Accessing disability benefits at the Social Security Administration has gotten more difficult since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to new qualitative research.
SSA, an early focus of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, saw the departure of over 7,350 employees last year. Its leadership made rapid changes — and, at times, reversals — to its phone line, back-end operations and more.
Katie Savin, an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento, set out in the spring to understand what these changes meant for Americans who rely on the agency for disability benefits.
“Access to Social Security benefits has never been easy,” said Savin, adding that “we found again and again that access had gotten worse over a number of metrics.”
The new report, coauthored with fellow academics Callie Freitag and Matthew Borus, is based on interviews with 52 attorneys and other specialists who help people get disability benefits, and it includes recommendations for SSA. The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and the American Association of People with Disabilities published it on Monday.
Technology has been at the center of Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s agenda to offer more self-service options online, move the agency off of paper, automate tasks and leverage artificial intelligence.
Bisignano, a longtime financial services businessman, has often said that people should be able to get help from SSA in the mode that suits them — online, on the phone or in person — although the agency has a goal to halve the number of field office visits from Americans and has pushed more people to do business with the agency online and over the phone.
The clunkiness and old age of the agency’s tech has long been a complaint for some recipients who may wonder why they can’t do a given SSA task online, Savin told Nextgov/FCW, but recent updates have made it more difficult for some people with disabilities or who don’t have internet access to get hold of the agency.
Some of SSA’s phone updates have been helpful, including its callback feature and estimated call wait time, as have new digital features like online notices or electronic signatures, the report said. Some lawyers also told researchers that the agency had updated a back-end system used to manage claimant information so that they could see more information about their cases there, instead of having to call SSA to ask for an update.
But researchers found that adding AI to SSA phone lines — which has been criticized for being difficult to use — and pushing recipients to online SSA accounts often made access especially difficult for those who struggle to use the internet or don’t have access to it, as well as those with cognitive or psychiatric disabilities.
“For both the 1-800 number and the field office phone lines, clients and representatives must now navigate the new AI system before reaching an SSA staff member,” the report said. “The new AI system requires callers to say what they are calling about, but frequently does not interpret the caller’s statements correctly.”
These changes could be especially difficult for claimants with cognitive, psychiatric or communication disabilities, the report’s authors noted.
The agency has also pushed people to complete routine tasks online.
SSA recently announced that over 100 million Americans have an online Social Security account, which it is hailing as an important milestone that gives people 24/7 access to the agency to manage their benefits and conduct services. But creating a mySSA account requires an email address and mailing address. Users also have to pass identity checks powered by facial recognition.
The lawyers and advocates that Savin spoke to “feared that SSA’s push to internet-based services left out many of their most vulnerable clients who struggled to access and use the internet.”
One San Francisco attorney told researchers that getting through identity proofing isn’t possible for most of their clients. Many of the people researchers spoke with “found themselves either unable to support their clients with mySSA access or spending hours of their time setting up email addresses for clients who rarely use the internet.”
“Respondents consistently described online systems as inaccessible for many SSI and SSDI claimants, particularly those with limited internet access, cognitive or psychiatric disabilities, unstable housing, or limited technology literacy,” the report said.
As for those who may want to get help from SSA in person, changes started under the Biden administration that require appointments to visit field offices, with some exceptions for walk-ins, also hit low-income clients with limited phone and internet access especially hard.
And when the lawyers and advocates helping claimants ran into problems, they found eroded accountability mechanisms within SSA due to the consolidation of its regional offices, the report authors found.
The agency itself, however, argues that changes made over the last year have led to service improvements.
“Americans with disabilities are benefiting as a result of streamlined processes for disability claims, smarter technology, and stronger federal-state partnerships,” an SSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW in a statement, calling the report “biased.”
The agency pointed to its initial pending backlog, which is down by over 30% compared to June 2024, reductions in the average time it takes to process an initial claim, reduced average processing times for hearings and more
“The Commissioner is committed to serving Americans wherever they want to be served—online, on the phone, or in a field office. SSA regularly hears from and implements feedback from advocates, field office staff, and beneficiaries,” the spokesperson said.
The consequences of unresponsive customer service for the people depending on benefits include health deterioration, homelessness and even death while waiting for benefits, the report noted.
Researchers recommended that SSA not require exclusive use of online systems for any essential customer service processes, that it maintain “meaningful” non-digital options and offer alternatives to its AI-based phone systems. The report also dug into those non-digital challenges like field office policies and staffing levels and recommended that SSA link them to service outcomes.
As for tech, “I don’t think that the conclusion here is that Social Security shouldn’t be trying to improve their technology — not at all,” Savin told Nextgov/FCW. “It’s more that they need to be aware that people exist on very divergent ends of a technology and literacy spectrum, and that technology needs to be accessible to people across different disabilities.”