The Social Security Administration late Wednesday abandoned plans it was considering to end phone service for millions of Americans filing retirement and disability claims after The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service team was weighing the change to root out alleged fraud.
The shift would have directed elderly and disabled people to rely on the internet and in-person field offices to process their claims, curtailing a service that 73 million Americans have relied on for decades to access earned government benefits.
However, Social Security and White House officials said the administration will still move ahead with another far more limited element of the original proposal: Customers will no longer be able to change a direct-deposit routing number or other bank information by phone.
“Approximately 40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information,” the agency’s press office said in a statement hours after The Post published its article. The “current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.”
That shift will happen by the end of March, according to the DOGE account on X. The statement did not say how much fraud is believed to occur through direct deposit transactions. The statement said that “all other SSA telephone services remain unchanged.”
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