7,100 Social – After sweeping staff cuts, office closures, shifting phone rules, and the removal of public performance metrics, disability benefit claims are becoming harder to process—especially for applicants who can’t manage online systems or fear immigration scrutiny. Ad
On a line that should have led somewhere simple—an answer about a case. a status update. a next step—there was instead the sound of time running out. In the Kansas City region. a paralegal described cases “stuck in purgatory” because the Social Security Administration doesn’t have enough workers to move them. Another benefits representative in the Denver region said she couldn’t even reach the agency to make an appointment. a promise many people still remembered from earlier years but felt evaporate once the new procedures took hold.
The push has been fast: more than 7. 100 jobs cut at the Social Security Administration. closing six of its 10 regional offices and shifting more services online. The agency also expanded automated and artificial intelligence systems on its public phone lines. On top of those operational changes. rules about how people can apply by phone were announced and reversed—officially ending phone applications in March 2025. then reversing the decision a month later. For applicants trying to navigate SSI and SSDI while life is worsening, the uncertainty has a measurable cost.
At the center of the controversy are two moves that advocates say deprive the public of clarity: staffing shrinkage and the removal of performance transparency. In June 2025. the agency removed key customer service metrics—such as phone wait times and disability claim processing times—from its website.
The disappearance of those numbers mattered because disability benefits rely on a rigid definition of disability and a process that requires documentation. timing. and follow-through. The Social Security Administration administers benefits for more than 60 million retired workers. along with survivor benefits for spouses and children under 18. But when it comes to disability. it administers two programs for a total of 16 million people: Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).
SSI is a public assistance program for low-income older adults and people with disabilities under age 65. In 2026, it provides a maximum of US$994 per month for any one person getting benefits. SSDI provides a limited pension for people who have worked long enough to qualify and now have disabilities that prevent them from working any longer; payments vary by past wages. and the monthly average in 2026 is about $1. 634.
To receive either benefit, Americans must meet the Social Security Administration’s strict definition of disability, which considers health status, past education and employment, and age to determine whether a physical or mental disability makes someone unable to work.
Advocates say the hardest part isn’t just the official rules—it’s the system’s ability to process claims at all. After staffing cuts, the agency had fewer employees available to answer phone calls, contributing to long waits. Benefits representatives also described changes to customer service protocols that routed phone calls to field offices the callers hadn’t dialed. even when those staff couldn’t help them.
Some advocates said the experience became stranger as well as slower. They described encountering AI chatbots that did not answer their questions. Others found that staffers with specialized knowledge were reassigned to other tasks.
“It is taking more of my time to do the same amount of work, which then means we’re not able to take as many cases,” said Megan, a paralegal in the Boston region.
Even when people manage to reach someone. the rules around access—especially in field offices—have been a second source of frustration. The Social Security Administration has more than 1,200 field offices across the nation where people seek services. Shortly before Trump took office in 2025, the agency began moving from walk-in services to requiring appointments. It had promised in 2024 that it would “not turn people away” if they couldn’t or didn’t want to make an appointment.
But benefits representatives told a different story in 2025: field offices were requiring appointments and turning people away if they arrived without them. Freddie. a benefits representative in the Denver region. said she couldn’t even make appointments because she couldn’t “reach anybody at Social Security.” “We can’t get through to make an appointment. ” she told us.
As of May 2026, 10 offices in nine states are either open on an appointment-only basis or closed to the public until further notice.
The agency’s shift toward online services. too. runs into limits when life doesn’t come with stable internet. privacy. or health. The push to conduct business online assumes everyone can easily use digital platforms. but advocates said that assumption misses people who rely on the system most. Michael. an attorney in the Atlanta region. described why online application processes may be unrealistic for people such as “someone who’s in their 20s. but unhoused. ” or “someone in their 70s and having issues with memory loss.”.
