Social Security sent letters to hundreds of clients cancelling benefits; it turns out it was a mistake
Last week, the Social Security Administration (SSA) mistakenly told some Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients that they would no longer receive benefits. The agency was wrong, reports CBS News.
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Supplemental Security Income is a federal program that provides financial assistance to low-income, disabled and older Americans.
The SSA website told some SSI recipients they were "not currently receiving payments," according to an April 7 letter from Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Mark Kelly of Arizona to Acting SSA Commissioner Lee Dudek.
The payment history and all benefit data for SSI recipients also disappeared, the senators wrote. They said they had received numerous messages from constituents about the error.
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"In 50 years of working with Social Security and SSI, I've never heard of anything like this happening," said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group for SSI beneficiaries.
Chris Hubbard, whose 37-year-old son with disabilities relies on the program to pay for housing, said she learned of the problem March 31 when a glitch was noticed in a Facebook group for mothers of children with autism.
Hubbard, who lives with her husband in Westborough, Massachusetts, checked her son's account and was alarmed to find a similar message. She stayed up all night refreshing the page and fell asleep at 5 a.m. without seeing any changes.
"I was still worried because the message was still on the website saying my son was no longer receiving payments," Hubbard said.
The next morning, however, the correct information appeared on her son's page, and the money was deposited on April 1 as planned. But she and her husband said they had not received any notification from the SSA about the problem or an explanation for the error. They decided not to call the agency because of the long wait times on the phone.
The Hubbards are concerned that the outage could indicate larger problems in the system, especially given potential SSA staff cuts.
"We're afraid it could happen again. Why did it happen?" Tom Hubbard wondered.
The Social Security Administration said the issue only affected SSI recipients and "it did not impact Social Security or Medicare recipients." An SSA spokesperson said, "This specific issue was resolved in less than twenty-four hours. All users with a My Social Security login can once again log in and see up-to-date benefit information."
The disruption to the SSI program is troubling because it affects “the nation’s most vulnerable people — low-income seniors and children and adults with disabilities — who face extreme hardship when their payments are delayed or interrupted,” the senators wrote in their letter.
Altman said the SSI glitch could be related to changes taking place at the SSA under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk. Musk has claimed the system is riddled with fraud and called the program the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.
The SSA website has been down multiple times in recent weeks, with outages lasting up to a day. The agency said the “short-term outages” averaged about 20 minutes.
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“Before Trump, Musk, and DOGE took over SSA, there were virtually no major outages or system errors on the agency’s website,” said Maria Freese, a leading Social Security expert at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a retirement-income watchdog group. “And there were certainly no messages erroneously informing people that their benefits were being cut off.”
The maximum monthly payment for SSI in 2025 is $967 per person. The program is designed to help people with disabilities and seniors who have no or very low income. Most SSI recipients live below the poverty line, according to the Roosevelt Institute.
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