From Semafor:
… The Social Security Administration is an upcoming focus of the Department of Government Efficiency, a source with knowledge of its work told Semafor, and one person involved in DOGE is currently preparing to work with the agency that provides benefits to the elderly and disabled. …
DOGE’s basic plan, already in progress at certain agencies, includes asking government managers to help create a plan for workforce reductions, reorganization of divisions — and, if necessary, shutdown of certain areas, one of the three people said.
The shutdown targets are likely to include regional offices seen by DOGE as archaic and wasteful, as well as the sale or other elimination of some properties the government owns. …
66 comments:
I've never in my life been arrested, but smacking the taste out of the mouth of one those Elon-Jugend seems like a good way to kick it off.
Having never worked in an Area or Regional office, I can't account for what happens there but any office that does not directly impact customer service delivery or answering phone calls should be consolidated. If those regional and area office positions are critical, why those positions can't work out of a field office or PSC or TSC is one question I'd ask...
Great. God knows we need more lazy trust-fund babies with subaverage IQs, inflated egos, and virtually no management skills or emotional intelligence to run things at SSA.
Welcome to Project 2025. Trump said he knew nothing about this but one of the architects of Project 2025 just got voted in for the OMB position. Trump also promised to be a dictator on day one! Promises made promises kept!
These maneuvers are a way to offset the Republican tax cuts that mainly help the wealthy. I’m still waiting for grocery, housing and gas prices to come down since that was the most important issue for most voters. This is not promises made promises kept!
Yay! So many do-nothings at SSA! Buh bye!
Since SSA employees were told they were exempt from the Fork Directive, that indicates that they won't be letting any frontline workers go. DOGE will primarily focus on non-frontline positions. If I were in those positions, I would quickly try to apply for a frontline position as soon as possible... or apply for a hardship transfer to an FO. But beware, the work at field offices is intense!
Fuck off. I work in the RO and work my ass off and make an immediate and measurable impact of operations and field office traffic.
Hi 10:35, please ignore the troll. Only a no-nothing would call us do-nothings. The rest of us have your back and stand in solidarity with you.
I work in hearing office. I want out but i need VERA and we are not allowed to participate. I want to leave so bad i am going to take postponed retirement if i cannot leave via VERA
Mmm, I don’t believe you.
Do nothings huh? Trust fund babies? I work Medicare cases for 12 states including most of the congressionals. That's in addition to all of my other workloads and my second job as a data exchange coordinator for SSA. You wouldn't get things resolved if it wasn't for your regional office employees. Your states wouldn't get the data they need to run their agencies. We're taxpayers too. We work 40+ hours already and when we get more work because SSA hasn't been able to retain hires we don't whine about it. We get the shit done. I bet you never worked that hard in your job and had to deal with the amount of uncertainty we're going through. Get rid of us and see how that works out for the field offices and the american public.
If you don't know what we do in the RO then you should probably shut up. We do a lot of your ad hoc workloads and medicare items and we do call the public. We don't need to be in an fo to get that accomplished. Besides, they are downsizing this entire agency where are we going to go. Dumb comment.
As a social services provider we are often in contact with the RO trying to get the big furry problems worked out that the FO cant get deep enough into the weeds to figure out. We find RO in Illinois to be super helpful.
Yeah ditto fucker! These are people's jobs.
We worked there before, and most of us for 20+ years. Don't act like your brand new.
How soon until they propose AI for disability decisions and VE testimony?
Isn't a processing center different from redundant management in regional offices? I'd be hard pressed to defend all the regional component heads and their assistants. But folks working a real job, handling cases for the public, are probably safe.
AI would at least know that a nut sorter is a made-up job.
As soon as Bisignano gets there.
The RO hate here is laughable. In my career I’ve worked in the FO, RO and CO. The RO does some of the most important work in the agency. A lot of it is fixing things the FO screws up, and making sure FO employees get paid, have the lights on, get insurance and make decisions that are way too complicated for your frontline people to comprehend in your narrow scope of the agency. Don’t hate on the RO. It’s tough work.
...am I alone here in thinking ROs are probably the least inefficient component? They never "misplace" our requests, respond relatively quickly, and usually even can fix the issue we are having with a FO.
If anything deserves DOGE, it's the processing centers, but I hesitate to support even that since they almost certainly will mess things up worse.
