Workers at the understaffed Social Security Administration are steeling themselves for millions more people to flood field offices, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week that will upend, at least temporarily, the constitutional provision allowing for birthright citizenship. The conservative court’s ruling effectively kills the Enumeration at Birth program that has for decades allowed parents at hospitals, birthing centers, or those using a licensed midwife to request a Social Security number for their newborn at the same time that they register the child’s birth.
Under that program, parents simply checked a box on a form, and their child’s Social Security card arrived by mail about four weeks later. Easy.
Now, parents will likely have to fill out the form and take it into an administration field office, where workers will have to figure out if the baby should be counted as a citizen, a determination they’ve never had to make, for which there is no process.
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“This would be a radical change in how Social Security numbers are assigned. It’s not clear at all how this might work,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, adding that Trump officials have given no guidance on how to proceed. “The Executive Order says agencies have 30 days to develop the guidance. But it’s not a 30-day proposition.”
The Supreme Court’s Friday ruling related to the executive order Trump issued on January 20, the first day of his second term. The “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” order denies citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally or temporarily, clarifying that when Trump and his confederates whine about falling birthrates, they mean for white people. As the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner writes, the order is an obvious violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen regardless of who their parents are.
Immigrant rights advocates and 22 states sued; federal district court judges in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington issued nationwide injunctions that barred enforcement of the order across the country. The Department of Justice argued that the Supreme Court should overturn the injunctions, and the Court agreed 6-3 along party lines. Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that judges should only grant relief to the parties who brought the suit, and nobody else.
The ruling allows Trump’s order to take effect in states that lack an injunction, which is the majority of them, and will carve up the United States into a nation with varying citizenship laws, what Romig calls an administrative “nightmare.”
“Even for native-born U.S. citizens, I don’t know how it’s going to go down, but this has the potential to wreak havoc for all new parents and new babies,” she said.
What do you do if your child is a product of rape or a one-night stand, and you don’t know who the father is, but you need their citizenship record to ensure your child is a legal resident? Or what if the baby’s mom is unlawfully present in the U.S. but the father is lawfully present? Those are the kinds of unanswered questions nobody has worked out yet, said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and member of the bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board. She told the Prospect that the only way to make ending Enumeration at Birth in some states workable is to end it everywhere.
“But if you do that, then you’ve got these already-overwhelmed field offices getting a ton more people coming in,” she said. Plus they’ll have to contend with the additional and unprecedented task of deciding who is and isn’t a citizen.
The administrative nightmare comes as Trump has already sought to crush the agency through a “significant workforce reduction,” despite it already operating at a 40-year staffing low, as the Prospect’s David Dayen has reported. The regime must cut another 3,000 workers to reach its goal of no more than 50,000 workers to administer benefits for more than 73 million Americans, said American Federation of Government Employees Social Security Council 220 president Jessica LaPointe in an interview.
“We’re basically herding the public through like cattle and then we don’t get the back-end processing time to make sure the applications are processed accurately,” said LaPointe, who had been a bilingual claims specialist since 2009 before her election as president in 2022. “It’s lots of stress for the workers and long service delays for the American people.”
There were 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2024, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. If all of those parents had to visit a Social Security field office to get their child a working Social Security number, it would represent a roughly 8.4 percent increase above the approximately 43 million field office visits in 2023. And that would be on top of the nearly 2 million extra visits required by SSA’s revised policy prohibiting beneficiaries to make changes to bank information by phone.
This comes at a time when thousands of field office employees across the country have been either laid off or took buyouts, causing reductions at 40 offices of up to a quarter of total staff, LaPointe said. In some instances, field offices are down to just a handful of workers, she said. One office in Michigan closed because its lone worker took the Trump buyout offer. Now everyone who would normally go there must drive two hours away to the next closest field office.
Millions more people needing to visit field offices once Enumeration at Birth ends is an example of what happens every time there’s a change to processes at SSA, LaPointe said. The new policy for direct deposit changes sent 25,732 more visitors to field offices in just one week, which sums to about 1.3 million a year. These are “backdoor cuts” to Social Security that cause severe service delays, LaPointe said, adding that 30,000 people died before they received their benefits last year.
Even before the Trump administration, it was hard to fill open positions and retain workers, LaPointe told the Prospect, adding that “when we do get hires, they don’t stick around.” The administration has come in last on the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government ranking.
The job is so overwhelmingly stressful that as of 2022, 8 percent of Social Security Administration employees knew a colleague who had killed themselves because of work-related stress, according to a survey the union conducted. LaPointe’s longtime friend and coworker was one of the people who killed herself because of work stress, after the administration refused to accommodate her request to move to part-time work, she said. The experience is what prompted LaPointe to run for president.
“Social security workers are killing themselves,” LaPointe said. “We’ve just been really struggling. Then we came into 2025 and the attacks began” from Trump and Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
The unclear system for determining who legally deserves a Social Security number under the Trump executive order could also be an “opening for fraud,” Altman said, where scammers target people by claiming their child is no longer a citizen, just like they exploited the Trump administration’s decision barring bank transfer information by phone. “Field offices were swamped with people trying to prove they should get their benefits… there were a lot of scams where fraudsters were claiming to be Social Security administrators, saying, ‘Prove to us you should legitimately get your benefits.’”
It’s common to hear that Social Security has never missed a payment for 90 years, LaPointe added. But “that’s not really true.”
“We are sitting on 78 billion in improper payments, either overpayments or underpayments, because there’s not enough workers” to process them,” she said. “There’s no program without the worker.”
A spokesperson for the Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment.