The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, plans to cut 7,000 jobs from the U.S. Social Security Administration as it works to reduce the size of the federal government by eliminating waste and fraud.

Economist Monique Morrissey with the Economic Policy Institute calls the planned cuts a form of sabotage and says Social Security is already very efficient.

“Less than 1% of what they are paying out goes to administrative costs. That’s including not just the staffing, but the office space and everything else,” she said. “So, almost all the money that’s going out of Social Security is going directly into beneficiaries’ pockets.”

Morrissey added that staffing challenged the agency, recently falling to a 50-year low. She said wait times for phone and in-person appointments have skyrocketed, and half of all callers hang up before anyone answers.

President Donald Trump’s senior advisor, Elon Musk, claims that Social Security could be cut by $500 billion without reducing benefits, but Morrissey said layoffs can only save that kind of money by making it harder for people to access their benefits.

“And they claim that they can do this through looking for waste, fraud and abuse. But when you consider that less than 1% goes to anything that’s improper payments - which is mostly not fraud, but just mistakes, and that usually get recouped - you can’t get half a trillion dollars out of it and not be cutting benefits,” she continued.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security will run out of money in less than ten years unless Congress acts. Morrissey noted that most Americans would rather increase revenues than cut benefits and added that one easy fix would be removing the payroll tax cap.

“Everybody should pay the same share of their income into Social Security, and right now that is not happening. If you make more than $176,100, you don’t pay taxes above that amount,” she explained.

The Social Security office in Grand Junction is on a DOGE list of possible closures in June, although the agency said last month it “had not announced the permanent closure of any local field office.”