‘It’s a shambles’: DOGE cuts bring chaos, long waits at Social Security for seniors
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When Veronica Sanchez called a Social Security hotline Thursday, she waited two hours before her call was abruptly disconnected.
On Friday, she was on hold for six hours and still did not get through to anyone.
“I’m gonna have to take time out of my work to stand in line and hopefully get this resolved,” the 52-year-old medical practice manager in Canoga Park said Monday before calling one more time.
For Sanchez, the stakes are high: If she does not obtain a medical letter from the agency by April 15, her parents, who are on a fixed income, risk losing about $2,500 a month in medical care. They would no longer receive insulin medication for their diabetes, she said, and could lose their daily visit from a nurse.
But even if Sanchez shows up in person, she is not likely to speak to an agent. Field offices are no longer accepting walk-in appointments.
“The system, it’s broken down,” Sanchez said.
Elderly and disabled people — and those who care for them — are encountering a knot of bureaucratic hurdles and service disruptions after the Trump administration imposed a sweeping overhaul of the Social Security Administration system.
No field offices in California have closed. But there is rising frustration across Southern California and the nation as many seniors experience crashed webpages, endure jammed phone lines and are turned away at offices. Social Security officials have downplayed the problems and said some of the issues predate the Trump administration and the government efficiency push headed by Elon Musk.
In February, the agency that sends monthly checks to nearly 73 million Americans announced plans to slash 7,000 jobs and consolidate its regional offices from 10 to four as part of an effort to “reduce the size of its bloated workforce and organizational structure.” The cutbacks, enforced by Musk’s advisory team known as the Department of Government Efficiency, represent a 12% reduction of the agency’s workforce.
Sanchez does not believe she is reaping the benefits of government efficiency.
“It’s frustrating,” she said, noting that a call that would once take 15 minutes now involves much more work.
If Sanchez did not reach someone from Social Security this week, she worried her parents — particularly her mother, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis so severe she struggles to hold a coffee cup — could end up in the hospital.
“If they don’t have the caregiver that’s coming by to monitor their sugar in the morning, do the blood pressure readings ...” she said, “I don’t even want to think about the worst-case scenario. They will definitely be in a very, very, very bad situation.”
The death of 17 people in Altadena during the Eaton fire has highlighted L.A. County’s struggle to plan for the evacuation of elderly and disabled residents.
Last week, a coalition of advocacy groups, including the American Assn. of People with Disabilities, filed a federal lawsuit against the Social Security Administration, Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, and Musk. It alleged that the agency overhaul “severely undermined” services and caused “significant and irreparable harm.”
“In just nine weeks, the new administration has upended the agency with sweeping and destabilizing policy changes — shifting critical agency functions onto overburdened local offices, slashing telephone-based services, and debilitating the agency’s ability to meet beneficiaries’ needs,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia alleges.
“The result is a systematic dismantling of SSA’s core functions, leaving millions of beneficiaries without the essential benefits they are legally entitled to,” the lawsuit adds. “The defendants have abandoned their duty, placing ideology over obligation and governance over the governed.”
Maria Town, president and chief executive of the American Assn. of People with Disabilities, told The Times that the system changes were not only hurting people’s ability to sign up and enroll for benefits. People already connected to the system who needed support were also having trouble appealing benefits decisions or accessing medical services.
“You can’t get anyone on the phone,” she said.
Even before Trump took office, Town said, the system had challenges: About 30,000 disabled people died in 2023 waiting for their SSDI application to be approved.
“This is just going to make life harder for millions of Americans,” she said. “Americans with disabilities want government to be efficient and responsible to the needs of people. These cuts, despite their claims, are actually counter to that goal.”
The Social Security Administration did not respond to The Times’ requests for comment on the problems elderly and disabled people reported accessing services. The agency’s press office acknowledged in a string of posts on X that telephone wait times were too long and its website had faced challenges, but said the issues “predate the current Administration.”
“Zero customer-facing representatives been let go,” the agency said, noting that it continued to “move employees from non-mission critical positions to bolster the ranks of our existing, dedicated frontline employees to serve the public.”
The restructuring was “focused on mission-critical services without compromising service quality,” the agency said, and “aligns with the American people’s call for efficiency in government operations.”
But across Los Angeles, people who showed up at Social Security field offices without appointments were turned away.
Andrew Taylor, 55, threw his hands up in the air Monday morning as he walked out of the Social Security office on Wilshire Boulevard.
“Everything is by appointment now,” a federal employee told a small group of people lined up on the sidewalk.
Taylor, who is homeless and lives on Skid Row, had lined up just before the doors opened at 9 a.m. He wanted to get an award letter that would allow him to apply for food stamps and other benefits, but he was told he would have to wait three hours to get in. Even if he did, there was no guarantee that he would get the letter at the office.
“It’s ridiculous,” Taylor said. “They said they would have to mail it to me and there’s nothing they could do for me today.”
About five months ago, Taylor said, he asked for the same letter at the same office and did not run into any issues. He didn’t know what to make of the difference and had not followed the changes in the White House.
“If this is what they’re doing in Washington, it isn’t fair to everyone else,” he said. “Poor people always seem to get the worst of it.”
A three-judge panel blocked a lower court decision that halted DOGE access at the Education Department, the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management.
Several other people waited in line, including Camilla Sosa, 68, who said she waited on hold over the phone for about two hours on Friday. She had not received a letter from Social Security that she needs to allow her to open a new bank account, and she wasn’t able to get a straight answer about why.
An agency employee told her that without an appointment, she would have to wait for three hours.
“Oh no, that’s so long,” she said in Spanish. She decided to leave and try again another day.
Social Security employees handed out a flier with a phone number and a QR code that people could scan with their phones to make an appointment. But the website kept returning an error message.
Advocates for seniors say challenges accessing Social Security help were compounded in March when the Trump administration announced new online verification procedures that resulted in many elderly and disabled Americans being unable to use their personal “my Social Security” account.
“The system is a shambles,” said Gevorg Adjian, the founder of All Seniors Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that offers free medical care, supplies, and healthcare services for seniors.
After sending out a letter last month urging people having trouble with the online system to come on in, Adjian said, the administration then eliminated any kind of walk-in appointments.
Adjian said he had fielded calls from seniors who had lost or not received checks.
“They have no one to reach out to to find out the status of it, and appointments are three, four or five months down the line,” Adjian said. “On a Social Security income, you can’t really wait three, four months and not have any payments.”
Adjian said his foundation helps seniors get the online logins that they need. But uploading their ID could be a challenge, he said, because most of them don’t use smart devices or have emails.
“It’s cut out the seniors from communicating with the Social Security office,” he said of the system overhaul.
Adding to the complication, the agency was cutting out paper checks, which many elderly people who do not trust online transactions rely on.
Dr. Stephen Carney, 74, an emergency care physician in Los Angeles who receives Social Security, said he expected the changes to hurt a lot of elderly people who are not computer savvy.
“Everyone agrees there’s excess and waste in government in any nation,” he said. “But you don’t take a meat cleaver and do surgery.”
At a Los Angeles Social Security office on Crenshaw Boulevard, security guards did not allow anyone inside the building Monday without an appointment.
A woman leaning on a walker approached the doors after getting out of her Uber. She said she had an appointment.
The security guard looked at her paperwork and said her appointment was for a phone call and someone from the agency was scheduled to call her.
She laughed loudly and said, “Just let me in.”
The guard directed her to a phone number on a flier posted on the door and said she could try to get more information from the number.
“We don’t have anything for you here right now,” the guard said.
Her caretaker directed her back into the parking lot to call for another rideshare driver.
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