Seniors trying to access their earned benefit information hit a snag when the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) website crashed on Wednesday morning. These sorts of incidents have unfortunately become commonplace since the Trump administration took over, as DOGE’s crusade at SSA has left the agency in chaos.
“We continue to get reports of glitches on SSA’s website. It looks like this was one of them,” said NCPSSM President and CEO, Max Richtman.
At around 10 AM on Wednesday, My Social Security users faced “Online Service Not Available” errors. Advocates questioned whether the outage stemmed from SSA’s June login overhaul, which mandated Login.gov and ID.me as the sole sign-in options and scrapped traditional Social Security usernames and passwords. (Under new Trump administration rules, beneficiaries are no longer able to verify their identity over the phone.)
Thanks to Trump, Commissioner Frank Bisignano, and DOGE, staffing at SSA sits at historic lows, as the administration continues to force out experienced civil servants (including knowledgeable IT staff) in favor of a “technology agenda” better suited for the private sector, not an agency intended to serve the public. As a result, the website crashed five times in the month of March, and again during this latest incident. (Let’s not even get started on the AI bots that SSA has deployed to answer customer phone calls, which CNET called “maddening.”)
Trump’s Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano has presided over reckless cuts at SSA (AP Images)
Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, pointed out how Trump/DOGE cutbacks make tech outages “far more likely.” She told ThinkAdvisor, “This is especially concerning because Social Security leadership wants to reduce visitors to field offices by half, telling people to go online instead.”
“SSA is not a tech company to be gutted and sold to private equity. It is an agency that up until this year had nobly served the public, despite gross underfunding from Congress. On behalf of all Social Security beneficiaries, we lament the decline in service at SSA.” – Max Richtman, President and CEO, NCPSSM
SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano has tried to disguise these reckless cuts as part of his “technology agenda,” using sketchy stats to cover up the fact that the administration has done nothing but kneecap the agency’s ability to function.
In an April edition of our podcast, former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley excoriated Trump and DOGE for taking a “meat cleaver” to what had been an improving agency under the Biden administration, despite chronic underfunding from Congress.
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Read our fact sheet on how seniors can protect themselves from chaos at SSA here
Read our fact check on Commissioner Frank Bisignano, aka “The Frankster” here
Listen to our “You Earned This” podcast here