The phone lines at the Social Security Administration have become a gauntlet of despair. Elderly Americans and people with disabilities wait on hold for hours, sometimes days, only to be met with silence or a dial tone.
Some never get through at all.
That is the picture painted by a new report released by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and the Senate Democrats’ Social Security War Room, a year-old operation designed to push back against what Democrats call a deliberate dismantling of the nation’s retirement safety net.
The report alleges that the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the agency, slashing more than 7,000 employees, gutting field office services, and misleading the public about the damage.
Trump Republicans also “accelerated the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund, sending Americans even closer to an automatic benefits cut.”
“Since Day One, Donald Trump’s attacks on Social Security have made it harder for Americans to get their benefits,” Warren said in a statement accompanying the report. “We launched our Social Security War Room a year ago to fight back and stop Trump’s damage, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
The findings are blunt. An investigation by the War Room found that average phone wait times were more than ten times higher than what the agency claimed on its own website—assuming the call was answered at all.
In some rural areas, field offices have been so depleted that they are, in the report’s words, “effectively closed,” unable to perform the in-person services millions rely on to change direct deposit information, apply for benefits, or simply ask a question.
The report lays the blame at the feet of President Donald Trump and his handpicked Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, a former investment banker who reportedly had to Google the job description when first offered the post.
Under Bisignano, the agency has pursued what critics call a backdoor benefits cut: not by changing the formulas, but by making the system so difficult to navigate that people give up.
Republicans have long floated more direct attacks. The Republican Study Committee, which represents nearly 80% of House Republicans, released a budget last year that would raise the retirement age and cut benefits for three out of every four Americans.
That same budget would end Medicare as we know it, slash food assistance for children, and deliver massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy, Democrats note.
But the War Room’s focus is on the here and now.
One of its key victories, the report claims, came after a personal meeting between Warren and Bisignano, during which the commissioner committed to not moving Social Security workers into a new job classification known as Schedule F—a change that would have made it easier to fire them.
He also agreed to preserve paper checks for beneficiaries who cannot access online services and to cooperate with an independent inspector general investigation into the agency’s own data.
The report also aims at Elon Musk, the billionaire leading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Musk has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that Social Security is riddled with fraud—that dead people and undocumented immigrants are draining the trust funds, that the system is a “Ponzi scheme.”
When DOGE claimed that 40% of calls to change direct deposit information were fraudulent, the Social Security Administration’s own data found just two confirmed fraud cases out of 110,000 phone claims.
“Instead of working to address its customer service crisis, Doge was busy pilfering SSA beneficiaries’ sensitive and personal information,” the report says, citing ongoing congressional investigations into whether a DOGE staffer misused confidential Social Security data.
The War Room has introduced legislation to fight back, including the Keep Billionaires Out of Social Security Act and the Social Security Emergency Inflation Relief Act, which would temporarily expand benefits to match rising costs.
Another bill, the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act, would lift poverty-level caps that have left many disabled Americans trapped below the federal poverty line.
A Social Security Administration spokesperson rejected Warren’s claims, calling them “baseless” and accusing the senator of scaring seniors.
“Senator Warren refuses to acknowledge the significant customer service improvements occurring at SSA under Commissioner Bisignano’s leadership,” the spokesperson said.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston did not directly address the allegations about misinformation or staffing cuts but pointed to a temporary tax deduction on Social Security benefits.
“President Trump has fought and delivered for America’s seniors more than any of his predecessors,” said Huston. “President Trump will always protect and strengthen Social Security.”
The War Room, now one year old, shows no signs of closing up shop. Its next fight, Warren said, is to stop any proposal to raise the retirement age—a move that would force millions of Americans to work longer for less. For a 59-year-old roofer or a nurse with arthritis, that is not a policy tweak. It is a sentence.
“We’re keeping up the fight to protect—and expand—Social Security,” Warren said, “to make sure it’s here for generations of Americans to come.”