SSA CIOs Receive To Do List From GAO

      A letter from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) (footnotes omitted):

July 7, 2025

Mr. Aram Moghaddassi

Chief Information Officer

Mr. Michael Russo

Chief Information Officer

Social Security Administration

6401 Security Boulevard 

Baltimore, MD 21235

Chief Information Officer Open Recommendations: Social Security Administration

I am writing to you both with respect to your roles as the Chief Information Officers (CIO) of the Social Security Administration (SSA). As an independent, non-partisan agency that works for Congress, GAO’s mission is to support Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and help improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government. Our work includes investigating matters related to the use of public funds, evaluating programs and activities of the U.S. Government at the request of congressional committees and subcommittees or on the initiative of the Comptroller General, and as required by public laws or committee reports. Our duties include reporting our findings and recommending ways to increase economy and efficiency in government spending. The purpose of this letter is to provide an overview of the open, publicly available GAO recommendations to SSA that call for the attention of the CIOs.

We identified recommendations that relate to the CIOs’ roles and responsibilities in effectively managing IT. They include strategic planning, investment management, and information security. We have previously reported on the significance of the CIO’s role in improving the government’s performance in IT and related information management functions. Your attention to these recommendations will help ensure the secure and effective use of IT at the agency.

Currently, SSA has 11 open recommendations that call for the attention of the CIOs. Each of these recommendations relates to a GAO High-Risk area: (1) Ensuring the Cybersecurity of the Nation or (2) Improving IT Acquisitions and Management. In addition, GAO has designated one of the 11 as a priority recommendation. Fully implementing these open recommendations agencies. They are highlighted because, upon implementation, they may significantly improve government operations, for example, by realizing large dollar savings; eliminating mismanagement, fraud, and abuse; or making progress toward addressing a high-risk or duplication issue. Since 2015, GAO has sent letters to selected agencies to highlight the importance of implementing such recommendations. Fully implementing these open recommendations could significantly improve SSA’s ability to deter threats and manage its critical systems, operations, and information. I have summarized selected recommendations here. See the enclosure for a full list, and additional details on the recommendations.

Ensuring the Cybersecurity of the Nation. SSA needs to take additional steps to secure the information systems it uses to carry out its mission. Specifically, we recommended that the agency fully implement all event logging requirements as directed by the Office of Management and Budget. Until SSA does so, there is increased risk that the agency will not have complete information from logs on its systems to detect, investigate, and remediate cyber threats.

Improving IT Acquisitions and Management. SSA needs to take steps to improve its IT operations, including developing a complete inventory of telecommunications assets and more consistently tracking software licenses. For example, we recommended that the CIO verify the completeness of SSA’s inventory of current telecommunications assets, and establish a process for ongoing maintenance of the inventory. Until SSA does so, the agency is more likely to experience delays and increased costs during telecommunications contract transitions. We also recommended that SSA consistently track software licenses that are currently in use and compare its inventories of software licenses in use to purchased licenses. Implementing this recommendation will allow SSA to take advantage of opportunities to reduce costs and better inform its investment decision-making.

Copies of this letter are being sent to the appropriate congressional committees and the Federal CIO. The letter will also be available at no charge on the GAO website at https://www.gao.gov. In addition, we sent a separate letter, related to agency-wide priority recommendations, to theCommissioner of SSA. 

If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of the recommendations outlined in this letter, please do not hesitate to contact me at marinosn@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this letter. Our teams will continue to coordinate with your staff on addressing these 11 open recommendations that call for the attention of the CIOs. I appreciate SSA’s continued commitment and thank you for your personal attention to these important recommendations.

Nick Marinos

Managing Director

Information Technology and Cybersecurity

OIG Criticizes SSA Contract With Verizon

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has a good deal of criticism for the agency's $160 million contract with Verizon for an updated telephone system. Things worked out poorly and OIG blames the inability to get Verizon to make things work on lack of performance standards in the agency's contract with Verizon.

Maine Enumeration At Birth Mess May Not Be So Easy To Fix

     A former federal contracting officer writes that correcting the mess created by cancelling Social Security's enumeration at birth contract with Maine (and perhaps other states) may not be so easy. As he writes, "One thing drilled into the heads of contract specialist and contracting officer by their lawyers is that there 'ain’t breathing no life into a dead contract. Dead is Dead.'” Starting all over again on a federal contract isn't something done quickly.

"Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars In Savings"

     A press release:

Social Security Identifies Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Savings

Actions Support the Administration’s Priorities

The Social Security Administration (SSA) continues to make good on President Trump’s promise to protect American taxpayers from unnecessary spending while continuing to ensure it delivers on its mission.

“For too long, SSA has operated on autopilot,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We have spent billions annually doing the same things the same way, leading to bureaucratic stagnation, inefficiency, and a lack of meaningful service improvements. It is time to change just that.”

