WASHINGTON (DB) — The DOGE goons made another tech blunder early this week when they crashed the website of the agency that gives nearly $1.6 trillion to almost 70 million Americans every year.
The Social Security Administration (SSA) site has gone largely offline for countless beneficiaries who are worried that their personal information has been entirely deleted.
On Monday several people reported being unable to access their online accounts, weeks after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began hacking the agency apart from the inside. The cyber glitch has largely prevented elderly people and low-income families from accessing and managing their information, applying for government services, making or receiving payments, and much more.
The mistake was likely made after Musk’s DOGE team launched untested software on the site. The squad behind DOGE includes a crew of six young men under the age of 26 (including a 19-year-old college freshman).
There’s little explanation on the site. It simply says “Online Service Not Available” in a bar on the top of the page. “We’re sorry, but the online service you requested isn’t available right now,” it adds. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The website crash has incited fear in several users, which has been increasing weeks after many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program were told they could not currently receive payments.
Social Security and Healthcare Policy Director Darcy Milburn, who works at a nonprofit called Arc, said that “Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops.‘”
“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking bout a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” she said.
Even when people are able to access the site, some people say they haven’t been able to sign into their accounts. Or they sign in and most of their information has been missing.
According to a Washington Post report, “Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team” and “the technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush.”
The outage comes as President Donald Trump overhauls the agency. Around 7,000 workers have already been expelled since he took office and the administration plans to fire thousands more.
Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” that sends checks to dead people, despite a 2024 inspector general report proving that less than one percent of the agency’s payments were wrong between 2015 and 2022.
The website crash isn’t the first manifestation of SSA’s destruction. People have also reported long wait times on calls, the loss of direct deposit payments, and online accounts malfunctioning.
“At DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning… we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy told reporters last week, reported Politico.
A court recently blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive SSA data, and another lawsuit challenged the government’s legal ability to implement mass layoffs. But workers and customers alike have described Musk’s moves as utterly chaotic.
By KENNEAL PATTERSON/Daily Beast
