Americans can finally call the Social Security Administration (SSA) to obtain their advantages after a month of chaos caused by the Elon Musk Government Department (DOGE).
Musk, who led a crusade to reduce federal spending and eliminate the “bloating”, urged the SSA to remove telephone complaints, which allow Americans to call and speak with an SSA representative to request services or process a complaint. On March 29, the SSA prevented customers from modifying their bank information by telephone to limit identity fraud.
The announcement caused a mass panic. Long lines served around the offices on the SSA field while the elderly and disabled Americans were waiting to show their driving license to the staff. The phone waiting times have skyrocketed, and the SSA website crashed several times after Musk and its Doge lips have launched unused software.
Now Musk has been forced to overthrow the course.
The legislators pleaded with Musk to end madness, and Wednesday, The Washington Post Confirmed that they had succeeded: SSA leaders brought back Musk’s plans and restored all teleclamation services. A social security spokesperson confirmed the Job This was true, despite a vague post that did not announce the rebirth of the teleclamation service.
The Daily Beast contacted Musk and the Trump administration to comment.
A service note of the Acting Commissioner of the SSA, Doris Diaz, at the acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, also announced a new system of treatment of tele-fraud which could produce false positive fraud, but the “risk is less than the sending of more than 40,000 customers of teleclamation to offices on the ground per week for the tests of identity in person”.
Musk’s television plots were put aside to make way for an influx of Americans in the hope of establishing direct payments on the phone. SSA determined that it could examine people for fraud on the phone, effectively killing Musk’s business and relieving the stress of agitated beneficiaries.
The restoration of Teleclaim is a major insurance for older and disabled Americans who may not be able to navigate in technology or access a location in person.
The opposite order comes as Musk attacked the SSA, which provides medical allegations and retirement, survivor and invalidity services for 73 million Americans.
Even if President Donald Trump said NBC News After the elections according to which “we do not affect social security”, Musk tried to dismantle the agency which he calls “the greatest diagram of Ponzi of all time”. He also said that SSA is the “big to eliminate” and plans to reduce 7,000 jobs and close offices across the country.
Vice-President JD Vance also wrongly warned that 40% of people who call social security “commit fraud”, poorly interpreting a statistic which revealed that only 0.00625% of social security services are lost because of direct deposit fraud each year, with 0.0025% lost by calls.
Social security was called the “third rail” of American policy. In other words, touch it and you will die. But it turned out to be much more difficult for Musk to destroy the SSA than the other agencies to which he took a chainsaw, including the American Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ministry of Education.
Monday’s memo said the agency will implement a new fraud detection tool to “report suspicious teleclamations according to the common characteristics known to fraudulent complaints”. Individuals will only have to present themselves to an SSA office in person if their call suspects. The tool will be launched by April 14.
Although the new service can lead to “falsely positive signaling of legitimate teleclamations”, the Monday memo insisted that it was always a better option than forcing old or disabled customers to visit in person.
The SSA receives around 9.5 million complaints each year, or about 40% per phone. In the middle of chaos of last month, some seniors have prepared to drive hours to access their social security benefits, 6 million living more than 45 round trips of a campaign office. Some people in distant places, including 60,000 in Alaska, did not have access to the Internet at all, and call is their only reliable option.