The agency has thus far identified over $800 million in cost savings or cost avoidance for fiscal year (FY) 2025 in areas of payroll, information technology, contracts and grants, and space savings (i.e., real property), and other savings through new, common-sense approaches to printing, travel, and purchase card policies.

• List of Savings


• Payroll: Froze SSA and Disability Determination Services (DDS) hiring and drastically reduced overtime - $550 million.


• Information Technology Systems (ITS) Budget: An ITS budget reduction of $150 million by cancelling non-essential contracts and identifying reductions in other ITS contracts.


• Non-ITS Budget: 70 percent Reduction in Travel - $10 million.


• Contracts and Grants:
  • Contracts Terminated - $15 million.
  • Grants Terminated - $15 million.
• Real Property:
  • Planned non-public facing usable square footage (USF) reductions:
  • Achieved Savings to date - 270,000 USF - $102 million.
  • Anticipated Additional Savings thru EOY FY 2025 - 30,000 USF - $1.5 million.
  • Soft-Term Lease Terminations – Over 60 lease terminations with assistance from the General Services Administration (GSA) - $4.0 million in annual rent savings once terminations are complete. Most sites are co-located; others are non-public facing, consolidations, or preplanned closings.
   
• Guards: Plan to implement protective security officer staffing model and policy for field offices - estimated $30 million beginning in FY 2025.
 
• Printing and Postage: Made SSA-1099 and SSA-1042 notices available online, and 5.4 million customers opted out of paper notices - $3 million cost avoidance.


• Centralized Print Printing: Contracted with vendors to centrally print and mail notices rather than having frontline staff print and mail them locally - $28 million in workyear savings.


• Travel and Purchase Card Policy: Revised card policy to save millions in purchase card obligations.

Social Security remains committed to identifying more ways to save taxpayers money and implementing more solutions that free up frontline employees to help more customers.

SSA Ending External Research

      A press release:

The Social Security Administration today announced the termination of their Retirement and Disability Research Consortium (RDRC) cooperative agreements. This action supports the President's Executive Order, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.

“Terminating our RDRC cooperative agreements aligns with President Trump's priorities to end fraudulent and wasteful initiatives and contracts,” said Social Security's Acting Commissioner Lee Dudek. “We will continue to root out waste and abuse to earn back America's trust and confidence in our agency.”

Social Security previously entered into RDRC cooperative agreements with research centers that included a focus on research addressing DEI in Social Security, retirement, and disability policy. Terminating these cooperative agreements results in about $15 million dollars in cost savings for hardworking Americans in fiscal year 2025.

     My recollection is that money has been specifically appropriated for external research. If so,this would be an example of Presidential impoundment, a very dubious legal theory. I believe this hurts Boston College and the University of Michigan the hardest.

DOGE Claims To Have Already Saved Over $232 Million At Social Security But That Is Disputed

      Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is claiming to have already saved over $232 million at Social Security, primarily by cancelling a contract with Leidos, Inc. Social Security has been contracting with Leidos for more than thirty years for IT support.

     NPR, however, is reporting that the Leidos contract with Social Security hasn’t actually been terminated.

$81 Million AI Contract

     From a press release:

Accenture Federal Services has won an $81 million artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI / ML) contract from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The company will deliver end-to-end back office intelligent automation services to transform the way 250 million retiree and survivors’ benefits documents are processed every year. The forms are currently being received and managed via email, mail, and fax.

The Social Security Administration has already successfully deployed an enterprise hyperautomation platform that uses advanced deep learning and computer vision techniques to identify data from the agency’s electronic folder, extract text, transcribe data with the highest level of accuracy, and speed processing through downstream business processes. The platform uses internal enterprise data to intelligently and rapidly keep pace with high demand, expedite decision making, and control costs.

Accenture Federal Services will now take this project to the next level providing the licenses necessary to deliver an end-to-end, Infrastructure as a Software (IaaS) roadmap for intelligent automation installation, testing, and training. ...

How Much Do VEs and MEs Make?

     This is from a Freedom of Information Act response that Social Security posted recently.

Social Security Ready To Start Moving To The Use Of Generative AI

     From a Request for Information published by the Social Security Administration:

SSA is looking for a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) solution capable of: 

• assisting SSA developers in developing code more expeditiously, and/or
• transforming Legacy Code to modern languages for the purpose of refactoring Legacy Systems to leverage modern technologies and platforms. ...

What's In A Name?

     Social Security is using Voicemeeter Potato to record Administrative Law Judge hearings.

What A Disaster!

     From Promoting Opportunity Demonstration: Final Evaluation Report, submitted to Social Security by Mathematica, a contractor:

...  POD [Promoting Opportunity Demonstration] was a randomized controlled trial that included two treatments of a benefit offset. The two treatment groups had the same benefit offset but different termination rules. Treatment group 1 (T1) did not face termination, but treatment group 2 (T2) faced termination after 12 consecutive months of earnings above the full offset amount (the point at which benefits were reduced to zero). ...

