In Social Security, these are the age of the living dead

Lenny Glasgow, who has been with the Social Security Administration for 15 years, sees something new in his work: dead people.

Of course, they are not really dead. In four cases over the past few weeks, he told KFF Health News that his Schenectady, Office, in New York, “is just that there’s no information on the record, they’re dead.” Therefore, employees need to “revive” them. They are able to receive their benefits as they assert that they are alive.

According to Glasgow, the revival was previously “sporadic” and in such cases it has risen in upstate New York. He is also an employee of the U.S. Government Employee League, a union representing 42,000 Social Security employees just before the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Martin O’Malley, who led the Social Security administration towards the end of the Joe Biden administration, said in an interview he had heard similar stories at a recent town hall in Racine, Wisconsin. “In a room of 200 people, two people raised their hands and said they had friends who were mistakenly marked as deceased when each of them was very alive,” he said.

That’s not just an inconvenience, Glasgow said, as other agencies rely on Social Security numbers to do business. When declared dead, “it affects your bank account. This affects insurance. This affects your job ability. This affects your ability to accomplish something in society.”

“They’re ending people’s financial lives,” O’Malley said.

It’s just one thing that advocates and lawyers are concerned about, but these false deaths come after two initiatives from new leadership in the SSA, changing or updating the database of living and dead.

Holders of millions of Social Security numbers are marked as deceased. Separately, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants have been cleansed and separated them from banks and commerce to encourage these people to “self-promotion.”

Glasgow said an SSA employee received an agent’s email about the purge in April, directing how to revive the beneficiaries who were mismarked. “Why not do due diligence to make sure what you’re doing is right in the first place?” he said.

Misinally prominent deaths are just part of the Trump administration’s crash program aimed at eradicating fraud, modernizing technology and ensuring the future of the program.

However, interviews with more than 12 beneficiaries, advocates, lawyers and current and former employees of KFF Health News suggest that overhauls is exacerbating the agency in its main work.

Lisaceda, a Philadelphian with cancer, has been struggling for weeks to sort out the difficulties of 24-year-old Nie with the Social Security Disability Insurance program. There are two problems. First, you are about to change your nie address. Second, we try to figure out why the program deducts about $400 a month from Medicare Premium. I believe her disability lawyer (the company has a policy to talk about records) could end up at zero.

Since March, Social Security has been making direct payments to her nie’s bank account and sometimes mailing checks to an old address. Trying to sort it out is a quagmire of long phone calls and in-person trips to hold reservations.

Before 2025, it was usually easy to handle changes to an institution, her lawyer said. There’s no more.

Need is miserable. If the agency stops paying for nie’s disability, “she’ll be homeless,” Seda recalled telling an agency employee. “I don’t know if I will survive this cancer, but no one else will help her.”

Some of the issues are technical. According to whistleblower information provided to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, agencies’ efforts to process certain data have been failing more frequently. If that happens, “it can delay or stop payments to Social Security beneficiaries,” the committee recently told the agency inspector.

Technicians and former Social Security officials have warned of the possibility of a complete conflict in the system, but said that daily disruptions can become insidious and serious, formerly Kathleen Romigg, the Social Security Agency and its advisory board, and now Director of Social Security and Disability Policy on Budget and Policy Priorities. Beneficiaries could struggle to appoint or get the money they owed, she said.

Social security is important to more than 70 million beneficiaries nationwide. According to the National Social Insurance survey results released in January, more than a third said they could not afford to buy essentials if the check is stopped.

Advocates and lawyers say social security these days has not been offered to a very unprecedented degree in their experience.

Carolyn Villers, executive director of Massachusetts Senior Action Council, said two of the members’ March payments were delayed a few days. “For one member who meant they couldn’t pay rent on time,” she said. “I’ve never heard of any delays in payments in the last 20 years.”

When KFF Health News presented questions to the agency, Social Security officials handed them over to the White House. White House spokesman Elizabeth Houston mentioned Trump’s “overwhelming mission” to make the government more efficient.

“He is committed to protecting Social Security and all recipients will continue to receive benefits,” Huston said in an email. She did not provide specific, record-breaking answers to the questions.

The complaint regarding missed payment is mushrooms. The Arizona Attorney General’s Office had received approximately 40 complaints related to delays or suspensions in payments by early April, spokesman Richie Taylor told KFF Health News.

Connecticut, which supports Medicare people, said social security-related complaints — often help manage payments and register patients in government insurance programs for people over the age of 65 — almost doubled in March compared to last year.

According to lawyers representing beneficiaries, historically underfunded institutions have always had a share of error and inefficiency, but it has become worse as experienced employees have been let go.

“We see more mistakes happening,” said James Latchford, a West Virginia lawyer with 17 years of experience representing Social Security beneficiaries. “We’re seeing more dropping.”

What is dropped is sometimes a basic transaction record. Missouri’s independence Kim Beavers tried to complete a regular ritual in February. However, they did not show the payments scheduled for March and April.

She was appointed in-person to solve the problem – it is only said that she had no record of her submission, despite showing printed documents related to the representative of the agency. The Beavers have a new appointment scheduled for May, she said.

Social Security employees frequently cite missing records to explain that they cannot resolve issues when meeting with lawyers and beneficiaries. Disability lawyers whose corporate policies do not allow names to be named have had particularly inexplicable cases. One client, a longtime Social Security disabled, reassessed her interests. After winning the appeal, the attorney returned to the agency to make the payment to restore the payment. But there was nothing there.

“The only thing that gets told they’ve never been paid before is chaos, right? Unconditional confusion,” the lawyer said.

Researchers and lawyers say they have doubts about what lies behind the issue of social security: efforts to revamp the Elon Musk-led institution.

Approximately 7,000 SSA employees reportedly have been let go. O’Malley estimates that another 3,000 people will leave the agency. “When workloads go up, morale drops deepen, people burn out and leave,” he predicted at an April hearing held by House Democrats. “When I go to the field office, it means there are a lot of more empty, closed windows.”

The departure was hit hard by the agency’s local payment centre. These centers help to handle and arbitrate several cases. That’s the type of behind-the-scenes production that “the problem first comes to light,” Romigg said. But if the staff doesn’t have enough time, “these things suffer.”

Winding means that in some cases it is removed by a critical program like Medicare. Social Security will often automatically deduct premiums and manage payments for health programs.

Recently, there have been an increasing number of cases where agencies have decided that Melanie Lambert, a senior advocate at the Center for Medicare advocates, is borrowing money from Medicare. The cash is being sent to the payment centre, she said. And then check said, “Just sit there.”

Beneficiaries have lost Medicare and “these terminations tend to occur earlier than they should, based on Social Security’s own rules,” Lambert said.

Employee technology is more often in Fritz. “We have problems with our system every day. Every day, at certain times, the system goes down automatically,” says Glasgow, of Social Security’s Schenectady office. These issues began in mid-March, he said.

The new problem makes Glasgow suspect the worst. “It’s more work for less bodies, and ultimately increases the inefficiency of our work, creates us, we become agents, it looks as if it’s inadequate, and then takes a step closer to privatizing agents,” he said.

Jodie Fleischer of Cox Media Group contributed to this report.