By Darius Tahir, Kff Health News
Rennie Glasgow, who served 15 years for Social Security Administration, sees something new at work: the dead.
They are not really dead, of course. In four cases in recent weeks, he told Kff Health News, his Schenectady office, New York, saw people coming for whom “there is no information on the file, just that they died”. Employees must therefore “resuscitate” them – affirm that they live, so that they can receive their advantages.
Awakenings were “sporadic” before, and there was an increase in such cases in New York, said Glasgow. He is also responsible for the American Federation of Government employees, the union, which represented 42,000 social security employees just before the second term of President Donald Trump.
Martin O’malley, who directed the Social Security Administration towards 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. “In this room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said that they each had a friend who was wrongly deceased when they are very alive,” he said.
It is more than a simple drawback, because other institutions are counting on social security numbers to do business, said Glasgow. Being declared dead “has an impact on their bank account. This has an impact on their insurance. This has an impact on their ability to work.
“They put an end to people’s financial life,” said O’malley.
Although it is only one of the defenders and lawyers are worried, these erroneous deaths come after a pair of SSA New Leadership initiatives to modify or update its databases of the living and the dead.
Holders of millions of social security numbers have been marked as deceased. In addition, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, thousands of figures belonging to immigrants have been purged, cutting them from banks and trade, in an effort to encourage these people to “self-work”.
Glasgow said that SSA employees had received an agency email in April about the purge, explaining to them how to resuscitate the beneficiaries wrongly marked. “Why don’t you do a reasonable diligence to make sure you do it first is correct?” He said.
Incorrectly marked deaths are only part of the Trump administration crash program supposed to eliminate fraud, modernize technology and secure the future of the program.
But KFF Health News’ interviews with more than a dozen beneficiaries, defenders, lawyers, current and former employees, and the legislators suggest that the overhaul aggravates the agency to its main work: the sending of checks to the elderly, orphans, widows and those who suffer from damage.
Philadelphia Lisa Seda, who has cancer, has been struggling for weeks to settle the difficulties of her 24 -year -old niece with the social security insurance program. There are two problems: first, trying to change the address of his niece; Second, trying to understand why the program deduced about $ 400 a month for Medicare bonuses, when its lawyer in disability – whose company has a policy against speaking – believes that they could be zero.
Since March, sometimes Social Security has had direct payments on the bank account of its niece and other times by the post of checks at its old address. Trying to set this was a swamp of long calls on hold and people in person who asked for an appointment.
Before 2025, bringing the agency to treat changes was generally simple, said its lawyer. No more.
The need is disastrous. If the agency stops the disability payments of the niece, “then it will be homeless”, recalls Seda. “I don’t know if I will survive this cancer or not, but there is no one else to help him.”
Some problems are technological. According to denunciation information provided to the Democrats of the Chamber’s Supervisory Committee, the agency’s efforts to process certain data failed more frequently. When this happens, “he can delay or even stop payments to social security beneficiaries,” the Committee recently told the Agency Inspector General.
While technological experts and former social security officials warn against the potential of a complete system accident, daily decrease can be an insidious and serious problem, said Kathleen Romig, formerly of the Social Security Administration and its Advisory Council and currently Director of Social Security Social Security and the policy of invalidity at the center of budgetary and political priorities. The beneficiaries may have trouble obtaining appointments or the money due to them, she said.
For more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide, social security is crucial. More than a third of the recipients said they would not be able to afford the necessities if the checks stopped coming, according to the results of the National Academy of Social Insurance Survey published in January.
Defenders and lawyers say that social security recently failed to deliver, to a certain extent which is almost unprecedented in their experience.
Carolyn Villers, executive director of the Massachusetts senior Action Council, said that two of the March payments of its members had been late for several days. “For a member, this meant that he could not pay rent in time,” she said. “Delayed payment is not something I have heard in the past 20 years.”
When Kff Health News asked the agency questions, social security officials sent them to the White House. The White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston referred to Trump’s “resounding mandate” to make government more effective.
“He promised to protect social security, and each recipient will continue to receive his advantages,” said Huston in an email. She did not provide specific answers and on the record record.
Complaints concerning missed payments are the fungus. The Office of the Attorney General of Arizona had received approximately 40 complaints related to delayed or disturbed payments in early April, Richie spokesman Taylor said Kff Health News.
A Connecticut agency helping people on Medicare said that social security complaints – which often help administer payments and register patients on the government insurance program mainly for those over 65 – had almost doubled in March compared to last year.
Lawyers representing the beneficiaries claim that, although the historically under-funded agency has always had its share of errors and ineffectiveness, this is getting worse while experienced employees have been released.
“We see more errors committed,” said James Ratchford, a lawyer in West Virginia with 17 years of experience in the representation of social security beneficiaries. “We see more abandoned things.”
What is abandoned, sometimes are records of basic transactions. Kim Beavers of Independence, Missouri, tried to finish a periodic ritual in February: filling out an update form for disabled people saying that she cannot work. But its payments scheduled for March and April did not arise.
She obtained an appointment in person to disentangle the problem – only for him to be told that there was no trace of her submission, despite her impressions of the relevant documents to the agency’s representative. Beavers has a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.
Social security employees frequently cite missing files to explain their inability to solve problems when they encounter lawyers and beneficiaries. A lawyer for disabled people whose firm’s policy does not allow him to be appointed had a particularly confusing case: a customer, a long -standing beneficiary of social security, has had his advantages reassess. After winning the call, the lawyer returned to the agency to restore payments – the recipient was without February. But there was nothing there.
“Being informed that they have never been paid before is just chaos, right? Chaos unconditional,” said the lawyer.
Researchers and lawyers say they suspect what is behind social security problems: the effort led by Elon Musk to reorganize the agency.
Some 7,000 SSA employees would have been released; O’malley estimated that 3,000 others would leave the agency. “As the workloads increase, demoralization becomes deeper and people are exhausted and leave,” he predicted during an audience in April held by the Democrats of the Chamber. “It will mean that if you go to a country office, you will see many more closed and closed windows.”
Departures hit the agency’s regional payment centers hard. These centers help treat and judge certain cases. This is the type of work behind the scenes in which “the problems first surface,” said Romig. But if the staff does not have enough time, “these things languish”.
Language can mean, in some cases, to be abandoned by important programs like Medicare. Social security often automatically deduces premiums or otherwise administers payments for the health program.
Recently, Melanie Lambert, a main lawyer at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, has seen an increasing number of cases in which the agency determines that the beneficiaries owe money to Medicare. The money is sent to payment centers, she said. And the checks “stay there”.
The beneficiaries lose health insurance and “these endings also tend to occur earlier than they should, on the basis of social security rules”, putting people in a bureaucratic labyrinth, said Lambert.
Employee technology is more often on Fritz. “There are problems every day with our system. Each day, at some point, our system would drop automatically,” said Glasgow, of the Schenectady office of Social Security. These problems started in mid-March, he said.
The new problems let Glasgow suspect the worst. “It is more work for less bodies, which will end up enlarging the ineffectiveness of our work and will do us, make the agency, seem to underperform, then a closer stage of the privatization of the agency,” he said.
Jodie Fleischer by Cox Media Group contributed to this report.
© 2025 Kaiser Health News. Visit Khn.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. © 2025 Kff Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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