I don't want any public facing office touched. But if the DOG(doge)department examine SSA i hope the trumpers and red states are severely affected and perhaps the beginning of normalizing this crazy republican administration.
Bisignano gave an interview on CNBC this week. It's on YT.
Just bring AI into the agency! Phones and then the PC's. How easy.
Their plan is it will actually be 4 years to implement, so 2029 is the projected date that is tossed around. What's never mentioned is the costs involved, including the extraordinary amount of electricity needed to power an AI data center. The agency would need to construct that as well.
Maryland is already facing lawsuits in eminent domain land grabs of privately owned farmland. All in the name of building out The Holy Grail of AI.
I know very little of what work my SSA colleagues in other units do or how much or how well they do it.
But I assume that all of my colleagues agency-wide are competent, diligent, and dedicated to the mission, until I see clear evidence to the contrary. When a colleague shows that evidence, I change my opinion, but only for that person, and not for the entire office or unit or department where that person works.
We have been under great stress for years and the stress has now been ramped up, stress imposed by design, possibly in the hope that we will turn against each other. I hope we can resist the urge.
I direct my anger at DOGE, a fake agency run by a yammering South African bivalve whose perception of the world is so distorted by limitless privilege, he doesn't care what damage he does to whom. In fact, he relishes it.
What you mean to say is nut sorter is a made up job EXCEPT for deez-nuts DOT Code 420.069-666.
We need those in RO and we need those in the field but hopefully you are all aware we have a new CIO - a MUMP installed person who will help to eliminate ALL..
Maybe they will make SS more efficient, after all that's the goal and if they can decrease the workforce then that's less draw on the Trust funds, isn't it? Less fraud would also be less of a draw.
I am on SSDI and I am for life, and so my main concern is the Trust fund depletion and upcoming monthly benefit reductions of 21% that no-one is talking about!
If you don’t know much about the regional office, then maybe you should learn before you make comments based on zero knowledge. Besides all of the other things that are done in ROs, they also house regional development teams. These are the folks who make things like.WAC, Toolbar, QueryMaster, WorkTrack. Systems has tried for years to duplicate those applications, and nothing even comes close. Do we need to mention CCE? What about all of the other modernizations? It is difficult to modernize multiple massive systems. This is why the regions are so important. Regional developers can move quickly and can get applications to production in six months rather than six years. Regional development groups have programmatic expertise that is lacking in Systems components. The folks programming in Systems are mostly contractors who have never done the work. The regions have been handling modernization for the last 25 years. They’ve been filling the gaps in processing for this entire time waiting for Systems to catch up. So before you talk shit about nothing being done in the RO, try imagining doing your front line job without WAC, Query,Master, DISCO, MacPasre, or any of the other applications that are not enterprise applications released by Systems.
This is a time for SSA employees to stick together and defend each each other, not feed on each other like vultures. We’re at the lowest staffing level in 50 years. There’s nobody sitting around doing nothing all day. Stop being part of the problem.
I think a better way to think about this is: when there is a government shut down, guess who is deemed non-essential? RO and HQ employees. A lot of the employees in RO and HQ are redundant fluff that absolutely can and should be consolidated, ONLY IF the money saved gets reinvested back into FO/TSC/PC positions that actually work with the public and accomplish mission critical workloads.
“ We worked there before, and most of us for 20+ years. Don't act like you’re brand new.”
I’m always amused when reading comments like this. The vast majority (but certainly not all) of those who say crap like this are old timers who worked in an FO during the late 90s up until the early 2010s when SSA had plenty of employees, manageable workloads, and was rated one of the best agencies to work for. They have zero idea what working in an FO is like in 2025 and it shows lol
I'm a beneficiary too. I hope people don't have blind loyalty to this republican administration. These so called waste reductions are a republican strategy to award tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of those who rely on government programs.
Not exactly. Everyone here (and we are all a little bit on edge)are all working for people like you. The trust fund and staffing it SSA are not particularly closely related. Raising the cap is the key too solvency of the trust fund.
I can’t wait to see how many of us are allowed to stay. And by what arbitrary means. If they follow the Twitter pattern, they will get rid of most of us. Then when they discover how complex and boring it is and how there’s no way to make money off it, they’ll beg us to come back. By then it will be too late as we will have moved on to these “busy” private sector jobs that pay better and provide other perks that are forbidden to civil servants. I hope everyone has a plan B for when their retirement and disability payments are moved to pay for a billionaire’s space odyssey to Mars.
