours or more over the past few weeks.
The phone service proposals were announced less than a month after DOGE team members went to Social Security headquarters and started searching for how to trim what they characterized as “fraud, waste and abuse” under their mission from President Donald Trump to reduce the size of government, said two individuals familiar with internal discussions. DOGE, for Department of Government Efficiency, has tried to eliminate staff members and expenditures in every federal agency, causing havoc and accusations that the staff is slashing critical functions.
The DOGE team was originally aimed at concerns that deceased individuals were receiving benefits fraudulently, according to the two individuals and the records. But in sessions last month, the career staff pointed out that the presence of individuals with impossibly long lifetimes on the rolls was a regrettable aspect of an old technology system and that none of those dead individuals or their families were receiving benefits. The DOGE team seemed to let the issue go, the individuals said
Despite that, billionaire Elon Musk has kept sounding the alarm that 150-year-olds and even individuals who have lived over three centuries are somehow getting tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, an outlandish series of accusations he has leveled without proof for the last month. Musk addressed the topic as recently as Monday on Fox News, and Trump amplified his accusations last week during his speech to Congress.
