President-Elect Donald Trump promised not to cut Social Security. During his campaign he even suggested higher-income beneficiaries would be able to keep more of their Social Security income through his proposal to stop taxation of benefits (apparently not considering that eliminating that source of income would cause the Trust Fund to exhaust three years sooner than currently projected). Project 2025, which Trump has distanced himself from but is widely recognized to inform many of his policies, makes no mention of Social Security.
But there is one aspect of Social Security that may be affected by the new Trump administration, and that’s the overall administration of the agency. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has the Social Security Administration in its sights, even though SSA is one of the most efficient of all government agencies. According to recent testimony by SSA commissioner Martin O’Malley, productivity was up 6.2% in 2024 even as the number of new beneficiaries has been soaring. SSA’s staffing is at a 50-year low. SSA made great strides under O’Malley, reducing average call wait times from 42 minutes to 12 minutes, streamlining procedures for overpayments and underpayments, and reducing wait times for disability approvals.
And yet Trump’s DOGE team will likely seek to wring inefficiencies from an already lean Social Security Administration and Medicare (which is administered by SSA), its co-head, Vivek Ramaswamy, said at a recent conference. According to Ramaswamy they’ll be going after “waste, fraud, and abuse” first, primarily ensuring that payments go their rightful beneficiaries. This is expected to save “hundreds of billions of dollars” without even touching on benefit formulas.
I believe most clients will not be affected by these measures. However, human interactions with SSA could get worse in terms of wait times and mishandled claims by poorly trained personnel. O’Malley, who instituted significant efficiency improvements at SSA in his one-year tenure, recently resigned. Trump has nominated financial software CEO and GOP donor Frank Bisignano to replace him. “Frank is a business leader, with a tremendous track record of transforming large corporations,” the president-elect said in a post on social media. “He will be responsible to deliver on the Agency’s commitment to the American People.” So, while benefits to current beneficiaries are not likely to be cut under Trump, clients’ experiences with SSA could become more challenging. This will affect survivor benefits the most, since these benefits are not automated and must be handled by human personnel. Otherwise, encourage your clients to use SSA’s online services as much as possible and to come to you (not SSA) with their questions.
Further reading: Trump Aims to Slash Government Spending. What It Could Mean for Social Security.