I’ll join you!
SSA, like all places of employment, public and private sector, have lots of great employees that work hard, and at the same time have lots of dead weight. As a disability processing specialist, I see both, some of us answer our phones, others don't, some of us get the majority of our cases out in under 120 days, others don't. The job is exceptionally complex and takes years to learn. However NCPS and Imagen have definitely been a huge benefit in reducing processing time. I am definitely for more changes like those.
You're a redundant fluff and pos coming after your colleagues who are the ones supporting you. Take back the workloads we help you with. Garbage comment from a garbage person.
Every RO employee despises the FO and wants nothing to do with it, because they know that's where the real work is.
Get your butts off your ivory tower and come down here to the FO to do some real work.
Preach!
A majority of the RO employees were previous field office employees. I work in the FO and I think we all need to stick together. We're all going through this. Why is it okay for you to call out another component and what their doing. You would probably do the same to the PC and WSU. We all need each other. Chill out and focus on the problem, DOGE and Musks minions.
@9:28 pm. Never forget that most everyone in the RO knows how to do your job in the field, and more than likely were an expert at it before they went to the RO. On the other hand, you can’t do what they do.
I'm dismayed to find so much fighting in the chat! FO and RO employees must work together during these challenging times. I have heard nothing but great things about Mr. Bisignano. My hope is when he arrives he can bring unity among the components.
Idk if I would brag about all the “systems” created at RO. They are basically all garbage and not even functional at the FO level. We all laugh at how bad they are daily and how much they slow us down.
I would suspect that known of these Doge employees really know or care anything about public service.They look at everything with a dollars and sense attitude.Probably figuring everything can be done via computer with AI leading the way.Having worked in a FO for some 40 years I have seen numerous advances in technology but I still get calls from some very smart people trying to navigate the system.There probably can be some consolidation of FO’s with branch offices but that would only make the public suffer more.Can we do away with Area Directors offices?The IRS has many less places for the public to walk into leading towards many to resort to having to pay for services.Just like with attorneys handling disability cases it may come to people having to pay for their retirement and pe issues to be resolved if they can’t navigate online services.Doge will have plenty of suggestions to save money but it will just lead to more inconvenience for the public and harder times for those left to work at SSA.It used to be very difficult to close an office with Congressional complaints.Lets see if it is still that way.After they get done with agency practices they will move on to cutting,pay,benefits like health insurance and retirement.
This is what Americans voted for-you pay for what you get!
DOGE should look into all the DEIA work done by OCREO discussed on the record in O’Malley’s SecurityStat like racial quotas and how there are too many white men at SSA. Also all the money O’Malley wasted flying around the country and other stuff. Also how is O’Malley’s COO he hired from OMB still there!?!
9:55 is right. We need to stick together in these trying times. At the end of the day, we're still working to administer the country's most popular social program. If that's gone, what else would we have left?
I half agree with you. RO employees may know how to do the job by the book, but they would crumble at the idea of taking 3-4 DIBs per day plus RSHIs. The unrealistic procedures that ROs create for FO employees is the exact reason why they don't want to return to the FO.
Wow. Times get (possibly) rough and we throw each other under the bus? Would like to think we’re better than this
Maybe DOGE should restructure state DDS. As a disability examiner I am aware medical consultants are paid by the case in many states and sign +150 cases a day. These doctors sign off on cases in 1-2 minutes and examiners are paid bonuses for high production despite poor quality and wrongful denials resulting in increasing reconsideration and ALJ backlogs. This fraudulent practice costs the federal government millions of dollars year after year.
Times have been rough. They've been rough for years, and what you're seeing here isn't new. Let's not pretend that impending catastrophe is not being stacked on top of a decade of neglect and mismanagement. FOs resent ROs and HQ for a reason, because people in FOs don't know what happens in ROs, they know what comes out of ROs and it's usually silence or bullshit.
People in the field don't see all be hardworking people at the RO who do all the great work. They see regional commissioners and their immediate staff constantly increasing their workloads then breathing down their necks to do the impossible.
