I’m seeing a report that the total layoffs at Social Security will be 7,000. It’s mathematically impossible to achieve this without losing mission critical personnel.
I’m seeing a report that the total layoffs at Social Security will be 7,000. It’s mathematically impossible to achieve this without losing mission critical personnel.
49 comments:
And More To Come...
SSA did a press release today announcing it. https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/#2025-02-28
No wonder MAGA Leland Dudek is pushing for the completion of the WEP and GPO cases. The SSA employee pool is shrinking by the second!
The million dollar question is will the early outs cover it?
Everyone needs to call representative Clay Higgins. He’s the one who held up his phone during the oversight hearing to show the wait times and demanded everyone get back into the office to help with this. How is cutting staff going to help. Call him and ask. I did.
House Republicans have already reduced staffing at SSA to a fifty year low. At least DOGE’s ACOSS walked back the 50% edict. But the fact remains, they are gutting Social Security and robbing hardworking Americans of the customer service they’ve already paid for by paying in their whole lives.
But given the toxic work environment, the constant threat of firings, the abuse and public embarrassing of SES (particularly women), and the tons of OUR money they are giving employees to leave now and get paid for the year… they are going to gut the agency by a lot more than another 7,000.
And yes, all this gutting of customer service, disability determinations, claims processing and IT systems will crater mission critical functions.
Mission critical is being defined way too narrowly too.
I feel so sorry for the claimants who have waiting as long as two years for their day in court. As an ALJ, it makes me feel sick. I plan to review all of my pending cases to see if I can do an OTR before I leave the agency. Who knows how long it will be until the canceled hearings get rescheduled
Can someone confirm the Appeals Council sent out RIF notices today. If so, can someone post a copy of it.
Phase 1, but target is half
Looks a lot better than the 50% rumor…
The kicker will be if they cut management staff that carried the agency through the pandemic.
The agency’s swift reorganization is being led by Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner whom Trump named to the post less than two weeks ago. He was a mid-level career staffer at Social Security before being elevated, and he is aggressively reshaping the agency as Trump’s nominee, Frank Bisignano, awaits Senate confirmation.
Dudek had been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation earlier in February for working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but the president instead decided to put him in the top job temporarily.
A “significant focus” of the overhaul will be on “functions and employees who don’t directly provide mission critical services,” Social Security said in a press release.
The news release says that SSA wants to go from 57,000 to 50,000. Many of those could be voluntary resignations and retirements though. I don't think this means that 7,000 will be terminated.
It will definitely crater mission critical services. Given the gutting of customer service and IT systems, I believe for the first time in 90 years, we will see an interruption in benefits — for tens of millions of Americans.
Call your Congress people and senators. Email them. EVERY DAY. Tell your family and friends. Do not despair. There’s 57,000 of us and when you add up our loved ones, many more. FIGHT BACK NOW
It's not a report it's confirmed.
Https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/#2025-02-28
Higgins is hell bent on privatizing Social Security.
I have no doubt. I also have no doubt many of them will find a way to convince themselves it’s Joe Biden‘s or Hillary Clinton‘s fault. This ain‘t the same America we were born in.
They didn’t.
Great Point. A real gut punch for them.
I just hope that the American people know who to hold accountable when that happens. I'm not particularly optimistic.
You mean the target for SSA staffing is still 50%, but this is only phase 1?
Hardly anyone at SSA took the fork, which was an even better deal than VSIP. I doubt they will bite on this, but who knows.
I called my rep in Congress (R) and two senators. Only the rep’s office got back to me, and the guy who took my concerns about the staff cuts at SSaa and he sounded like he could not care less.
@Martin O'Malley That seems to be the objective here. If SSA can't get the payments out on time, then a case can be made to utilize a private vendor to move the money - like Fiserv.
https://www.fiserv.com/en/about-fiserv.html
More than
25,000
financial transactions
per second at peak
Roughly 20,000 employees are age 50 and above. I don’t think the issue will be if they meet the 7,000 target. I think the issue will be how to provide service with such an already depleted workforce.
That was early on when no one knew what was going on and the extent of the hirings and layoffs that would ensue government-wide. As the months have gone by, people have shifted their expectations dramatically. I suspect many do no want to continue working in such a tense environment
Umm that is because they made SSA employees exempt from taking the fork in the road...many of us tried and we're told we were too essential.
