Don’t trust the media’s Social Security hysteria: Trump is delivering results

On my first day as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, I promised our workforce we would do two things: Focus relentlessly on the people we serve, and restore the public’s trust in our agency, a crucial linchpin in American life.

I am proud to report we are keeping that promise. More than that, we are delivering real results.

President Trump asked us to be bold, not bureaucratic; to be faster, not frozen in process; to care more about service and stewardship than slogans.

Under his leadership, SSA is doing just that.

In these first 100 days, we paid over $14.8 billion in long-delayed retroactive benefits to 2.2 million Americans under the Social Security Fairness Act.

We’ve identified over $1 billion in savings through common-sense improvements to travel, printing, contracts, IT, and payroll.

We have shifted thousands of employees into direct public-service roles and ended outdated telework arrangements that undermined accountability and responsiveness.

Throughout this customer-focused transformation, we have treated our employees with dignity and respect.

We’ve given them options to do what works best for them, whether that means volunteering for a public-service role or choosing to separate from the agency on generous terms.

Some in the media have erroneously reported that our optimization effort includes terminating 12% or more of our workforce.

Not true: In fact, the number of SSA employees involuntarily removed from federal service so far this fiscal year amounts to one-tenth of one percent of our total employees, in line with the prior year, under the previous administration.

The American people cannot afford another four years of long wait times for Social Security help.

We must deliver relief for our seniors and people with disabilities waiting on a claim decision; for young families needing a Social Security number for a child; for every taxpayer who rightly expects government to do more with less.

We are rebuilding trust, not through headlines or hashtags, but through hard work and honest service.

One of the most moving moments of my tenure came during a visit to a field office in Wisconsin. A father came in, tired, quiet, holding the hand of his son with a disability.

He didn’t expect much. He had been waiting months for help.

That day, our staff, leaner, faster, refocused — got him the answer he needed. As he stood to leave, he looked up and simply said, “Thank you for seeing us.”

He didn’t mean the appointment. He meant being seen by his government.

That’s what these 100 days have been about.

We’ve rolled out a modern telephone platform to hundreds of field offices. It’s already improved service on our national 800 number by using AI-enabled self-service tools to reduce wait times and improve call handling.

We’ve implemented new identity-proofing tools that protect against fraud without locking out the vulnerable, and we restarted the Treasury Offset Program to recover billions in taxpayer funds.

All this without permanently closing any local SSA field offices — vital lifelines for seniors, people with disabilities, and rural communities.

SSA’s in-person services are not going away.

For those who prefer to do business with us online, we are delivering there, too. Our secure online portal, my Social Security, continues to perform with near-perfect uptime.

To increase transparency, we now publish real-time and historical data on the status of critical systems (check it anytime at status.ssa.gov).

Through the Payroll Information Exchange, we are now receiving automated wage data from employers — an innovation long promised, finally delivered — that will reduce overpayments, improve payment accuracy, and save nearly $3 billion over the next decade.

And through our Health IT partnerships, we are cutting down the time it takes to make disability decisions by securely accessing medical records from providers across the country.

This is what good government looks like: focused, humble, and urgent.

Some complain we are moving too fast. I say the American people have waited long enough.

In the spirit of the president’s call for results over rhetoric, we have reshaped SSA not to serve a party or a press cycle, but to serve the people.

All of them. Fairly. Quickly. Honorably.

I’ve often said that public service is the most human work in the world. It calls us to be better listeners, better neighbors, better stewards of the promise we make to each American — that when they need us most, we will be there.

We are not finished. But if these first 100 days are any indication, the future of Social Security is not just protected, but is being renewed.

For that, I thank our extraordinary workforce, and President Trump, whose vision and direction have helped light the path forward.

Not a bad start. Not at all.

Leland Dudek served as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration.