Republicans Are Cutting Your Social Security to Pay for More Billionaire Tax Cuts
By Chad Bolt and Alex Lawson
House Republicans are hard at work on their number one priority: deliver more tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by cutting programs that everyone else relies on. Given the budget plan that Republicans have already put in motion, they’ll have no choice but to slash Medicaid and Medicare – which the nonpartisan scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office recently confirmed.
But Republicans aren’t stopping there. Trump and his co-President, Elon Musk, have ordered the Social Security Administration to eliminate thousands of jobs and close field offices, with more field office closures likely coming soon. This will devastate the agency and ultimately hurt beneficiaries. We know that Social Security field offices receive, in total, approximately 120,000 visitors every day – and the agency was already stretched thin. In fact, staffing levels at SSA were already at a 50-year low. This at a time when 12,000 Boomers turn 65 every day.
Slashing SSA staffing and closing field offices will have an immediate impact on beneficiaries. They will experience longer wait times for routine services like applying for benefits,, replacing Social Security cards, processing name changes, enrolling beneficiaries in Medicare, and helping applicants navigate complex retirement questions. It will also mean longer wait times for disability determinations, which is already experiencing a significant backlog.
Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley recently warned that, because of the DOGE closures and staffing reductions, as well as DOGE minions rummaging around in our personal data stored in SSA’s legacy computer systems, “Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits. I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.” He added: “people should start saving now.” It’s no wonder, given what the Washington Post recently reported:
Wait times for basic phone service have grown, in some cases to hours, according to some employees, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal details. Delays in reviews of disability claims and hearings before administrative law judges are already starting.
Employees at a field office in Indiana have been forced to pick up calls for other offices, one employee said, and are fielding phone inquiries for an area covering two-thirds of the state. The phone “never stops ringing now,” the employee said. Phone backups have prevented the staff from processing retirement claims.
Meanwhile, supervisors have little time to give guidance or advice, the employee said, because they are constantly pulled into lengthy meetings to dissect the latest guidance from the Trump administration on return-to-office orders, firing of probationary employees and a Musk-led campaign requiring federal workers to send weekly bullet points laying out their accomplishments.
“Morale is in the toilet,” the employee said. “We all know what DOGE wants to do, which is just break us, so they can privatize us.”
Despite what Trump said in his joint address to Congress, these tax cuts are not “for everybody” – they are overwhelmingly skewed to the top incomes. A recent analysis found that the average tax cut for the top 1 percent of households was $60,300 (a 3.9 percent increase in after-tax income), compared with an average tax cut of $660 for the middle 20 percent of households (a 1.1 percent increase in after-tax income). In fact, the tax cut for the top 1 percent was larger than the entire annual after-tax income of a typical household in the middle 20 percent.
The DOGE-led effort to slash Social Security Administration capacity, which is jeopardizing the benefits that seniors and people with disabilities rely on, is intertwined with the Republican agenda to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy. That’s because Congressional Republicans are using a procedure called budget reconciliation to pass their billionaire tax cuts, and that procedure requires them to pay for the tax cuts somehow.
That’s where the cuts to Social Security come in. In Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s own words, Republicans will incorporate the DOGE savings into reconciliation. That means Republicans will use Musk’s cuts to Social Security to pay for more tax cuts that overwhelmingly flow to the highest incomes.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Chad Bolt is the Chief Strategist at Families Over Billionaires.
Alex Lawson is is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition— a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.
