A Social Security–related protest in Houston, Texas, March 2025.Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/AP
On March 31, the Social Security Administration will cease allowing people to confirm their identity over the phone when enrolling or changing their bank information, according to a memo obtained by journalist Judd Legum’s Popular Information. The policy change means that anyone who cannot confirm their identity independently online will have to appear in person, a shift framed as minor but likely to harm a large number of the program’s approximately 70 million beneficiaries.
The move came as Elon Musk continues to claim—without providing any evidence—that there is a sweeping Democratic conspiracy to orchestrate supposed benefits fraud among noncitizens. This is not the only move that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken to undermine the Social Security Administration and the disabled and aging adults who need its services. DOGE is, among other things, closing 10 of the agency’s field offices throughout the country, which will compel some of those users drive up to 100 miles for appointments—like the in-person appearances the agency’s new phone rules would entail. SSA also plans to terminate 7,000 workers, around 12 percent of its workforce.
Retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income.
Last week, 13 senators—including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—sent a letter to their colleague, Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Michael Dean Crapo (R-Idaho), urging him to hold a hearing on Musk’s attacks on Social Security. “At a time when the agency’s workforce is at a 50-year low,” the letter reads, “the potential loss of centuries’ worth of agency experience will risk worsening backlogs, lengthening wait times, and interrupting benefit payment.”
Advocates say that the changes will have a greater impact on aging adults living in rural areas, who are less likely to have steady internet service. The Affordable Connectivity Program, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration to ease the cost burden of internet use, ended in June 2024; moreover, not all older adults have access to a smartphone and computer, or the ability to use them unaided for sensitive, high-stakes tasks like identity checks. Pew Research Center reports that 61 percent of aging adults, defined as people 65 and older, have a smartphone; 44 percent, likely with some overlap, have a computer.
There are also reasons to believe that Trump and Musk’s attacks on Social Security will disproportionately impact retirees of color. According to the National Academy of Social Security Insurance, retirees of color are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole source of income in comparison to white retirees—a consequence of being more likely to have jobs that don’t contribute to retirement funds or provide pensions, and of being less likely to have generational wealth.
“Adding additional barriers such as discontinuing some phone services, imposing new online requirements, and closing field offices will harm low-income older adults of color disproportionately,” Tracey Gronniger, managing director of economic security at advocacy group Justice in Aging, said in a statement to Mother Jones. “When Social Security is your sole source of income, losing even one month of benefits can lead to hunger, poor health, and housing precarity.”
According to research from the National Equity Alliance, people of color across different income levels are also less likely to have access to a car, making it more difficult to travel between cities (or even within a city with less-than-robust public transit) to get to a Social Security Administration office for identity verification—none of which appears to be of any concern to Musk.