President Trump is railing about its “incompetence and probable fraud.” Elon Musk is calling it a “Ponzi scheme.” Hundreds of its offices are being shuttered and thousands of its employees are being furloughed. Should the roughly 56 million older Americans who rely on monthly social security checks be concerned about the future of America’s largest safety net and the agency that manages it?

Maybe.

This week, a Democratic former Social Security Commissioner, Martin O’Malley, told CNBC that changes being forced on the agency by the Department of Government Efficiency already have caused IT system outages and could ultimately lead to a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within weeks. Mr. Malley warned people who rely on monthly stipends from the fund they have paid into most of their working lives to, “start saving now.”

Social Security is the primary source of income for most older Americans, and nearly one in five rely on it for almost all their income, according to the AARP, America’s largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization advocating for citizens 50 and older.

The AARP’s chief advocacy and engagement officer, Nancy LeaMond, said in a statement that recent moves in Washington have “thousands of older Americans confused and concerned about their Social Security payments, the status of Social Security field offices, and inexcusably long wait times on the phone to get their questions answered.”

Last week, the Social Security Administration announced an “agency-wide organizational restructuring” that will involve shedding about 12 percent of its 57,000-strong workforce. The agency says it will hit this target largely through retirements, resignations and “voluntary incentive separation payments,” but added that there could also be “reduction-in-force actions that could include abolishment of organizations and positions.”

The announcement has intensified fears that there will not be enough staffers to run an agency that requires hands-on customer service for some of the services it provides, and that mass spending cuts being pursued by DOGE could cause delays or denials of benefits. 

This trepidation appears to be well-founded. Staff cuts “will inevitably hurt beneficiaries,” the director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Kathleen Romig, told AARP. “There’s no way that the agency can sustain thousands of staff cuts without hurting the people who rely on Social Security, which is all of us.”

Fears of a “system collapse,” however, could be over-hyped. Benefit payments are nearly always automated, with money transferring electronically to beneficiaries’ bank accounts from the U.S. Treasury, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on Social Security reform, Andrew Biggs, tells the Sun. 

“For both technical and political reasons, benefit payments are the last thing I would imagine being disrupted at Social Security,” Mr. Biggs says. “The greater risk of disruptions is with things like filing for disability benefits, which is much less automated and relies much more on interaction with SSA employees,” Mr. Biggs says. It’s possible that wait times for customer service or to apply for disability benefits could increase if the recent cuts survive the growing public scrutiny.

Service issues have already been plaguing Social Security, whose workforce had shrunk to a near-50-year low amid attrition and hiring freezes even before the latest announcement. The agency’s performance data from January discloses that the average disability application took eight months to process, compared to four months in January 2020.

Under the Trump administration, the Social Security Administration insists that the staffing cuts — coupled with changes to information technology, contracts, grants and other areas — could lead to savings of more than $800 million for the 2025 fiscal year.

According to Mr. Musk, radical reform is necessary for a retirement system which he described to podcaster Joe Rogan as a “Ponzi scheme.” Trump alleged in his Tuesday night address to Congress that there are “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” He argued that millions of senior citizens over age 100, including 130,000 people more than 160 years old, were collecting Social Security checks. 

“The federal government itself reports billions of dollars a year of likely fraudulent payments from Social Security,” the director of a center on the federal budget at the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Richard Stern, tells the Sun. “DOGE’s efforts here are essential to preserving the program and ensuring that seniors get their benefits without the trust fund being depleted through fraud.”

Yet the Trump administration’s claims of widespread fraud in Social Security have been debunked. Though inspectors general at the agency have identified millions of people over 100 in their database as a result of outdated records, there were 89,106 people, not tens of millions, over the age of 99 who received retirement benefits in December 2024, out of the more than 70 million people who receive benefits each year.

Fierce criticism of Social Security won’t make it go away. That is unless Congress refuses to deal with America’s runaway debt of $36.22 trillion, and the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund becomes insolvent in 2033 as many are predicting unless federal spending is curtailed. Running solely on taxpayer money, the program would then be mandated by law to enact a 21 percent cut in retirement benefits for everyone receiving them.