The United States Social Security Administration’s internet portal has frequently gone offline in recent weeks, and presented inaccurate or incomplete information to users, perhaps because of changes steered by Elon Musk’s cost-trimming DOGE unit.
A Washington Post report suggests DOGE’s introduction of a fraud checking service is to blame for the site often going dark, and cites anonymous staff members who claim the application wasn’t tested to operate at appropriate scale.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has admitted it’s suffered outages, and blamed its old infrastructure and user demand.
“SSA website went down because of atypical high volume and it’s a 1979 platform,” the SSA wrote on X. “It had nothing to do with DOGE. In fact, this problem has alerted to an issue that DOGE will promptly fix.”
That 1979 is likely a reference to the millions of lines of COBOL and assembly code at the heart of the SSA, and there have been rumors Musk’s team is mulling replacing all of it with something modern in the space of months. We’re not surprised to see the codebase and DOGE mentioned together by administration spinners; the software is in the White House’s cross-hairs.
SSA hasn’t said why demand to access the portal is high but the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper’s report advances two theories: Users are being encouraged to use the web instead of other channels for support, and some recipients of payments are incorrectly being told they’re not currently receiving any money.
Last week, for example, recipients of Supplemental Security Income – a program for disabled and low-income Americans – were told their benefits would be cut. This turned out to be an error, and checks were deposited on time.
“This alarming episode raises fresh questions about operations at SSA and the effects of the Department of Government Efficiency’s attacks on the agency, which you have helped facilitate,” said Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in a letter to acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek, referring to Musk’s non-department DOGE.
“Indeed, we are concerned that these efforts are a precursor to attempts to make further cuts to Social Security, or privatize it entirely.”
Further changes at SSA are not beyond the realms of possibility. Elon Musk recently described social security as a “Ponzi scheme” on Joe Rogan’s podcast and the SSA has announced plans to cut staffing levels by 7,000, from 57,000, through encouraging retirement or voluntary redundancy.
There’s also a political angle to the SSA’s problems. After a very public spat last month between the Maine’s Democratic Governor Jane Mills and President Trump, Dudek issued a letter to staff instructing them to cancel contracts that result in payments of federal funds to the state, even though he acknowledged that this would increase fraud levels.
“Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” Dudek wrote, according to Representative Gerald Connolly (D-VA).
DOGE operatives have apparently expressed a belief they can rebuild SSA’s website in six months, if not the entire codebase somehow. Here’s hoping they succeed, against all odds as this is the kind of careful work ordinarily that takes years, as Elon Musk has already said that he wants to emphasize online customer interactions and rely less on phone-based service. ®