This ^^^^
I’m a SSA field office worker. They should either close the regional or area offices. All they do is send out listings with crazy deadlines, which means we have to spend more time in unnecessary listings instead of helping customers.
It is sad funny watching non-SSA folks try and troll real ones by trying to use the words and phrases like they knew what they meant. It'd be great if they got ignored, instead of replied to. Because they don't care about teh post or reply, just want to stir sh*t up. Ignore them.
The lists are coming from the top and trickling down. The ROs and ADOs are just doing what they’re told to do.
Let DOGE clear out the fat, get people working effectively and get the public served. What's wrong with that? Nobody in leadership has tried yet, or has just failed at it.
Hahaha...listings...if you know you know...if not...you thinks is actual lists! And yes, I am a federal DPS, so I definitely know. Hilarious
I’ve been in an FO for 20 years. What we did in 2010 is nothing compared to today.
You are targeting the wrong folks. The problem is leadership. All the staff are following what they are told to do.
Can you name one or two states where this is happening?
As an outsider and a strong supporter of SSA, it makes me sad to see the infighting. We all know Trump/Musk is the biggest source of fraud and abuse, not to mention lies and hate.
I’ve worked both RO and FO Jobs and while I will say the FO is definitely more stressful, it does not mean RO isn’t. I work credit all the time to deal with critical situations and assignments. As we have had absolutely no backfills and not allowed to have any in future - as all go to FO/TSC - I now have even more I am responsible for.
I’m assuming your comment was because you don’t know the work we do and not a troll. But please remember we are on the same team
And to the comment of why can we work out if FOs? I’m assuming you don’t want to take my assignments and rather close the RO building? That’s fine by me. My hour commute would go to 15 minutes
It's not really a Trump/Musk thing. I can only speak from the field perspective, but there has been distrust from above for a very long time. It has grown over time. When policies pushed down seem ignorant to the needs of the field or needs of customer service, the perception of disconnectedness up the line grows. Yes, a staffing shortage has contributed significantly. Blaming Trump or Musk is simply off the mark. Sure, people have had extra reason to voice concerns about what is going to happen at SSA, but the real concerns have been there for some time. You can only drink from a firehose for so long. Then, misguided DEI agendas of the Kilolo regime added a layer of disgust. O'Malley was no Saint to the field either. His flip the agency upside down, give away the farm to the union, push through rapid change after change caused a lot of issues. In the field, the pace of change caused extra work. And yet, if you come to a blog like this, we see CO employees championing the greatness of O'Malley for the very reasons the field is upset. His union friendly approach was insane and his firehose methods were problematic at best.
You want to know why there is so much infighting. Because the FO is face to face taking the direct hit every single day. They get yelled at, cursed, sometimes even threatened. Nobody else in the system is exposed. How many others have to have security walk them to the cars at the end of the shift? Unless you are on the front line you do not understand.
This is unfortunately the outcome the agency has fostered and even pushed to create for over the last 15-20 years. The agency has essentially been carved up into a bunch of smaller turf fiefdoms that aren't allowed to contact or interact with each other except through management, which really doesn't do anything to allow it. Different components are actively encouraged to view other components as "the enemy". The FOs can't directly contact the PSCs or ROs, a lot of the RO program experts are often as clueless as the people asking them for help and can't improve because they keep getting other workloads foisted on them, the DDSes have become detached from the FOs and vice versa. ALJs allowing their political leanings to color their decisions instead of following the law, Appeals Council substituting judgement where they clearly shouldn't just to create remands, again politics. An agency whose management has absolutely DESTROYED its training processes in order to throw bodies on desks as quickly as possible to meet meaningless metrics, resulting in lots of very poorly trained employees who half-way do their jobs to move work off their list so clueless managers will stop harping at and beating them up over it, not caring that someone else has to eventually fix the mess they made and that the public has to suffer for months in order for that to happen.
The agency at present time is an absolute shiteshow and is ripe for deconstruction by these DOGE morons who only want to create maximized chaos and make things up to support their political narrative.
But you took the job and continue to stay on the job. Not sure why people who choose or strive for something different are the enemy. All of SSA should be banding together.
So what happens if they target ROs? Will those employees likely be let go or reassigned and consolidated with local components?
12:55 WRONG!!!! 100% WRONG I left after 6 years because I knew I could take the knowledge I gained and provide real help for those that need it. Try again jerk.
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