Rennie Glasgow, who has served 15 years at the Social Security Administration, is seeing something new on the job: dead people.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re not really dead, of course. In four instances over the past few weeks, he told KFF Health News, his Schenectady, New York, office has seen people come in for whom \u201cthere is no information on the record, just that they are dead.\u201d So employees have to \u201cresurrect\u201d them \u2014 affirm that they\u2019re living, so they can receive their benefits.<\/p>\n
Revivals were \u201csporadic\u201d before, and there\u2019s been an uptick in such cases across upstate New York, said Glasgow. He is also an official with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represented 42,000 Social Security employees<\/a> just before the start of President Donald Trump\u2019s second term.<\/p>\n Martin O\u2019Malley, who led the Social Security Administration toward the end of the Joe Biden administration, said in an interview that he had heard similar stories during a recent town hall in Racine, Wisconsin. \u201cIn that room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said they each had a friend who was wrongly marked as deceased when they\u2019re very much alive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s more than just an inconvenience, because other institutions rely on Social Security numbers to do business, Glasgow said. Being declared dead \u201cimpacts their bank account. This impacts their insurance. This impacts their ability to work. This impacts their ability to get anything done in society.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey are terminating people\u2019s financial lives,\u201d O\u2019Malley said.<\/p>\n Though it\u2019s just one of the things advocates and lawyers worry about, these erroneous deaths come after a pair of initiatives from new leadership at the SSA to alter or update its databases of the living and the dead.<\/p>\n Holders of millions of Social Security numbers have been marked as deceased. Separately, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times, thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants have been purged, cutting them off from banks and commerce, in an effort to encourage these people to \u201cself-deport.\u201d<\/p>\n Glasgow said SSA employees received an agency email in April about the purge, instructing them how to resurrect beneficiaries wrongly marked dead. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just do due diligence to make sure what you\u2019re doing in the first place is correct?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The incorrectly marked deaths are just a piece of the Trump administration\u2019s crash program purporting to root out fraud, modernize technology, and secure the program\u2019s future.<\/p>\n But KFF Health News\u2019 interviews with more than a dozen beneficiaries, advocates, lawyers, current and former employees, and lawmakers suggest the overhaul is making the agency worse at its primary job: sending checks to seniors, orphans, widows, and those with disabilities.<\/p>\n Philadelphian Lisa Seda, who has cancer, has been struggling for weeks to sort out her 24-year-old niece\u2019s difficulties with Social Security\u2019s disability insurance program. There are two problems: first, trying to change her niece\u2019s address; second, trying to figure out why the program is deducting roughly $400 a month for Medicare premiums, when her disability lawyer \u2014 whose firm has a policy against speaking on the record \u2014 believes they could be zero.<\/p>\n Since March, sometimes Social Security has direct-deposited payments to her niece\u2019s bank account and other times mailed checks to her old address. Attempting to sort that out has been a morass of long phone calls on hold and in-person trips seeking an appointment.<\/p>\n Before 2025, getting the agency to process changes was usually straightforward, her lawyer said. Not anymore.<\/p>\n The need is dire. If the agency halts the niece\u2019s disability payments, \u201cthen she will be homeless,\u201d Seda recalled telling an agency employee. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019m going to survive this cancer or not, but there is nobody else to help her.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the problems are technological. According to whistleblower information provided to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, the agency\u2019s efforts to process certain data have been failing more frequently. When that happens, \u201cit can delay or even stop payments to Social Security recipients,\u201d the committee recently told the agency\u2019s inspector general<\/a>.<\/p>\n While tech experts and former Social Security officials warn about the potential for a complete system crash, day-to-day decay can be an insidious and serious problem, said Kathleen Romig, formerly of the Social Security Administration and its advisory board and currently the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Beneficiaries could struggle to get appointments or the money they\u2019re owed, she said.<\/p>\n For its more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide, Social Security is crucial. More than a third of recipients said they wouldn\u2019t be able to afford necessities if the checks stopped coming, according to National Academy of Social Insurance survey results<\/a> published in January.<\/p>\n Advocates and lawyers say lately Social Security is failing to deliver, to a degree that\u2019s nearly unprecedented in their experience.<\/p>\n Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said two of her members\u2019 March payments were several days late. \u201cFor one member that meant not being able to pay rent on time,\u201d she said. \u201cThe delayed payment is not something I\u2019ve heard in the last 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n When KFF Health News presented the agency with questions, Social Security officials passed them off to the White House. White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston referred to Trump\u2019s \u201cresounding mandate\u201d to make government more efficient.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has promised to protect social security, and every recipient will continue to receive their benefits,\u201d Huston said in an email. She did not provide specific, on-the-record responses to questions.<\/p>\n Complaints about missed payments are mushrooming. The Arizona attorney general\u2019s office had received approximately 40 complaints related to delayed or disrupted payments by early April, spokesperson Richie Taylor told KFF Health News.<\/p>\n A Connecticut agency assisting people on Medicare said complaints related to Social Security \u2014 which often helps administer payments and enroll patients in the government insurance program primarily for those over age 65 \u2014 had nearly doubled in March compared with last year.<\/p>\n Lawyers representing beneficiaries say that, while the historically underfunded agency has always had its share of errors and inefficiencies, it\u2019s getting worse as experienced employees have been let go.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re seeing more mistakes being made,\u201d said James Ratchford, a lawyer in West Virginia with 17 years\u2019 experience representing Social Security beneficiaries. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing more things get dropped.\u201d<\/p>\n What gets dropped, sometimes, are records of basic transactions. Kim Beavers of Independence, Missouri, tried to complete a periodic ritual in February: filling out a disability update form saying she remains unable to work. But her scheduled payments in March and April didn\u2019t show.<\/p>\n She got an in-person appointment to untangle the problem \u2014 only to be told there was no record of her submission, despite her showing printouts of the relevant documents to the agency representative. Beavers has a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.<\/p>\n Social Security employees frequently cite missing records to explain their inability to solve problems when they meet with lawyers and beneficiaries. A disability lawyer whose firm\u2019s policy does not allow them to be named had a particularly puzzling case: One client, a longtime Social Security disability recipient, had her benefits reassessed. After winning on appeal, the lawyer went back to the agency to have the payments restored \u2014 the recipient had been going without since February. But there was nothing there.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be told they\u2019ve never been paid benefits before is just chaos, right? Unconditional chaos,\u201d the lawyer said.<\/p>\n Researchers and lawyers say they have a suspicion about what\u2019s behind the problems at Social Security: the Elon Musk-led effort to revamp the agency.<\/p>\n Some 7,000 SSA employees have reportedly been let go; O\u2019Malley has estimated that 3,000 more would leave the agency. \u201cAs the workloads go up, the demoralization becomes deeper, and people burn out and leave,\u201d he predicted in an April hearing<\/a> held by House Democrats. \u201cIt\u2019s going to mean that if you go to a field office, you\u2019re going to see a heck of a lot more empty, closed windows.\u201d<\/p>\n The departures have hit the agency\u2019s regional payment centers hard. These centers help process and adjudicate some cases. It\u2019s the type of behind-the-scenes work in which \u201cthe problems surface first,\u201d Romig said. But if the staff doesn\u2019t have enough time, \u201cthose things languish.\u201d<\/p>\n Languishing can mean, in some cases, getting dropped by important programs like Medicare. Social Security often automatically deducts premiums, or otherwise administers payments, for the health program.<\/p>\n Lately, Melanie Lambert, a senior advocate at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, has seen an increasing number of cases in which the agency determines beneficiaries owe money to Medicare. The cash is sent to the payment centers, she said. And the checks \u201cjust sit there.\u201d<\/p>\n Beneficiaries lose Medicare, and \u201cthose terminations also tend to happen sooner than they should, based on Social Security\u2019s own rules,\u201d putting people into a bureaucratic maze, Lambert said.<\/p>\n Employees\u2019 technology is more often on the fritz. \u201cThere\u2019s issues every single day with our system. Every day, at a certain time, our system would go down automatically,\u201d said Glasgow, of Social Security\u2019s Schenectady office. Those problems began in mid-March, he said.<\/p>\n The new problems leave Glasgow suspecting the worst. \u201cIt\u2019s more work for less bodies, which will eventually hype up the inefficiency of our job and make us, make the agency, look as though it\u2019s underperforming, and then a closer step to the privatization of the agency,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n KFF Health News<\/a> is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF\u2014an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF<\/a>.<\/p>\nUSE OUR CONTENT<\/h3>\n