DOGE Cuts Have Left Grieving Families Struggling to Access Survivor Benefits

Kathy Quitno-Bolt was still numb when she started calling Social Security days after her husband’s sudden death in July. Steve, her partner of 25 years and husband of 13, died four days after being diagnosed with lung cancer — just enough time for their daughter to arrive and say goodbye.

When she finally got through to someone, they told her they wouldn’t have an appointment to begin her application for survivor benefits until October.

Her head started spinning. Did she have enough saved to make it through then?

Survivor benefits could have stabilized Quitno-Bolt’s life when it felt like everything she knew was falling apart. But like many people across the country, she was facing significant delays at the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The agency hemorrhaged jobs in 2025, creating what advocates have described as a crisis of customer service. Since, it’s been taking weeks or months before some people can even get an appointment to receive their benefits, according to accounts by numerous advocates, attorneys and experts.

Among those facing the longest delays are people claiming survivor benefits after the loss of a spouse and those applying on behalf of children who lost a parent. These groups are entitled to monthly payments that vary depending on the earnings of the worker who died and the age of the surviving spouse. There’s no online application for survivor benefits; they are at the mercy of the phones and the appointment calendar, which in the past year has become a logistical nightmare that has a disproportionate impact on women and children.

People with disabilities, too, have reported extensive delays to access Social Security disability payments because those applications typically require more interaction with agency staff.

After her first appointment in October, Quitno-Bolt submitted her documents, including her husband’s death certificate and their marriage license, to her local office thinking that was the end. But she heard nothing back for weeks. In November, she found out SSA had denied her benefits, saying she didn’t turn in her documents even though she had already received them back from the agency.

For the past four months now, she’s called the agency almost weekly trying to sort through what went wrong. Typically, she waits on hold for 70 to 90 minutes. At one point, she was told her application was closed without a denial or approval. More recently, she was told her second application was being processed. She’s still in limbo.

“It’s been a mess, and I can’t even think anymore because I’m so worried about everything,” said Quitno-Bolt, 57, who is disabled and can’t work. Her husband, a factory worker, was the breadwinner. A GoFundMe set up by her daughter helped her scrape by, but she said the last of her savings will run out this month.

“I was trying to stay busy and not think about the money, but you can’t do that, especially when you know that you deserve it, you know that it’s there,” she said.

Women with one or more children make up 92 percent of those seeking young survivors benefits. About 95 percent of those seeking “aged widows benefits,” for those over the age of 60, are also women. Because women tend to live longer and face pay disparities, they are more likely to rely on their spouse’s Social Security benefits.

An estimated 1.3 million children receive survivor benefits, and 1 in 10 children live in families that rely on Social Security payments to pay for bills, rent, food and other needs. When there are delays in timely benefits, children are among the ones who feel it the most.

Funeral director Heather Hill, a widow herself, has been counseling families through the process of obtaining survivor benefits since she lost her husband in 2014. For the families Hill works with, it can now take up to two months instead of a couple weeks before an appointment is available, which can be “devastating for a widow,” she said. When her husband died suddenly, her children were six, seven and nine. The $4,000 check they received monthly from Social Security when her kids were small sustained the family.

“If you aren’t the breadwinner, you don’t know how you’re going to feed your family, you don’t know how you’re going to make the rent or mortgage payment. You don’t even know how much you’re going to get,” Hill said. “You’re left with so much uncertainty, it exacerbates the grief you have.”

Connie Becker, who lost her husband, Van, on January 2, told The 19th she had to navigate various dropped calls until finally, after waiting seven hours for a call back, she spoke to someone who scheduled an appointment for the end of February.

“My knees nearly gave way. It felt like the floor might open up and swallow me whole,” she wrote on Facebook, where she’s been chronicling her grief journey, at the time. “Nothing can happen until the interview takes place and everything is processed. Only after that will anything begin to move forward.”

At her appointment, she was told she likely won’t start receiving her payments until April or May.

“How do people survive this?” she wrote. “How do widows live through months like this when every dime has already been spent caring for the love of their life as their health declined?

“It feels like the system forgets that grief doesn’t pause the bills.”

A year ago, as a part of Elon Musks’ so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, the agency made its largest-ever personnel cuts: 7,200 positions were eliminated, many of them frontline customer service workers who helped connect people to their benefits. Another 1,500 positions have been cut this fiscal year so far. SSA was already at a 50-year staffing low when 2025 began, but those cuts were the largest-ever in the agency’s history. Its workforce is down nearly 15 percent from 2024.

The agency has said the cuts to its “bloated” workforce would allow it to “prioritize customer service.”

But the cuts hit field offices in every state. At least 49 individual field offices have lost a quarter of their staff or more.

John Whitelaw, the advocacy director for Delaware Community Legal Aid Society who has been counseling clients through the process, called the current situation “a disaster.”

“I’ve been doing this 38 years,” Whitelaw said. “It is the worst it has been since I started.”

If people don’t have an advocate to support them or some other aid, they often quit the process entirely. Less than half of children overall and even fewer children of color with a dead parent or guardian even receive survivor benefits they are entitled to because they don’t apply or finish the process. All of his clients depend on their Social Security benefit just to meet basic needs, Whitelaw said. Any delay puts them in a bind of having to choose: “Which essential do you go without?” he said.

In the past year, Social Security has been making changes to try to address the staffing shortfall and improve call wait times. At least 2,000 existing workers have been reassigned to answer the phones, backfill positions in field offices and handle disability claims.

