Dem
47
GOP
53
Social Security was created on Aug. 14, 1935, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the SS bill. Payments began in January 1937 with a lump-sum payment. Monthly payments began in Jan. 1940. The SSA has never missed a payment date since then. It might now.
The reason payments might not go out on time is that Elon Musk and his kid bros have gutted the SSA staff. Musk thinks getting the payments out on time is waste and fraud, but people who don't get their checks on time may think otherwise. About half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, meaning they have (almost) no savings. Not getting a check on time could mean not being able to pay the rent on time or buy food or medicine. This is especially true for seniors for whom Social Security is their main (or only) source of income.
Martin O'Malley, the former Commissioner of Social Security, believes that if all of Musk's cuts go through unabated, the system could collapse and payments could be interrupted, possibly within months. Musk fired three-quarters of the workers at Twitter, yet the system more-or-less continued. But Twitter was not based on 50-year-old COBOL code, which is a lot more fragile than the more modern Ruby and Scala that power eX-Twitter. People currently scheduled to get payments will probably continue to get them since that part of the system is automated. However, anyone signing up or changing their situation is likely to feel the full brunt of the staff cuts.
In addition to the problems caused by lack of staff, there has been a leadership upheaval. Acting Commissioner Michelle King resigned in a dispute over whether the DOGEys could access sensitive data on millions of Americans. Then Trump appointed Lee Dudek as the new acting commissioner. He agreed to let the DOGEys in the door, which led to blowback that resulted in his being placed on administrative leave. Donald Trump has nominated the CEO of Fiserv, Frank Bisignano, as the new commissioner, but the Senate has not taken up his confirmation. Fiserv is a company that allows small businesses to accept mobile payments. Its scale is a wee bit smaller than Social Security.
Needless to say, Social Security has long been the third rail of American politics and any politician who touches it dies. If there are major screw-ups in signing up for benefits, changing one's status or address or anything else requiring manual input, there will be hell to pay. If it is really bad, that could spell serious trouble for Musk, and indirectly for Donald Trump. (V)