You’re just proving my point: if they didn’t take DRP before because they couldn’t, many will take the deal now because they CAN, even if it’s not as good as DRP.
In our larger systems area, about 10% took the Fork deal. A number of those had been around long enough to have 20+ years of service in and might have planned retirement regardless. However, it still reflects a huge institutional knowledge loss for them to all leave within a period of 6 weeks, esp in light of the hiring freeze.
Leland and the DOGE boys do not care about making processes more efficient or cost savings. I proposed three solutions to problems that would improve service to the public, save ~$52M annually, automate processes reducing effort and reduce overall time in these three programs. They acted very arrogant and not interested. Guess I will not share a couple of other solutions that could reduce cost by $100M+ annually. By the way, none of these efforts, requires reduction in the work force. Do they require some investment? Yes, but the ROI shows cost savings, more efficient processes and better service to the public.
Have they mentioned what positions are mission critical? Seems they could deem anything they want “mission critical.” Apparently they are closing offices, so where did those employees go?
One more follow-on. Rather than cut staff to reduce cost. Why not solicit input from folks that do the work everyday about ways to make the job more efficient, lower cost and improve service to those we serve. Problem is that executive and senior management have tended to put restrictions on this kind of input, thinking that they are the only ones that know how to improve what we do. The folks that do the work everyday are great sources in helping to identity waste, fraud and abuse while suggesting solutions of improvement.
According to DOGE's Organizational Chart, there are 24,147 employees at SSA who are age 50 and above and 16,837 who have 20+ years of experience.
https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=d5d84819-3442-4157-8405-9e9058039cec
@1:30, can you confirm if your colleagues were placed on Admin as of 2/24 as stated in the offer? Frontline here, we were not eligible.
In the disability realm, what Ortiz and Dudeck / Bisignano need to do is trim down RO’s (done), get rid of writers who can’t hit simple productivity (DWPI) expectations, and bump up review of favorable and later onset decisions to line up with the number of reviews they’re already doing on my dismissals. Why are we bending over backward to give people 100 chances to come to a hearing but not devoting resources to stopping bad pay cases from going out??? I can’t tell you the number of CDRs I see where the ALJs comparison point decisions are lousy and indefensible yet ties my hands if there’s no evidence of medical improvement. If they catch problems in allowances BEFORE they go out the door, it will save a ton of time, money and resources both in not paying benefits in the first place and not having to do CDRs down the road. In house reviews, in line quality review, compliance reviews, whatever it takes to make sure we aren’t just taking the easy way out and paying cases that should be denied. Likely not a popular opinion here but doing our jobs the right way now will save critical funds and time in the near and long term both.
I am 60 with more than 35 years experience.
The future is bleak for SSA due to people leaving.
It takes at least 2 years to learn these jobs.
But that doesn't meam there is crossover between the 2. I have over 20, but am not 50, and do not have 25, so not Vera eligible. Otherwise, DRP with Vera may have been a consideration.
They went on admin leave as of Friday
It's weird that, based on your comment, the only people you don't think should be held to account by potentially losing their jobs are your fellow ALJs. Since we're apparently going down the road of who to get rid of in OHO, why did you only say to stop bad pay cases from going out instead of actually fixing the problem and getting rid of the judges who issue them? If your goal is "fixing" the hearings system, let's not half-ass it. Judges get paid too much for them to just get away with expecting writers to cover their butts on the back end and then have the writers alone bear the consequences.
Please retire so someone younger than you can be retained.
I've worked at SSA a long time. There are easily 7000 SSA employees who are dead wood, and contribute little to nothing, in terms of getting important work done.
One man worked into his 90's when he passed away, still employed by SSA, and getting big paychecks. They even had bring a typewriter in for him because he couldn't understand how to use a computer. The work he accomplished his last 10 years at SSA, was a small fraction of what a younger, more able person could have done.
"Judges get paid too much for them to just get away with expecting writers to cover their butts on the back end and then have the writers alone bear the consequences."
AMEN. As a longtime DW, it's amazing how much of new DW training revolves around how to manage the judges' errors and omissions.
