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The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced Thursday that it "will soon implement agency-wide organizational restructuring that will include significant workforce reductions."
The planned cuts, which are in line with an executive order from President Trump to broadly slash the federal workforce, are raising concerns about staffing at the agency that disburses retirement savings, as well as disability and survivor benefits, to tens of millions of Americans.
Advocates say long wait times for services have plagued the agency for years, and its staffing of some 60,000 employees is already at about a 50-year low. Ahead of the looming broader cuts, at least five of eight regional commissioners have recently resigned, according to a senior SSA official who was not authorized to speak to the press.
Morale at the agency is extremely low, the source said, as staff are crying in meetings and managers are trying to reassure their employees during a time of great uncertainty.
"The public is going to suffer terribly as a result of this," the source wrote to NPR. "Local field offices will close, hold times will increase, and people will be sicker, hungry, or die when checks don't arrive or a disability hearing is delayed just one month too late."
Trump has said that Social Security "won't be touched" as he continues to make sweeping cuts to the federal government.
Until now, the SSA has been largely spared from efforts, mainly overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, to slash the size of the federal government. That includes a federal hiring freeze and more recent dismissals of large numbers of mostly newer workers. But in the last week or so, the agency has faced much of the same chaos and disruption that has been experienced by other federal departments. Changes at the agency are also leading to worries among employees and cybersecurity experts about the protection of sensitive records.
The agency's prior acting commissioner, Michelle King, was recently replaced after clashing with associates of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency who sought access to sensitive personal data held by the agency. King has been replaced by Leland Dudek, who was being investigated internally before being promoted, according to the SSA official.
The protection of sensitive data is one of the top concerns for SSA employees: "SSA is incredibly risk averse. And for good reason," the SSA official said. "The data we house is intimate and comprehensive. Every U.S. man, woman and child (living and dead), has a Social Security Number and records of their work, income, tax, disability and civil relationships. And now DOGE has access to all of it."
The SSA's servers are vast, complex and archaic, processing billions of data points a day, often using programming languages that few people are familiar with, the source continued. Those systems are already under constant attack by digital adversaries from around the world, creating a constant challenge for those tasked with protecting the systems.
There are no indications that the engineers working with DOGE have gone through required training to protect federal records, the source said, nor specific agency-level training to work in each department's unique systems. Lawmakers have already begun to raise the alarm about cybersecurity concerns of DOGE's access to federal systems, while legal cases about DOGE's access are ongoing.
Max Richtman, president & CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told NPR that the process to get disability benefits, in particular, is "so cumbersome and difficult to navigate" and insufficiently staffed that in the last couple of years, "about 10,000 claimants who appealed for their benefits die waiting for their claim to be resolved."
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Thanks. My wife and I were talking about this this morning. She was going to wait 2 1/2 more years before filing but maybe we should file now before it becomes almost impossible.
I believed until recently that they would not attack things that were critical to their MAGA base but I am not longer so sure.
Does anybody know calculator that can tell you how much you gain or loose by filing a few years early? We know what her two payments would be, and could figure our the return on the early money sorta but it is complex
SSA.tools Social Security Calculator
Piper's Prose
What is harder is to calculate the total return on the payments she would receive between now and 11/2026 if that income stream were invested, and compare it to the total return of the higher payment that starts in 12/2026
"The SSA already operates efficiently. Administrative costs represent about 1% of the benefits paid out, former Commissioner Martin O’Malley said last year. The agency’s Office of the Inspector General found that less than 1% of total Social Security payments were improper from 2015 to 2022, and most of those were overpayments to living beneficiaries."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/cybersecurity/is-social-security-safe-from-doge-s-cuts/ar-AA1zSJgv
I posted this article on another thread and I think it’s appropriate for this thread too. Not a rosy outlook for social security, even for those already receiving benefits