“A new policy announced yesterday by the Social Security Administration serves as further evidence that the Trump administration is determined to make it harder for Americans to collect their earned benefits. The new policy requires anyone applying for new benefits by phone to first verify their identity online.
This replaces the policy where claimants were able to complete the benefit application process 100% by phone, which had been in place for decades. The new policy is supposedly intended to prevent ‘fraud,’ without any proof that phone claims were being paid out fraudulently.
The new process would force seniors and people with disabilities to navigate a needless technical hurdle in applying for their earned benefits. If these claimants (who do not aways have computers or smart phones, reliable internet service, or the technical skills to complete the process online) cannot verify their identity online, they would have to call SSA via the already overburdened phone line to set up an appointment, and travel in person to an SSA field office at a time when the agency is closing field offices across the country and radically reducing staff.
If ever there was a ‘solution in search of a problem,’ this is it.
This policy is part of a clear pattern: Elon Musk, DOGE, and their acolytes at SSA are engaged in an intentional campaign to make it harder for Americans to collect their hard-earned Social Security benefits. They have carried out this campaign under the false banner of searching for ‘fraud,’ even though all of Musk and DOGE’s allegations of massive fraud have been thoroughly debunked. (Improper payments amount to less than 1% of benefits paid and few of these are actual fraud.) Yet they continue to lie and use ‘fraud’ as a justification for disrupting operations at the agency that delivers benefits to more than 70 million Americans.
Intentionally erecting obstacles for the people who’ve earned these benefits (and who pay for SSA operations with every paycheck) betrays at the least an indifference — and more likely, an outright hostility — to the elderly, people with disabilities, their families and survivors who rely on Social Security.
One has to ask why the world’s richest man — who has received in the tens of billions of dollars in federal contracts — is targeting the agency that helps so many Americans keep their heads above water financially.
It’s clear now that Musk (who recently called Social Security a ‘Ponzi Scheme’) and DOGE, under the pretext of finding fraud, are attempting to undermine public support for Social Security by rendering the SSA dysfunctional, so that the program can be squeezed for cash, cut, and privatized. There is no other rational conclusion, despite President Trump’s increasingly hollow promise ‘not to touch’ Social Security.” – Max Richtman, President and CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
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