And that part about "simple" DWPI requirements? I've seen multiple writers get put on performance plans and get pushed out (they've all resigned before it came down to them being fired) over that exact metric. It's wild that DWs are one of the few positions in the agency with mandatory productivity requirements while still being called lazy.
SSA employees attacking other employees doesn't help anything, but if you try to throw me and my peers under the bus, I'm gonna grab your arm and take you down with me.
Well, hopefully by the time this mess is resolved, the union protections are gone. It's crazy SSA pays these people to gum up the works. Management would love to get rid of worthless employees. For some reason we have a ridiculous set of protections for those folks. Everyone knows what a pathetic employee looks like, yet the process to remove is excessive. Add an excessive removal process to low staffing and fear of slow or no replacements, it's no wonder why some of these slugs get to stick around. Also, when too few employees exist, management ends up doing production work to meet business needs. It's like an additional penalty for getting rid of a poor performer, and the need to do production work further ties the hands of management to try to get rid of people. This is broken. The whole system needs to change. Remove the protections and change the budgeting and hiring process. While we're at it, we just as well get rid of the anti harassment policy. We have far too many needless complaints. We've turned the harassment process into another tool for worthless people to create unnecessary work on behalf of management with no eventual findings. And again the union is right there with these employees pushing the agenda of harassment and the EEO process. The EEO game is the union's favorite tool because it allows union reps to do additional hours outside of "official" time. So basically, the whole system encourages these union reps to encourage employees to play these games so the union rep can do less agency work. Oh, and a final twist of fun is union reps get to telework for all union activity so they end up full time teleworkers even if their job only affords two days per week. Anyone, who complains that people voted for Trump and somehow people should now feel guilty for voting for him need to clue up. SSA is heavily broken. Yes, we do need an enema. Do we have some great employees? Of course. However, we've got a lot of bad ones too. Great employees tend to feel like management tends to feel. How are these people still employed? The whole system is geared towards accepting low standards. I'm not even going to mention some of the reasonable accommodations that tie our hands and further help to lower the bar. We have an agency with good employees covering the dead weight of those that can't or won't. Unfortunately, what we'll probably experience with the latest purge efforts is we'll probably lose a higher volume of good employees than the bad ones. If you sucked, would you walk away from the greatest job you could ever find?
@11:14 - As someone who has led people for 20+ years, the 2nd worst employee in the world is the one that wastes their time worrying about what other people are doing. The worst is the one that spends their time developing and nurturing vitriol towards their fellow employees and passing judgement on them based on their own internalized perceptions.
High performers worry about two things: their mission and/or goals and what they are doing about them. Consistently, the lowest performers worry about what every body else is doing and always look for reasons to undervalue it in order to make themselves feel better.
(That or they are a just a new-gen business major always looking for ways or reasons to undervalue people to excuse treating them poorly).
So you are suggesting SSA does not have a good number of poor performers and a system that inhibits getting rid of them?
@6:04 - The system doesn't inhibit anything. It requires a manager to do the work necessary to protect people from unfair treatment while also providing a clear and well defined path for addressing legitimate performance concerns.
If you are a manager and you view the system as inhibiting you from doing your job as a manager, you aren't interested in doing your job. You are interested in appeasing your desires or enacting your prejudices and expect it to be easy and without interrogation of your claims or motives.
As for whether there are poor performers or not, my point is that unless someone is a manager and they are grading the performance of their direct reports they have no basis for developing ANY opinions on someone else's performance. Especially when exhibiting biases like the ones mentioned in the original post. To do so is a character flaw.
Given the choice between an under-performer and someone who worries about what others are doing, I will take the under-performer every day of the week and twice on Sundays because an under-performer can be fixed. The one sitting around worrying about what everybody else is doing is a cancer to a high performing team.
Sounds like you read too many books. Not all under performers can get fixed. That's some of the fantasy talk that leads to where we are now. More of the poor performers need a quick exit, not years worth of holding their hands hoping for them to get better. With that said, some times a year or two probationary period is not enough, so some of these people who start slow make it to permanent status only for management to finally get convinced progress has stalled and it's time to put them on an OPS. The OPS is a waste of resources. If management got to the point of putting an employee to an OPS, they are already convinced the employee isn't good enough to stick around. The OPS is simply an exercise of wasted resources so the agency can move on from the employee. Overall, I'm saying we could use a more efficient tool than an OPS.
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