Lisa Rein, Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson at WP:
The Social Security Administration — the sprawling federal agency that delivers retirement, disability and survivor benefits to 74 million Americans — began the second Trump administration with a hostile takeover.
It ends the year in turmoil. A diminished workforce has struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices — record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers, according to internal agency documents and dozens of interviews.
Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.
...
The table was set in February by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which installed a loyal, mid-level data analyst with no management experience to lead the $15.4 billion agency..
.Regional offices abruptly disappeared in a rushed reorganization. New policies to fight fraud were rolled out only to be canceled or changed, prompting confused customers to jam the phones and the website, which crashed repeatedly. Daily operations in some respects became an endless game of whack-a-mole as employees were pulled from one department to another.