For many applicants. there is another pressure: the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. which now extends to people who are authorized to live in the United States. Advocates said many immigrants who receive disability benefits—or who support relatives through SSI and SSDI benefits—are no longer sure whether it is safe to visit Social Security offices.
Those fears were reinforced in February 2026. when reports emerged that some Social Security workers had been told to share appointment data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Several benefits specialists said they no longer know how to advise clients about potential risks of interacting with the agency. including whether visiting a field office is safe or whether the agency might share information with immigration authorities.
While the system’s channels grew more complicated, staff availability tightened. Advocates said the problem-solvers who could navigate the hardest situations left with the cuts, taking years of expertise with them. They described remaining staff as harder to reach and less familiar with the intricacies of Social Security Administration policies and procedures than senior colleagues who had departed.
And in accounts shared during interviews, the delays didn’t stay abstract.
Multiple advocates described terminally ill clients dying before receiving benefits for which they were eligible. Anne. an attorney in the agency’s Philadelphia region. described the case of a homeless. seriously ill client who couldn’t move forward because staff told her they couldn’t locate paperwork submitted three years earlier. “This woman is dying,” Anne said. “All you have to do is push a little button to get this moving. and you’re telling me you can’t.”.
Miranda. also an attorney in the Philadelphia region. said her work changed during the second Trump administration: what used to be advocacy over complex legal issues now often becomes a narrower fight to get information processed. Clients “may find that they need an attorney simply ‘to make sure something gets off someone’s desk and then faxed into the system.’” Faxing. while rarely necessary for most everyday business transactions. is commonly used during the disability benefits application process.
The numbers behind the change are part of what makes these accounts harder to dismiss. Even though the Trump administration made no formal changes to eligibility criteria for SSI or SSDI. despite considering proposals that could have narrowed eligibility rules and potentially excluded millions who qualify today—or reduced the size of benefits payments—an analysis by the Urban Institute of state-level data from the first half of 2025 found that 7% fewer claims for disability benefits were submitted to the Social Security Administration than during the same period a year earlier.
For the advocates who spoke, the barriers weren’t just policy—they were operational, and they kept shifting. Some rules were announced and then reversed. and key public measures of performance—phone wait times and disability claim processing times—were removed from the website in June 2025. With less staff. more routing issues on the phone. appointment-only field offices in parts of the country. and additional automation on public phone lines. the process began to feel like it was designed for fewer people—or fewer people who could afford the time it takes to be heard.
The advocates behind these findings say they studied the human impact directly. The researchers—social work professors at California State University. Sacramento. Binghamton University in New York. and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—interviewed benefits representatives at 32 nonprofits. They conducted in-depth interviews with 52 advocates at organizations that collectively assist over 8,000 people every year. Because of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. the advocates were referred to by pseudonyms. and the researchers published the findings in collaboration with two national disability advocacy organizations: the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and the American Association of People with Disabilities. The findings were published in March 2026. before submitting to academic journals. with the stated goal of sharing the information with the public as soon as possible.
The paper also lays out what it believes the agency should do next. It calls for the Social Security Administration to employ enough people to handle all applications and appeals in a timely and accurate manner while protecting data privacy and accessibility for all applicants. including those from immigrant families. It also says agency leaders should listen seriously to feedback from professional benefits representatives who help people apply for SSI and SSDI—along with the clients those representatives serve.
For people waiting on disability benefits, the question is not only whether eligibility rules changed. It is whether the system that decides. routes. and processes those claims still has the capacity to do it—at the speed and accessibility that serious illness. disability. and financial survival require.
Katie Savin. Assistant Professor of Social Work. California State University. Sacramento; Callie Freitag. Assistant Professor of Social Work. University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Matthew Borus. Assistant Professor of Social Work. Binghamton University. State University of New York are listed with the report. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Social Security Administration disability benefits SSI SSDI 7100 layoffs phone wait times disability claim processing field offices appointment-only offices AI chatbots immigration enforcement Urban Institute Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund American Association of People with Disabilities