The key features of POD implementation included benefits counseling services and support for processing earnings adjustments, led by the implementation team, and recruitment, led by the evaluation team. ...

Approximately 30 percent of treatment group members used the POD benefit offset, with a median monthly offset amount of $351. More than 80 percent of offset users experienced a work-related overpayment or underpayment, requiring a retroactive adjustment to reconcile the difference. ...

We did not observe any statistically significant differences in outcomes between the two treatment groups for overall offset usage or the impact estimates for the primary outcomes. ...

There were limited statistically significant differences in observed outcomes for the POD treatment and control groups. There were impacts on one primary outcome (annualized SGA) and several other employment-related measures. For example, we found positive impacts on job search and use of Vocational Rehabilitation services, which might contribute to longer-term outcomes. These impacts were notable because they indicate that impacts could still emerge beyond the two-year evaluation window. ...

POD had positive net benefits for beneficiaries and net costs to SSA. The net benefits for beneficiaries were driven by increases in earnings and fringe benefits, and SSDI benefit amounts. The new costs were driven primarily by the increased benefit payments and costs for counseling services. ...

    Even with counseling, 80% of those using the offset ended up with an overpayment or underpayment! The experiment had only a limited effect on outcomes and ended up costing more money than it saved! Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

    Why can't policymakers admit the obvious? Social Security disability recipients are, for the most part, really, really sick. Everything under the sun has been tried to get them back to jobs. Nothing has worked. Nothing. The work incentive schemes just get more difficult and expensive to administer. They end up with messy results for the disability recipients who do attempt to return to work because the offsets are too complicated The schemes always end up costing more money than they save. There's no possible work incentives that will get any significant number of disability recipients back to work because they're too sick. 

    Crappy experiments like this are likely to go on forever because policymakers are blinded by their own preconceptions that it's easy to get on Social Security disability benefits and that a lot of disability recipients could work if given the right incentives. They don't bother to study the pathetic history of work incentive failure. They get sold on new schemes by contractors like Mathematica who end up getting paid even though their schemes never work. Even after this disaster this 406 page report ends with ideas for new schemes that could be tried!

Is This A Good Idea Or Just Too Intrusive?

     From a posting by Social Security on SAM.com:

This is a Request for Information (RFI). This RFI is for informational and planning purposes only and shall not be construed as a solicitation or as an obligation or commitment by the Government.  ...

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is conducting market research to identify potential vendors capable of providing record locator services to help identify interactions between a disability claimant and the healthcare system (e.g., physician visits, hospitalizations). ...

During the application process [for Social Security disability benefits], claimants may spend a great deal of time gathering information and trying to remember dates of medical treatment and provider details.  The process relies solely on claimant recall for the names and addresses of medical providers and dates of treatment.  As such, the body of medical evidence assembled for evaluation may be incomplete and omit information that could be critical in making an accurate determination of disability. ...

Technical Requirements:

• The service shall support the ability to accurately identify a patient based on key demographic information supplied by SSA, such as patient name, date of birth, gender, address, and Social Security number.
• The service shall support the ability to provide an encounter/treatment history within a specified timeframe for an identified patient, which consists of a list of treating facilities/providers, including address information, Medical Record Number (MRN), date of encounter, and conditions that were treated or evaluated.
• The service shall support the ability to provide a list of active medications within a specified timeframe for an identified patient, including the prescription date along with the prescribing doctor, facility, and address.
• The service shall support the ability to identify the electronic address of a specific patient’s electronic medical record based on key demographic information supplied by SSA.  ...
• The service shall support the ability to notify SSA when specific patients, identified by key demographic information supplied by SSA, have had medical encounters, and provide information about the treating provider or facility, the date of the encounter, and the electronic location of where the associated electronic medical record could be found.

      I really want for Social Security to have a complete medical record on my clients. I try hard to figure out who they've seen and to help complete the record set that Social Security has. Contrary to what some would think, the problem isn't claimants trying to conceal medical sources they've seen. I don't think that's what this RFI is even about. The problem is that medical histories get complicated and claimants forget. Still, this RFI seems a bit creepy to me. Do we really want the government to have the power to troll across all medical records to find every last bit of records on an individual? To be able to construct a list of prescribed medications at any given moment? Would you want the government having this kind of power to gather your medical records?

SSA Wants Monthly Payroll Data

      From a Request for Information posted by the Social Security Administration (emphasis added):

The Social Security Administration (SSA) has a need to acquire contractor services to provide an online wage verification system that SSA can use to substantiate employment, wage amounts, and other employment-related data. The SSA is seeking information on how an interested contractor could meet our requirement to establish a data exchange with payroll data providers to provide monthly wages per individual and employer data for use in SSA’s administration of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program on a monthly basis.