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The Trump administration, after legal challenges, abruptly reversed its mass firings of so-called “probationary” federal employees. But it is moving speedily to find other ways to hobble the administrative state, focusing dubiously on instituting large reductions in force, while claiming that federal staffing levels are unreasonably high to carry out executive branch duties.
One of the first agencies to comply was the Social Security Administration (SSA). Last week, I reported that the agency, which enrolls and manages benefits for over 73 million Americans, was undergoing a “significant workforce reduction,” even though the agency was at a 50-year staffing low before Trump took office. Already, two dozen senior staffers have left, regions have been consolidated, and all employees have been given incentive offers to voluntarily retire or terminate employment.
The SSA has said publicly that its new staffing target is 50,000, roughly a 12.2 percent reduction in the overall workforce, and that a deeper reduction of 50 percent of staff (first reported by this magazine) was a “false” rumor. But the Associated Press continues to report that a 50 percent staff reduction is in play. My sources have backed that up, and assert that acting Commissioner Leland Dudek is trying to minimize bad publicity by downplaying the 50 percent cut he initially proposed.
Meanwhile, SSA has maintained it will focus staff reductions on “employees who do not directly provide mission critical services” and will “prioritize customer service.” But sources have explained to the Prospect that field office reductions are quite likely.
Every employee at SSA, including frontline workers at its over 1,200 field offices, is eligible to take the retirement or resignation offers. “We’ve had problems with recruitment and retention over the last ten years,” said Jill Hornick, a 33-year SSA employee in a field office in suburban Chicago. “We have high turnover because the workload’s crushing.” That will make buyout offers more attractive to field office employees.
Agency leadership has said it will reassign remaining employees into customer service positions. But that will create a learning curve and training deficit across the country, just as the number of applications increase as baby boomers retire. At the same time, offices around the country are either being eliminated or having their leases sold, while Dudek talks internally about wanting to “outsource non-essential functions,” a pretext to using AI or chatbots to sign up seniors and people with disabilities for earned benefits. This is asking for trouble.
If there are shortages in certain field offices, the Trump administration’s immediate hiring freeze and directive that agencies can only hire “one employee for every four employees that depart” will make it nearly impossible to compensate. So field offices will almost certainly be affected negatively by the reorganization.
Staffing cuts will create a learning curve and training deficit across the country, just as the number of applications increase as baby boomers retire.
It turns out that we’ve seen this exact same scenario before. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration embarked on a large-scale staff reduction at SSA, intended to cut staffing levels by 21 percent. Just like today, Reagan officials insisted that service to the public would not be affected, and that technological innovations would pick up the slack. Just like today, policymakers and former SSA employees were skeptical.
A remarkably timely research paper actually looked at this very time period. Sydney Gordon, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, wanted to study whether federal workforce downsizing had an impact on access to benefits. What she found at the SSA between 1985 and 1990 should serve as an eerie warning to Trump’s hatchet job on the federal workforce.
This paper, published just last week, estimated that for every 10 percent decrease in field office employees in a particular county, there was a small reduction (0.06 percent) in enrollment for traditional Social Security, and a larger reduction—about 0.32 percent—in enrollment for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), intended for people with disabilities and older, poor adults.
This translated nationwide into 79,027 eligible people not receiving benefits over this period who otherwise would have been enrolled. And in 1990, there were only 39 million Social Security beneficiaries, compared with 73 million today—for which reason, many more people would be potentially subject to a loss of benefit access from SSA’s current downsizing than were affected in the 1980s.
If these numbers are correct, the result of the new staff reduction effort will be an effective benefit cut to Social Security, with many thousands of people struggling to survive in the name of “government efficiency.”
THE REASON THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION INSTITUTED this large-scale cut was that new computers were coming to SSA to modernize and automate payments to beneficiaries, and a toll-free number was being rolled out so people could enroll and get questions answered over the phone. But the timelines for those technological improvements kept slipping, even as the directive to cut staff remained in place. That’s because the staff reductions were paying for the computers and phone service; Social Security’s administrative expenses are primarily paid through the same payroll taxes that provide the benefits, and so this represented internally shifting money around.
Social Security field offices were downsized through attrition and by not hiring to replace workers who left. Reductions were widespread; 91 percent of all field offices lost staff between 1985 and 1990, and 64 percent lost at least 20 percent of staff. The restructuring not only cut workers but closed so-called contact stations, part-time offices set in convenient locations for beneficiaries.
The robust data, and its lumpy nature, with reductions ranging widely depending on which jobs were left unfilled, created the kind of dataset that resembled a randomized control trial. It allowed Gordon to take a deep look at an agency that touches everyone at some point in their lives, and how small decisions on staffing can end up impacting people. Because SSA administers distinct welfare programs—Social Security, disability, and survivor’s insurance—she could capture effects across them, and make inferences about which programs need more in-person support.
A Government Accountability Office report from 1991 gave some indication of the results. It found that processing rates for Social Security recipients were relatively stable during the 1980s upheaval. Disability insurance, by contrast, showed worsening timelines for processing claims and determination hearings.
“They want to make it impossible for America’s working families to access their earned benefits.”
