Trump take Social Security
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As is well known, DOGE and related Republican cuts to the federal government did not save any material amounts of money, but they were very good at making many government services worse. Social Security is another example:
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.
It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments leftinexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete sometransactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit93 million as of late September — a six-year high, data shows.
The troubled disability benefits system is also deteriorating after some improvement, with 66 percent of disability appointments scheduled within 28 days as of December — down from nearly 90 percent earlier in the year, data shows.
This affects the lives of a lot of people who are disproportionately likely to vote in midterm elections — Democats need to take political advantage of this to help put themselves in a position to start fixing it in 2029.