“When former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley took on the overpayment problems at SSA, he not only sought to reduce overpayments, but to mitigate the financial pain of beneficiaries who receive overpayment notices and somehow had to come up with the money to repay the program or have their benefits docked. The Trump administration now has reversed that policy, reinstating the default overpayment withholding rate for Social Security beneficiaries to 100 percent of a person’s monthly benefit.
This action, ostensibly taken to cut costs at SSA, needlessly punishes beneficiaries who receive overpayment notices — usually through no fault of their own. Many overpayments are the result of errors on SSA’s part. Ironically, SSA is in the process of radically reducing its workforce, under the influence of President Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE, at a time when staffing already was at a 50-year low. Fewer SSA employees will doubtless mean more overpayment errors on the agency’s part, costing SSA even more money and inflicting additional financial trauma on the part of the overpaid beneficiaries. Trump’s SSA also is closing field offices across the country, meaning beneficiaries will have to wait longer and possibly travel farther to resolve their overpayment cases.
This new policy is petty, cruel and thoughtless. It is part of Trump, Musk, and DOGE’s pillaging of the Social Security Administration for supposed cost-savings. Their real agenda, of course, is to dismantle Social Security from the inside so it can be cut and privatized — a billionaire’s dream. American workers pay for the administration of their earned benefits with every paycheck; funds from the FICA tax go toward SSA, one of the most efficient federal agencies. With an overhead of less than 1%, and chronically underfunded by Congress, it is hardly a worthy target unless the point is to raid and weaken Social Security itself.” – National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare