How Social Security cuts could put millions of older Americans at risk

Martin O’Malley, Former Commissioner, Social Security Administration:

Ever since December, people have been putting in — those eligible to retire have started to leave the agency.

The agency had already had been driven down to a 50-year low in staffing, even as Baby Boomers of my generation swelled their customer ranks to a new record high every single day. So, people are going to experience much longer wait times on the telephone. We had gotten that speed to answer down to 12.5 minutes. It’s now shot back up on average to over a half-hour now.

You’re going to see more people dying, waiting in line for their initial disability determinations, which we had started to get moving in a better direction. That’s now going back up. And it’s going to take longer when people do decide to retire to actually effectuate that claim and get them into a payment status.

Ultimately, all of this cratering out of the agency, all of this gutting of the agency’s customer service staffing is going to have, I think, very widespread consequences for all 72 million people receiving Social Security, because they have never had to operate these old systems with such few staff, and they are being gutted every single day.

I think they’re going to drive more than 7,000 people out of the agency.