That’s what Gordon found in her paper, too. She sifted out variables like population growth in particular counties or local unemployment rates, and looked at what was left. The negative effect on enrollment in SSI was five times greater than for traditional Social Security. “You see impacts on enrollment in high-touch programs, things that require more intervention from field office staff,” Gordon said in an interview.
Because she was looking just at field offices and not hearings, Gordon’s research has nothing to do with disability determinations as a factor in slowing down benefits. What she measured was just the impact from an overextended staff unable to get claimants through the system, or unable to do outreach to let people know what they qualified for. At the time, the disability system was only about ten years old, so a lack of take-up, especially without the staff to publicize it or inform people that they had to be recertified annually, was to be expected. By contrast, the takeup for Social Security is above 98 percent; everyone knows about old-age benefits.
There’s also the factor that SSI is relatively stingy compared to Social Security. If there’s significant friction for seniors or people with disabilities to sign up for SSI, they may determine that they cannot get enrolled or that it’s not worth it, even though they are often in severe need. This means that tens of thousands of very low-income, low-asset individuals simply gave up on the assistance to which they were entitled.
Gordon’s findings that staffing reductions hit SSI the hardest were echoed in a 2019 paper in the American Economic Journal, which documented a 16 percent reduction in disability recipients in an area where a field office closes.
In Gordon’s paper, she estimates that 47,285 people with Social Security benefits and 31,742 with SSI didn’t get enrolled in the period she studied who otherwise would have with higher staffing levels. The larger number for Social Security is a function of how many more people are enrolled in that program. Judged against the loss of field office staff over this time, it translates into 8.6 beneficiaries going without benefits for every employee who left the SSA.
SIMILAR IMPACTS FROM TRUMP’S STAFF CUTS are almost certain to reoccur today. In fact, they may prove worse.
Former Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley has even made the startling claim that Social Security benefit payments will be disrupted as a result of staffing cuts, for the first time in the agency’s history. “I wanted to smack him upside the head,” said Jill Hornick, the SSA field office worker. She believes the greater impact will fall on people with new claims, with redeterminations, with reviews, with requests for replacement Social Security cards. That’s who goes to the office for help, and who will run into the reality of understaffing. (Importantly, people who I trust say that O’Malley is not blowing smoke, and the potential for disruptions in regular benefits exists, too.)
On January 1, SSA changed the policy for its field offices, requiring everyone who enters to have an appointment. Appointments can be good to ensure a smooth experience at the office, but no resources were given to the agency to publicize this change. Since then, many people have shown up without an appointment and been turned away.
“People get told, ‘You have to have an appointment’; we schedule, and it could be a couple weeks, or months, depending on the staffing levels,” said Hornick, who thinks this will have a dramatic impact on whether offices stay open. “If you train people to not come to the office, and they are closing, then they’re not going to be complaining about potential closure of the office.”
With frustration levels already high at field offices, cutbacks will just intensify those feelings and increase wait times. SSA appears to want to push benefit claimants to the internet as a safety valve to weaken demand. But technological savvy varies widely, especially among the population of people seeking Social Security and disability benefits. Applications remain at a high level at the field offices, according to multiple sources.
Commissioner O’Malley did substantial work to reduce wait times for disability determination hearings, but the closure of hearing offices like the one in White Plains, New York, and the requirement to return to the office could wipe those gains away. “Our judges work weekends and late into the night; they’re not going to be able to do that if they have to travel to the office. It doesn’t work for claimants or our judges and not for the taxpayer,” said Judge Som Ramrup, president of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, which represents the people who adjudicate SSA disability claims.
Another hurdle is the implementation of the Social Security Fairness Act, which gives higher benefits to state and local employees like teachers, firefighters, and police officers. While this will be an automated process for many, some beneficiaries will need to have their totals recalculated and retroactive benefits processed, manually, by field office staff. While Dudek, the acting commissioner, claimed that some of these recipients would begin to get checks as soon as this week, Hornick scoffed at that, noting that she only found out about these changes from the press release.
I asked Gordon whether she thought her findings on SSA’s 1980s downsizing would carry over to today. “Technological shifts may work well for some people in some contexts, but might not work well for all people,” she said. “I do think people are going to fall through the cracks.”
Hornick agreed. She noted that when she started at SSA in 1991, after the Reagan-era purge, there were 40 bargaining-unit employees at her field office. Now there are 28, and they are under considerable stress. “It’s sad because employees are no longer happy,” she said. “When I started, people would go out for a drink, we’d have outside Christmas parties. That doesn’t happen anymore. People leave and the stress melts off of them. They look like a new person.”
Elon Musk recently called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and Donald Trump spent a long time in his address to a joint session of Congress making false statements about widespread fraud in the program and dead people getting benefits. Many see this as a prelude to benefit cuts. But that’s exactly the impact that siphoning off workers at the field offices will have. “They want to make it impossible for America’s working families to access their earned benefits,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, in a statement. “If Congress does not act soon to stop him, our Social Security system may never recover.”
Dudek, in an email to employees, promised to “double down on our greatest strength—the field.” But his actions are more likely to damage the field and spread to the beneficiaries.
The human touch that field offices provide would wither. Hornick noted the unusual camaraderie between federal employees and residents at SSA field offices, one of the most prominent public-facing initiatives in the government.
“The field office is unique, we have those human contacts,” she said. “Congress complains about the number of people who die waiting for benefits to be approved. That number is going to go up.”