A December 2025 audit from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General found that the average time callers actively wait on hold dropped to 7 minutes in September 2025, statistics the agency has touted. What’s really happened is that callers now have the option to accept a callback instead of waiting on hold after they’re told their anticipated hold time. When Social Security calculates the average wait time, it records every person who elected to have a callback as having zero wait time, which lowered the average to 7 minutes. Those who declined the callback and sat on hold were waiting, on average, 83 minutes in March, when the job cuts began. By September, after workers were reassigned to the phones, the average had dropped to 19 minutes, according to the report.

Every time The 19th called last week, the hold times were between 30 and 60 minutes.

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano said the audit is proof “that the profound customer service improvements were the result of technology enhancements and strategic staffing decisions.”

In a statement to The 19th, an SSA spokesperson noted that the agency was able to serve 68 million callers last fiscal year, an increase of 65 percent over 2024, thanks to some of these changes. The spokesperson said “Commissioner Bisignano has consistently pledged to have the right level of staffing to ensure SSA operates at peak efficiency and delivers best-in-class customer service.”

Interviews with attorneys, advocates and Social Security experts, reveal that delays are happening across the board, especially for people who need to interact directly with a staffer to complete their benefits application. Waits on the phone lines have improved over the past year, but it’s taking longer to get into a field office to complete an application, they said.

“They’re taking more people away from actually taking the appointments and allowing people to file their claims, and having more people answer the phone to say, ‘Oh, sorry, no appointments,’” said Kathleen Romig, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Romig served as senior adviser at SSA during the Biden administration.

The Social Security spokesperson said that the “large majority of all appointment requests are scheduled within 30 days,” speaking about all field office visits in general. But Social Security published some data in September showing 57 percent of claimants seeking survivor benefits, specifically, were waiting more than 28 days for an appointment.

Walk-ins have also been more limited since late 2024, when SSA started requiring appointments to go to field offices. The agency later said it wouldn’t turn people away and it accepts walk-ins, but attorneys said that, in practice, offices are still telling people they have to have an appointment to come in.

And many of the people who most need to interact directly with agency staff — widows and particularly aged widows, kids and those with disabilities — often can’t solely rely on many of the agency’s “digital first” improvements, like redirecting people to use the automated phone service.

An SSA spokesperson told The 19th that claimants can file for survivors benefits over the phone, but agency policy requires claimants send in original or certified copies of documents like birth certificates to support their claims, which people are typically reluctant to do. So, in practice, most are still going in person — when they can get on the appointment calendar.

And getting at exactly what’s happening with wait times for the phones and appointments is somewhat unknown because the agency removed data on wait times and other metrics from its website in the summer.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who commissioned the audit on wait times and has been pressuring the agency to release data, told The 19th in a statement that the problems at the agency are “just the latest way Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to Social Security is hurting people and denying them the benefits they’re owed.”

Jessica LaPointe, union council president for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 220, which represents Social Security workers, said the core issue is that there still needs to be a worker to process every claim.

“We are an agency of intake and that’s about it,” LaPointe said. “So it creates this bottleneck of service. That’s where — the social safety net — people start to fall through the cracks because it’s taking too long to get their benefits. They’re going homeless, they’re going bankrupt, they’re not getting their health insurance started in time, so they’re going into debt, or they’re not taking their medications timely. People are dying just waiting for this money to come in. It’s really sad what that causes on the back end when the agency isn’t staffed properly.”

The loss of staff means that at any given time there are about 1,500 benefit applications pending per worker, LaPointe said, according to data provided to the union by SSA’s Workload Support Unit, the group that processes online applications.

A survey of more than 800 Social Security workers completed in January found that 84 percent felt their workloads had gotten worse in the past year. About 70 percent reported they’re serving the public at slower speeds, and 65 percent said the quality of service has deteriorated. The loss of not only customer service staff but also experienced staff at an agency like the Social Security Administration where the claims process is complicated means mistakes can arise or people can quit the process altogether because the waits are too long.

The agency had already been incorrectly denying children’s benefits even before the job cuts began. According to a 2025 report from the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General, employees only correctly denied 39 percent of about 97,000 children’s claims surveyed between 2019 to 2023. Some $92.2 million in benefits were not paid out as a result of those employee errors, the report found.

“I’ve never seen anything like that kind of accuracy rate. That was shocking,” said David Weaver, a former associate commissioner in SSA’s Office of Research, Demonstration and Employment Support. “But it also tells you how complicated some of the child cases are. These folks need help. They need to talk to somebody at Social Security.”

That’s why Weaver recommends always appealing a denial. He also suggests claimants apply for benefits as early as possible because even if there are delays, the benefits can be paid retroactively to when the process was started. House and Senate offices are good resources, he added, because they have case managers that help constituents through the process.

The Social Security Advisory Board, a bipartisan and independent body, recently released a report recommending that child and survivor benefit applications move online, and that the agency work on an appointment scheduling platform that allows claimants to self-schedule their appointment slots online and bypass any challenges with the phones.

There is some evidence Social Security is making changes to improve service, said LaPointe, the union president. The agency reportedly plans to hire at least 700 customer service representatives this year and increase its workforce by about 1,000 people, according to reporting in the Washington Post.

“I do know that we’ve seen a lot of improvement in terms of communication, listening and working together as a voice so that’s encouraging,” she said. “The more that they engage with the union and the stakeholders, the more that we’re all getting on the same page.”