'Deep Hole of Their Own Creation': Trump Social Security Administration Cuts Come Back to Bite

The staffing cuts made by the Trump administration at the Social Security Administration are reportedly coming back to bite them as the agency continues to struggle with serving beneficiaries in a timely manner.

A new report from NPR finds that the administration has been shifting more SSA workers to man the agency's national 800 phone number after staffing reductions from earlier this year led to significantly increased wait times for callers. In all, the agency estimates that 4% of frontline SSA workers have been at least temporarily moved to help handle 800 number calls.

While the SSA claims that this has reduced wait times for callers, experts and current SSA employees who spoke with NPR warned that they will only create problems in other areas over the long haul.

"They are in a deep hole of their own creation on staffing and so you just don't have enough people to go around to serve the public," Kathleen Romig, a former SSA official and current director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NPR. "And so all you can really do at this point is rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Nicole Morio, a field office worker in Staten Island, told NPR that the staff cuts have led to a workforce that is burned out and overwhelmed.

"The stress level is probably at a maximum for everyone," she said. "At one point I think we were doing the work of 1.8 people. Now it seems as though we're doing the work of 10 to 15."

Jessica LaPointe, who works at a Social Security field office in Madison, Wisconsin, expressed a similar sentiment in an interview with NPR.

"If [SSA employees] decided not to take the buyout incentives that were offered in March, then now they're just leaving to save their mental health as their work keeps piling up," said LaPointe, who also serves as president of a local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union that represents 25,000 workers. "It really is a manufactured crisis as a result of past changes that just continue to just make everything worse, sadly."

LaPointe also dismissed the administration's spin on the situation and said "there's no indication that this is getting better," and that "we have an agency not listening to the workers."

Even if the administration's claims about improving call wait times are accurate, critics note that it's become much more difficult to see how such improvements are impacting the rest of the agency given that it recently removed assorted real-time metrics that had once been tracked on its website.

So far, an estimated 4,600 SSA employees have left the agency since March, and the Trump administration has pushed plans to reduce the staff by a total of 7,000 employees all together, which would represent a 12% cut in its workforce since the start of the year.

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, argued in an op-ed for Common Dreams last week that "total collapse" of the Social Security system is the end-goal of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies.

"Republican politicians hate effective government programs, because they don't make any money for their paymasters on Wall Street," Lawson wrote. "Since Social Security is the most popular and effective government program, they hate it most of all—and are doing everything they can to destroy it."