Elon Musk and his Department of Government of Efficiency are tearing through the Social Security Administration, vowing to root out fraud and to rewrite the entire system's code in a matter of months. And behind the scenes, they're also gutting the teams that run it, leaving employees terrified that it'll be sent into a "death spiral."

"Until they get rid of DOGE and the person in office right now, and the Republicans actually get a backbone and stand up for something for once in their lives, things are just going to be complete chaos," a longtime worker at the agency told The Guardian. "That's really the best word to describe SSA right now, just complete, utter chaos."

Mirroring the fate of other agencies, the changes to the SSA will be sweeping and crushing. Under the Trump administration's directive, the SSA is slated to eliminate over 7,000 employees, reducing its total workforce to around 50,000.

This jeopardizes the stability of the largest government program in the US, dwarfing even Medicare. Every month, around 69 million Americans receive Social Security benefits. That amounts to over $1.6 trillion being doled out per year.

The program is overwhelmingly popular across all virtually all demographics — but Trump and Musk's ruthless gutting of the federal government has shown that there are no sacred cows in this new paradigm. Musk infamously called Social Security the "biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time" — this coming from a guy who has literally been accused of perpetrating a crypto pyramid scheme. Seemingly, it doesn't matter that it's backbone of most Americans' retirement planning.

"You're going to see a wholesale collapse in the agency's service structure," Rich Couture, a spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employee's Social Security Administration general committee, a union that represents the vast majority of the agency's employees, told the Guardian. "Call wait times will skyrocket, wait times for appointments, processing times, all of it going to skyrocket because there won't be enough people to do the jobs, which opens the door to privatization."

To Couture, the size of the workforce reduction is arbitrary.

"It has never been explained with any degree of clarity how they came up with that figure," he told the newspaper. "What's being served by that by a loss of 7,000 jobs? How does any of that supposedly make this operation more efficient?"

The anonymous SSA employee echoed the rudderlessness of the whole operation.

"No one knows what's going on," the employee said. "They're just coming up with ideas at the top of their head."

While all this is happening, DOGE staff want to migrate the entire SSA's computer system, written in the ancient COBOL programming language, onto a new platform written in a modern language like Java in just a matter of months, Wired reported — something that experts say would take years to do properly.

With disruptions to the system itself, along with thousands of workers getting kicked out the door, the whirlwind changes run an extreme risk of blocking people's social security payments. And if that happens, good luck getting someone on the phone, or seeing someone in person, or getting help online. Since the DOGE purge, phone helplines have been shut down, with Musk claiming they're a vector of fraud. Dozens of SSA offices have been targeted for closure. And the website that aging seniors are supposed to figure out to use now keeps crashing.

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